Nation and State of Ukraine in the Prism of the Political Cult of the Dead from the First World War to the Present Day

The architects of the Soviet Union intended not merely to remake their society-they also had an ambitious plan to remake the citizenry physically, with the goal of perfecting the socialist ideal of man. As Euphoria and Exhaustion shows, the Soviet leadership used sports as one of the primary arenas in which to deploy and test their efforts to mechanize and perfect the human body, drawing on knowledge from physiology, biology, medicine, and hygiene. At the same time, however, such efforts, like any form of social control, could easily lead to discontent-and thus, the editors show, a study of changes in public attitude towards sports can offer insight into overall levels of integration, dissatisfaction and social exhaustion in the Soviet Union.