Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on February 14, 2025 in order to attend this event.

Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Przemysław Strożek. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.

In 1921, the first Spartakiad was organized in Prague, and subsequently in 1928, the first All-Union Spartakiad in Moscow, while the 1928 edition in Prague and 1931 edition in Berlin were cancelled due to political reasons. Contrary to the Olympic Games, these events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilizing workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This talk examines the visual propaganda of the realized and unrealized Spartakiads expressed through prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, and photographs. It emphasizes the significance of Spartakiads as the biggest cultural mass-events for workers, and a counter-Olympic events, as visualized by avant-garde and modernist artists from Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary.