ificant in the realm of sports, where, in the past, centralized authority has determined all policy and development related to sports activity. Restructuring in the Soviet political sector has also been significant for sports at the international level. In the past, political imperatives were likely to be the crucial factors in decisions related to the participation by Soviet athletes in international sporting events. Under perestroika, the Summer Olympic Games held in Seoul, South Korea were almost free of political controversy certainly the most conflict free, in a political sense, games in more than 25 years.4 It is the restructuring of Soviet society, as opposed to the openness characterizing its implementation, thus, which has had the greatest effects on sports.
3Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking For Our Country and the World (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987), 59.
4"All Out for Glory," Sports Illustrated, Summer 1988 (Special Issue), 6 7. David Plotke observed that, "as Marxism has become more legitimate, its orthodoxies have decayed," and that this occurrence has "opened the way to a creative interaction among theories often considered incompatible."5 He saw the major problem for contemporary Marxism as the credibility of its vision of the "working class leading the world to communism."6 Indeed, Michael Walker observed that Gorbachev did not appear suddenly on the Soviet scene out of nowhere.7 Rather, he was the product of increasing levels of education in Soviet society, and of the ascendancy to power in the Soviet Union of a better educated class. In the context of a society led by a growing body of the well educated, Walker viewed perestroika as inevitable, as opposed to just another effort at reform.8 In this context, Plotke observed that: "Claims about what is possible under socialism now have to be justified persuasively, not simply stated as the obverse of capitalist problems."9 While Sov...