Spartak

Spartak (Cyrillic Спартак ) is the name of an international gymnastics and sports association in the countries of the former USSR and an addition to the name of numerous sports clubs in the states of the former Eastern Bloc .

origin of the name

Unlike Sparta Prague , for example, the name is not derived from the Greek Sparta , but from the Russian form of the name of the Roman gladiator and slave leader Spartacus ( Russian Спартак ), whose revolt against the elite of the Roman Empire, especially in the Soviet Union as the historical forerunner of Class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie was considered. The use in a sporting context is also explained by the attempt of the communists to differentiate themselves from the “bourgeois capitalist” Olympic movement and to oppose it with the “proletarian” gladiator Spartacus, a sporting model from antiquity .

Sports movement Spartak

While workers ' sport has (had) a relatively long tradition in Germany, popular sport did not develop in the USSR until after the October Revolution and goes back to Nikolai Starostin , whose initiative to develop a workers' sport movement based on Spartak Moscow in 1935 to found the unionized All -Union Sports Association Spartak led. In 1975 it organized 6.2 million people in around 40 sports. The approximately 23,000 local sports collectives used 238 stadiums, 89 swimming pools, 1,800 gymnasiums and 1,300 soccer fields of the organization. After 1991 Spartak was reorganized as an international gymnastics and sports association and currently has six national member societies (in Russia , Belarus , Ukraine , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan ).

With the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence to the countries of Eastern Europe after the Second World War , mass sports were organized there based on the model of the USSR and sports clubs were also founded with the addition of Spartak .

In the Soviet Union and a number of its satellite states, for example, the addition of Spartak to the name indicated that the club belonged to the unionized or company-organized sports movement. Other organizations were Dinamo / Dynamo (as a sports association of the security organs) and CSKA (as sports clubs supported by the army).

Many of these associations kept their names after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe: