The World Youth Festival as an arena of the ‘cultural Olympics’

This chapter examines the meanings of competition in Soviet culture during the 1940s and 1950s. Culture and competition both served as constitutive elements in the building of a socialist utopia. In addition to being based on different ideological and economic foundations, the entire Soviet project was founded on the idea of offering a cultural alternative to the capitalist system. Particularly from the 1930s onwards, the Soviet Union pursued a policy of cultural dominance based on the idea that it was the ‘true guardian’ of European classical heritage as opposed to the demoralised and commercialised culture of the West. ¹ As Susan Reid has argued, the role of culture became ever more important in the context of the Cold War as the Soviet Union aimed at becoming ‘a world centre of culture’. ²