Authors

Richard Mills¹;  ¹ University of East Anglia, UK

Discussion

Whether in the provinces of the United Kingdom, rural Scandinavia, or colonial southern Africa, motorcycle speedway thrived at the twentieth century’s so-called geographical margins. Its evolution in the Soviet Union was typical. Though the sport’s Soviet debut took place at Moscow’s Lenin Central Stadium in 1958, speedway subsequently established only a limited presence in the USSR’s metropolises. By contrast, key centres developed in Ufa, Bashkortostan, in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and in Rivne, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The USSR’s league system evolved to encompass small-city clubs scattered across the Union, from Daugavpils, Latvian SSR, to Olmaliq and Farg’ona, Uzbek SSR, Rudny in the Kazakh SSR, and Novosibirsk and Vladivostok in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Many of the competing clubs carried the names of far-flung regions and geographical features (“Karpati”, “Sibir”, “Kuban”, “Bashkiria”, “Altai”, “Uzbekistan”…). Partially because of its unique geography, the sport was characterised by almost insurmountable challenges and chronic instability, with seasons derailed by travel restrictions, mismanagement, and corruption.  Building upon published research into the entangled peripheries of this transnational sport, this paper focuses on some of Soviet speedway’s far-flung ‘provincial heartlands’. It is underpinned by Soviet archival material, fieldwork in Uzbekistan, and motorsport periodicals. Why did the sport thrive in diverse provincial locations? How did the USSR’s motorsport authorities construct competitions to encompass such dispersed clubs? How did those clubs contribute to society at the All-Union, republic, and local levels? And how can the turbulent – and sometimes tainted – history of motorcycle racing in the USSR’s latter decades shed new light on life in the provinces of Soviet republics?