Dear Secretary General, dear permanent representatives to the Council of Europe, dear colleagues,

It’s not by chance that we are exhibiting the posters of Soviet artists dedicated to sport in the premises of the Council of Europe which attaches high importance to promoting human rights also through advertising healthy sports.

Baron Peirre de Coubertain’s famous phrase ‘Oh, sport – you are peace’ became the motto of Olympic movement. It contains deeply humanistic appeal to social and public reconciliation and unity, so topical in today’s turbulent world.

Sport was always popular in Russia. It is appropriate to recall that Mikhail Lomonosov, the great Russian scientist and founder of the Moscow University, yet in the XVIII century worked out the concept of the healthy way of life, healthy nutrition, and 250 years ago called the resumption for the Olympic Games. Many great Russian writers were also passionate sportsmen. Pushkin and Tolstoy practised gymnastics, loved horse riding and played billiard. Tolstoy started to attend the group lessons on cycling when he was 16-17 years old. Mayakovsky and Nabokov were very keen on boxing and football. The contemporaries of a great Russian bass singer Fedor Shalyapin predicted him the future of a great football player. And Iosif Brodsky Nobel’s prize-winner for the literature was playing in the professional football team.

Chess was an especially popular game with Russians poets and writers. Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nabokov were excellent chess players.

In the USSR promotion of the sport was a state policy, aimed at strengthening health, physical development and providing facilities for healthy recreation. Going in for sports, alongside with the intensive work, acquired distinct patriotic colouring.

Posters that were often made by famous artists acquired a great role in popularisation of physical culture and sports. Many outstanding poets such as Vladimir Mayakovskyi were writing rhymes on the topics of those posters. The posters were forwarding the concept of a harmonions and morally developed personality. Despite naivety and political subtext, these works of art are winning our hearts due to inherent dynamics, optimism and sense of humanism.

This exhibition organized by the international Union of sports artists on the one hand reflects the atmosphere of the complex multi-faceted time, when the posters exhibited today were made. On the other hand, it gives us the opportunity to look afresh at the difficult processes of the modern world and sports movement.

And finally it gives us the opportunity to look at today’s beauty of sport not through the prism of bureaucracy but through the eyes of talented and somewhat idealistic artists of the former Soviet Union.

Thank you!