In Soviet Spectatorship, Samuel Goff provides new insights and interpretations of physical culture, or fizkultura, with the body as the subject of spectatorship. The book centers on different structures of “looking,” analyzed through three different modes (beautiful bodies, gendered bodies, and violent bodies) and via three different activities (the bather, the runner, and the footballer). Spectatorship as the relationship between observer and observed is perhaps most explicit in Chapters 3 and 4, but structures of looking are conceptualized more broadly as part of the Soviet visual culture of surveillance and aesthetics. Goff covers the early Soviet period and tracks continuities across the 1920s and 1930s to assess the Soviet “fixation on looking at bodies” (3). The book differs from other publications on physical culture in its deep examination of the visual representation of bodies in art and film in particular, while at the same time connecting to the literature on physical culture as well as recent publications on Soviet film, psychology, and art history.

In the first chapter, Goff draws on psychology and medical science to lay the basis for examining various Soviet perspectives on fizkultura as it related to the body and the mind. This reading allows Goff to explore different functions of fizkultura, including ways of thinking about bodily beauty from the mid-1920s to Stalinist neo-classicism, and the formulation of “a distinct Soviet aesthetics” defined by communality (obshchestvennostʹ, 44). The publications of Boris Arvatov, for example, are drawn on to illustrate how mid-1920s ideas about aesthetics shaped visualizations of the body in the following decade. Arvatov did not write about fizkultura specifically, but like social psychologists and others writing on the subject during the first decade of Soviet power, his work was nonetheless influential. Goff’s discussion places the Soviet body and fizkultura in a broader theoretical frame that enriches our understanding of their role in Soviet visual culture including film, photography, documentary, and other media.

The beautiful body is examined through various works of art, primarily that of Aleksandr Deinika and Aleksandr Samokhvalov, as well as Abram Room’s film A Severe Young Man. Goff places these into broader conversations about socialist realism and the literature on early Soviet art. The focus on bathing bodies brings gender and Soviet womanhood into the analysis, which also speaks to one of the questions often asked in this book: can bodies alone be Soviet or beautiful? Films such as Room’s show that intellect and body had to be integrated to be truly Soviet. Literary and art criticism are woven nicely into Goff’s unpacking of A Severe Young Man to also position fizkultura in debates about monumentalism, classism, and ancient Greece. It is only a pity that the art images in this chapter are in black and white when colors are discussed in the text.

The question of gender is followed through more explicitly in Ch. 3, which focuses on the runner and changing conceptions of Soviet citizenship from the 1920s to the 1930s. Goff argues that the fizkultura film form failed to offer coherent “portraits of Soviet sporting subjects” and were unconvincing “treatises on gender and sexuality” (102). Despite its apparent failures fizkultura film proved a good example of the Soviet effort to depict socialist values on screen. Goff again draws on film criticism to add another layer of analysis and highlight the rise of socialist realism in the 1930s. This is situated in a wider examination of the bio-social, biopolitics, and mid-1930s Stalinism.

The final chapter moves the interpretative lens to the footballer and violent bodies. The violence as conceived by Goff is that of playing games, and the disorder that can accompany these. Hooliganism is one example of this, and the psychopathology of the 1920s discussed in Ch. 1 resonates here. In the 1930s the violence is transposed to questions of bodily violence and social order. Fizkulʹtura becomes peripheral as the narrative shifts to consider the relationship between sport and spectatorship through the visual and emotional.

Goff’s investigation of the Soviet body through its visual representation in fizkultura places the physical body in dialogue with discussions about Soviet subjectivity and contradictions within the Soviet project. Film, art, photography, and other visual forms of the 1920s and 1930s saw various attempts to resolve tensions within socialist society through explorations of the body via fizkultura but these efforts were largely in vain.