James Riordan

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James Riordan (born October 10, 1936 in Portsmouth , † February 10, 2012 ) was an English writer , sports historian , folklorist and scientist for Russian language and literature. He is best known for his scholarly work on sport in the USSR and for his children's books.

Life

After graduating from high school (4 A levels) in Portsmouth, he completed his military service in the Air Force (1955–1957), which, because of his talent for languages, made him learn Russian intensively at the military language school in Bodmin, Cornwall, and led him to a deployment in Berlin. Immediately after completing his military service, he joined the British Communist Party, to which he belonged until its self-dissolution in 1991. From 1957 to 1960 he studied Russian at the University of Birmingham, which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1960 and qualified for teaching at the London Institute of Education. He then moved to Moscow and studied on a scholarship at the party college of the CPSU. Here he met the English spy Guy Burgess (whom he carried to his grave after his death), Ho Chi Minh and Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev . Alexander Dubček was one of his fellow students. After graduating in political science (1962), he worked as a translator and editor for the foreign department of the party publisher Progress Publishing and played football in the 2nd team of Spartak Moscow . His first wife Annick had accompanied him to Moscow, and the first two of his children were born in Moscow. In 1965, after five years in the USSR, he returned to England, continued his doctoral studies at the University of Birmingham and wrote his dissertation. To finance it, he worked as a barman, as a chimney sweep (like his grandfather), waiter, train conductor, traveling salesman and as a dance musician (double bass). In 1971 he was hired by the University of Bradford as a lecturer in Russian. In 1975 he received his doctorate in social sciences from the University of Birmingham with his seminal work Sport in Soviet Society (still the standard work today). The dissertation was published as a book in 1977 by Cambridge University Press. As a communist, he found a job at Bradford University, but had no promotion in 18 years. In 1980 he was the British attaché at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. He left Bradford in 1989, lived in Portsmouth again and moved to the University of Surrey (Guildford), where he was quickly promoted to director of the Institute for Russian Studies, director of the School of Language and International Studies and was appointed professor. After his retirement (2002) he was visiting professor at the University of Worcester.

In addition to his sports and political science works, he had already started collecting tales from the Tatars (his second wife Rashida was Tatar), from Siberia and other Soviet republics, and retelling Russian fairy tales in English for the first time. Eventually he published over 100 volumes of fairy tales from around the world. As the father of four daughters and one son, his stories often show strong girl / woman characters. He has published 20 scholarly works on sport and politics and has been a political commentator for the BBC and various daily newspapers. Eventually he wrote eight novels and one autobiography. In Germany he was best known in the history of sports through his collaboration on four books with Arnd Krüger .

Scientific importance

James Riordan showed the human side of the Soviet Union during the Cold War . He made it clear that there were considerable differences between the dominant ideology and the various currents within the party and state. With his historical depth, wide-ranging aspects of human existence and his understanding of the Russian soul , he brought the USSR and its people closer to the West. Through his internationally comparative work on communism, he showed the entire spectrum of what influenced the thinking of the 19th and 20th centuries. He called himself "a working-class oik from Portsmouth" ("the proll from Portsmouth"). However, this enabled him to retain his own, in no way academically detached perspective.

Honors

Works

  • Sport in soviet society: development of sport and physical education in Russia and the USSR / James Riordan. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977, (partially Birmingham, Univ., Diss.). ISBN 0-521-21284-7 .
  • With Arnd Krüger (Ed.): Sport in European Cultures. Bristol: Intellect. 2003, ISBN 1-84150-014-3 .
  • With Arnd Krüger (Ed.): The international workers 'sport: the key to workers' sport in 10 countries. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein 1985, ISBN 3-7609-0933-7 .
  • With Arnd Krüger (Ed.): The international politics of sport in the twentieth century. London: Spon 1999, ISBN 0-419-21160-8 .
  • With Arnd Krüger (ed.): The story of worker sport. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics 1996, ISBN 087322874X .
  • Sports power Soviet Union. Bensheim: Päd-Extra 1980, ISBN 3-921450-77-2 .
  • (Ed.): Soviet youth culture. Basinstoke: Macmillan 1989, ISBN 0333462319 .
  • Soviet social reality in the mirror of glasnost. New York: St. Martins 1992, ISBN 0-333-56966-0 .
  • Kon, Igor; Riordan, James, ed. (1993). Sex and Russian Society. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253332011 .
  • James Riordan (ed.). Sport under Communism. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1978, ISBN 0-7735-0505-9 .
  • Comrade Jim. The spy who played for Spartak. London: Fourth Estate 2008, ISBN 978-0-00-725114-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Portsmouth News: Popular columnist Jim Riordan dies
  2. ↑ Obituary on BBC Radio 4's Last Word http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01by9ll#p00pb1l9
  3. ↑ James Riordan . In: Oxford Education . Oup.com. Retrieved February 19, 2009.
  4. ↑ Kevin O'Flynn: Introducing the first Briton ever to play in the USSR . In: Football . Guardian. November 7, 2006. Retrieved February 19, 2009.
  5. ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9129562/Jim-Riordan.html
  6. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/21/jim-riordan
personal data
SURNAME Riordan, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer, sports historian, folklorist and scientist of Russian language and literature
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Portsmouth
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 2012