Leningrad-Vermont: Armed Competition in the 1930s

By Eric Hutchinson

 

 

 

 

            One of the most exciting occurrences for any historian is to stumble upon an interesting artifact or document.  Many interesting facts and undreamed of stories can emerge through these collusions of accident.  The subject of this essay is a perfect example.  As I was skimming through old issues of Pravda in search of articles on a completely unrelated subject, my eyes happened to fall upon the heading “Leningrad-Vermont” on the back page of the March 10, 1935 issue.  This story reported that the University of Vermont women’s rifle team exchanged scores with a women’s rifle team from the Samoilovoi factory in Leningrad via telegraph from the 12th to the 16th of March, 1935.  The firing distance was agreed upon beforehand and the scores were to be recorded by each respective team and transmitted to the other.  As can be imagined, this match was “one of the (season’s) most interesting in the details of its administration” for UVM athletics.

The contest was arranged between the University Military Department at UVM and the Osoaviachim Shooting Committee in Moscow.  According to Pravda, the event was set up so that the targets were at fifty (50) feet and each competitor had ten minutes to take ten shots from a prone position.  The teams involved were the 1935 UVM Women’s Rifle Team (Helen A. Miller- captain) and a women’s team from the Samoilovoi candy factory in Leningrad (Raia Frisman- captain).  The Vermont Cynic reported the Soviet team as the Women’s Rifle Club of Leningrad, although the stories in Pravda refer to it as simply Samoilovoi.  Potentially, this was simply a misunderstanding, however, it could also stem from Soviet ideology at the time.  In 1935, teams in the USSR were generally still centered around “worker’s clubs” although, according to researcher Barbara Keys, by the mid-thirties, Soviet sport began to adopt an organizational format based on Western professional models in order to “catch up with and overtake bourgeois records in sport.”  It is possible, therefore, that the same team could be perceived in the United States as an unaffiliated rifle club and in the Soviet Union as strictly a factory team.  This is, however, just speculation, however, and we should not rule out a simple case of misunderstanding. 

The team’s name was not the only item for which there were conflicting accounts between the two papers.  There was some confusion concerning the date of the match as reported by Pravda and the Cynic.  Pravda claimed that it was to take place from March 12th to the 16th, 1935 with a daily exchange of results via telegraph, while the Cynic mentioned only one exchange of results on March 16th.  This is a fairly minor discrepancy; perhaps the UVM paper did not receive any updates until the end of the competition.  More importantly, the two papers did not disagree on either the format or the results of the competition. 

            In general, it is curious how little coverage this international competition received in the Cynic as compared to Pravda.  Granted, Pravda was (and is) a daily paper while the Cynic was (and is) a weekly, however, in the majority of the articles I found, the UVM paper provided a bold-faced header for this story, but then no more than one paragraph of text.  Headings such as “Women’s Rifle Team Shoots Against Russia” were followed by three sentences about the meet followed by four paragraphs concerning the rest of UVM’s domestic competitions and a comparison of this year’s team with the last  This may have something to do with the struggles for press coverage that women’s athletics face even today.

            However, in the Soviet Union, Pravda provided nearly daily reports.  These stories were not only more numerous, but more informative than those of the Cynic, providing details about the competition itself and the Soviet team, even publishing practice results.  Perhaps this level of coverage was related to the drive to “overtake bourgeois sport,” or the Communist ideal of gender equality.  Perhaps it was simply a prosaic reflection of the professional journalism exhibited in Pravda compared to the student-run Cynic (although I imagine that some readers of Pravda would question the “professionalism” of that organ’s reporting.)  Regardless of the reason, the fact that this story received the attention that it did in a state-controlled, six-page newspaper with a national circulation is remarkable.

            It is difficult to reconstruct a narrative of what happened from the newspaper accounts, which simply told the order of firing and the scores.  We cannot know the mood at the venues, which competitors overachieved or underachieved, or how the participants interpreted the significance of the match.  What we do know is that the UVM women won by a score of 996 to 949 out of 1000.  Both the Vermont Cynic and Pravda reported this score and this outcome.  Apparently this was a comparatively comfortable margin, as UVM came in fourth place in the 1935 women’s intercollegiate championships, trailing the first place Carnegie Institute of Technology by a mere fifteen points.  This margin of defeat must have been an especially disappointing loss for the Soviet women who were posting “excellent results” in practice, hitting 99 out of 100.

            At this point, the story is incomplete and several questions remain unanswered.  How (or, more importantly why) was this event set up?  Pravda made no mention of the impetus for the contest, but simply began reporting relevant facts and figures.  The Cynic provided additional information.  It stated that the match was announced by the University Military Department and that a Mr. A.H. Jenkins of Washington would “properly address the correspondence” to Russia.  It is tempting to infer from this that Mr. Jenkins was the unnamed translator for the Vermont team; however this cannot be confirmed solely by the newspaper accounts.  Further research will be required to more precisely identify the link between Vermont and Leningrad.  A.H. Jenkins was obviously the lynchpin, but what were his connections to the parties involved?

            On the Soviet side as well, articles from Pravda alone will not answer how and why this competition came about.  Further, why was the team from the first Samoilovoi candy factory chosen to compete?  At first glance, it does not seem that this team was a hand-picked, elite squad, with “ten members…at the first level and three (as) snipers.”  No mention is made of any previous victories or contests.  What singled this team out as a fitting representative in international competition?

            Currently, this event suggests more questions than the evidence I have come across can answer.  I pose them now in the hope that someone will be able to uncover those answers in the future.  Perhaps these questions will interest future students of history to conduct further research on this story of historical significance to UVM.  It is at the very least an interesting story, well worth telling.