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but at Sokol they are clearly a great “free-thinker” and “Hussite.”

Gottwald’s view was then expanded upon by Ladislav Štoll, who in the 1950s became the leading figure of the communist cultural policy, on the occasion of the next Slet in 1932 in the essay The Political Sense of Sokol.208 Štoll also believed that Sokol’s historical role consisted of supporting the Czech bourgeoisie in its struggle for the “right to the free exploitation of its own proletariat.”209 The ideological framework of this struggle was created by Tyrš’s tract Our Task, Direction and Goal, this “sensational pack of high-minded sentences and grandiose words” and the “official fountain of specifically petty-bourgeois moralism.”210 Sokol Slets were then, according to Štoll, the truest expression of Sokol’s role in obscuring class differences: Prague will once again become the stage for great manifestations of patriotism. The assembly of thousands of healthy militarily disciplined gymnasts will impress the crowds. The illusion of a fleeting picture of a mechanically perfect collective performance, the activities of healthy muscles, the thrilling rhythm in the music of marching bodies with colorful papers will mesh in the spectators’ heads and will once again conceal for some time the fact of anarchy and the class struggle in society.211

The ambivalent relationship of the Czech left to mass gymnastic performances corresponds to the more general phenomenon among Central European leftist movements that imitated nationalistic 208 Štoll, Ladislav: Politický smysl sokolství. Karel Borecký, Prague 1932; See also Macura, Vladimír: “Souvislosti Štollovy marxistické analýzy sokolství. O odborné práci Ladislava Štolla Politický smysl sokolství (1932)”. Česká literatura, 1982, vol. 30, n. 6, pp. 547–550. According to Macura, Štoll here, first verified the possibilities of a Marxist methodology in analyzing the cultural phenomenon and showed “proper sensitivity regarding the mechanisms for creating a bourgeois national myth.”

209 Štoll, L.: Politický smysl sokolství, p. 11.

210 Ibid, p. 30.

211 Ibid, p. 5. In a 1929 congress resolution the Czechoslovak Communist Party characterized the Sokol as a fascist organization and the DTJ as a social-fascist organization. Kössl, J. – Krátký, F. – Marek, J.: Dějiny tělesné výchovy II., p. 167.

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gymnastic movements in their politicizing of the body, aggressive masculinity, opposition to competitive sports and in the creation of a mystical cult and ritual.212 Mass calisthenics also held a particular charm for the left in that it resonated with the ideological postulate of equality and a distaste for elitist “bourgeois” sports. Supporters of the Proletkult saw in sports and in the principle of fair play “the remnants of a decadent past and the personification of a degenerate bourgeois culture.”213 They called for a new beginning via a “revolutionary transformation of the proletarian physical culture that was to take the form of working gymnastics, of mass gymnastic performances and social excursions.”214 Yevgeny Rjumin, a literary critic close to the Proletkult movement, saw the mass gymnastic performances as an important element for cultivating new Soviet Rituals, particularly May Day parades. The synchronized movement and gymnastic exercises were to provide new content to the May Day parades of Soviet Russia: “The bulky, anxious and chaotic crowd of many thousands is transformed into a harmonious, grandiose, monumental and creative collective of all participants.”215 Mass gymnastic performances also resonated, like choral singing or recitals, with ideas of the leftist avant-garde. It offered the promise to fulfill the dreams of a mass theater for the masses, removing the barrier between the audience and the actors and transforming 212 Mosse, George L.: Nationalism and Sexuality. Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe. Howard Fertig, New York 1985, p. 134; also Wheeler, Robert F.: “Organized Sport and Organized Labour. The Workers ‘Sports Movement’”. Journal of Contemporary History, 1978, vol. 13, n. 2, pp. 191–210. However leftist gymnastic movements mainly differed from their nationalist counterparts in their attempt to overcome nationalist boundaries. The joint synchronized exercises of participants from different countries and different ethnicities served this purpose well.

213 Riordan, James: Sport in Soviet Society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977, pp. 101–102. Also see Geldern, James von: Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920. University of California Press, Berkeley 1993.

214 Riordan, J.: Sport in Soviet Society, p. 102.

215 Rjumin, Jevgenij: Massovye prazdnestva . GIZ, Moscow – Leningrad 1927, p. 45; See also Zakharov, Alexander V.: “Mass Celebrations in a Totalitarian System”. In: Alla Efimova – Lev Manovich (eds.): Tekstura. Russian Essays on Visual Culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1993, p. 215.

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11. Josef Sudek’s photograph of the parade of Sokols during the 1932 Slet, published in the avant-garde journal Žijeme.

the crowd into an active artistic collective, a necessary condition of which was the voluntary discipline of the masses.216 The ambivalent relationship of the art avant-garde to Sokol and its Slets was well illustrated by extensive coverage of the 1932 Slet by leftist life-style magazine Žijeme, which combined an admiration for the perfect 216 Perhaps the avant-garde artist most distinctly involved in mass gymnastic performances was Ladislav Sutnar, not only artistically (his famous poster for the 3rd Workers Olympiad in 1934), but also conceptually and choreographically (cf. fig. III).

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