ABSTRACT
The inter-war period was characterized by the intense struggle for supremacy between communism and fascism with the seemingly fragile democratic states being increasingly involved in the confrontation. In 1931 at a ‘world tour’ of Danish gymnastics the great globetrotter Niels Bukh landed right in the middle of these political antagonisms. In the Soviet Union, around 1931, the authorities initially showed an interest in Bukh’s rural gymnasts, who resembled the powerful, dynamic ideal workers of agitprop art rather than the worn-out, starving Soviet rural class-comrades that Bukh and his young lads and girls met during their tour of the USSR and who suffered the brutal consequences of forced collectivization. The extensive differences of opinion between Bukh and the Soviet authorities may have had an influence on his gymnastics’ achieving only a relatively limited currency in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Bukh and his gymnasts applauded a Japan which at the time was in the process of invading Manchuria. He allowed his troupe to be used in the Japanese military’s propaganda offensive both in Manchuria and Korea, which had been under Japanese control from 1910.
