Several publications claim that at the first Olympic Games for the USSR, Helsinki for the Soviet delegation built their own village. We checked whether this is really so.

In 1952, athletes from the USSR participated in the Olympics for the first time - the previous time the Russian delegation came to Games in Stockholm during the time of the Russian Empire. In popular publications about these competitions, it is stated that for the Soviet team in Finland they built their own Olympic village so that our athletes live separately from the rest. This is told, for example, the author of one of Blogs On Sports.ru. Similar statement I voiced And Leonid Parfyonov in a series of his YouTube project "The Last Ski" dedicated to 1952.

The 1952 summer Olympiad became a lot of sign. In particular, several states took part in the competition for the first time: the People's Republic of People's Republic, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Israel, which is not currently existing protector Saar and the USSR. At their debut Olympiad, Soviet athletes took second place in an unofficial medal standings.

The Cold War left the competition. For example, the US National Olympic Committee I was able to attract Additional financing on the wave of the upcoming sports confrontation with the USSR. Due to the conflict of Stalin from Tito, the match between the football teams of the USSR and Yugoslavia gained particular importance. After the defeat of the Soviet team, coach Boris Arkadiev deprived The title of Honored Master of Sports.

In such conditions, the question arose about the joint residence of athletes from the capitalist and communist countries in the same Olympic village. Initially, the Soviet leadership planned Set the national team in Leningrad and bring the athletes to Finland to competitions every day, but they refused this idea. At the same time, the Finnish side was not ready to settle all participants in the Olympics in one place-the village built for the 1940 games, canceled due to the war, was designed for fewer guests.

As a result, a compromise was found: athletes from the USSR and other countries of Eastern Europe settled in Otaniai, a town near Helsinki. Shortly before that, the campus of the Helsinki Technological University was just completed there and have not yet managed to populate students. It is symbolic that during construction Used The bricks of buildings, which previously belonged to Finnish diplomatic missions in the USSR and were destroyed during the war. It is also important that the territory of the "communist" village was not isolated from the "western" athletes, and once the Soviet delegation even invited Americans for dinner.

Thus, at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, the Soviet delegation really did not live in the main Olympic village, but the statement put into the headline is still not entirely correct. Firstly, athletes from the USSR lived in Otaniai along with representatives of other national teams from Eastern Europe. Secondly, no one erected this building specially-the economical Finns found the newly completed buildings of the future student dormitory, where it was possible to place guests from the USSR.