Sea Control - Sea Control 298 - Blood in the Water with Dr. Johanna Mellis

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Links1. End of Sportpodcast2. Crossing the Lane Lines: Treading Water in the Deep End - How Black Water Polo Players are Changing the Gamewith Genai Kerr, March 26, 2021.3. Das Wunder von Bern, 2003.4. Freedom's Fury, 2020.5. The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sports Bureaucracy and the Cold War - Red Sport, Red Tape, by Jenifer Parks, Lexington Books, 2016.6. "The (Inter-Communist) Cold War on Ice: Soviet-Czechoslovak Ice Hockey Politics, 1967-1969," by Oldrich Tuma et al, The Wilson Center, Cold War International History Project, 2014.7. Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics and US Foreign Policy, by Toby C. Rider, University of Illinois Press, 2016.8. "From Defectors to Cooperators: The Impact of 1956 on Athletes, Sports Leaders and Sport Policy in Socialist Hungary," by Johanna Mellis, Cambridge University Press, November 12, 2019.9. "Cold War Politics and the California Running Scene: The Experiences of Mihály Iglói and László Tábori in the Golden State," by Johanna Mellis, Journal of Sport History, University of Illinois Press, Spring 2019.  

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by Dr. Johanna Mellis. She specializes in Hungarian sports history and we're going to be discussing the legendary 1956 water pillow match between Hungary and the Soviet Union known as the Blood in the Water Game. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. At SimSec, we believe victory in the maritime domain starts with great ideas communicated compellingly. Write, fight, win. Beginning with Giving Tuesday and going through December, we are holding our annual Write, Fight, Win holiday donation campaign to support SimSec into the new year.

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On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control. hosted by the Center for International and Maritime Security. Aloha, Shemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Johanna Mellis, and we're going to be discussing the famed 1956 water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union known as the Blood and the Water Game. So, Dr. Mellis, thank you so much for joining us. Could you tell the listeners a little bit about your background, please? Absolutely, and thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So, I am a historian of

Cold War history. I focus on Hungary specifically, and I look at Hungarian sport and sort of how Hungarians use sport as a way to sort of navigate relationships with each other and sort of international relations during the Cold War. And I'm an assistant professor of world history at Ursinus College, which is about 40 minutes outside of Philly, Pennsylvania. So not to immediately deviate from sort of the questions that we already discussed, but could you tell me a little bit more about how you came to focus on Hungary as your focus area. That's a, it seems to me to be an unusual choice and I'd like to hear a little bit more about it. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a very sort of specific country. It's, it's a small country, especially from an American perspective. So

sort of a, sort of a multifaceted way that I came to it. So first off, I came to sort of sport history because I was an athlete growing up and I was a D1 swimmer in college. And when I was in graduate school, I coached swimming part-time just to sort of make some money and kind of get outside and all that good stuff. And so I've always been interested in sort of sports and how individual, how athletes sort of live their lives. And then when I started graduate school, I knew I wanted to study somewhere in central Europe just because I found that history really fascinating, but I didn't have the language skills required to study like German history or Russian history, which are kind of the two main countries, a lot of people start studying

in the region. And you need to have those language skills usually to go into graduate programs. But I was already living in Gainesville, Florida, which is where the University of Florida is. And they have a Center for European Studies, which is a government funded center to fund graduate students to learn lesser known languages. And Hungarian was one of the languages that they offer because there is a Hungarian language teacher there. And I already knew a little bit about Hungarian history. And I initially started studying Hungarian Jewish history and sort of what was life like for Hungarian Jews after the Holocaust, after World War II. And so that's what my master's thesis was about. And I started learning Hungarian and I got a scholarship that

paid for my tuition and gave me health insurance and gave me a stipend to live off of, which was, you know, all well and good. I didn't have to take out sort of loans to do all that. And then I went to Hungary and just absolutely loved it and just love kind of making Hungarian friends and really love being there. And then in terms of my topic, when it came to my dissertation, my advisor knew that I had been an athlete and she encouraged me to start looking into sport history as something that she thought I'd be interested in, in the longterm, not just like an academic topic, but something that I was kind of personally tied to. And so that kind of set me on like a really long road, which is Hungarian sport history. And we're going to talk about it

with the questions that you very carefully crafted. But Hungary has a really kind of amazing sport history, considering it's such a small country. And so it's just been a really, really cool topic to be able to research and study. Well, thank you again for coming on. As a reminder, all opinions are our own and not representative of any institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. So we'll spend a little bit of time setting the stage. And I'd like to first explain a little bit about Hungary's role in World War II and where it stood at the war's conclusion. Absolutely. So Hungary was on the losing end of World War II. They were an early ally of Nazi Germany. And that was in part because Hungary, in World War I, Hungary had been part of

the Austro-Hungarian or Habsburg Empire that had also allied with Germany. And because they had lost World War I, the Western powers or the Allies had essentially broken up Austria-Hungary into a bunch of smaller countries, thinking that if they broke the countries up into sort of more ethnically focused countries, that there would be less political tensions between them and hopefully prevent another world war. But then as Germany gained power in the 1930s, Hungary increasingly looked to Nazi Germany and Hitler as a potential ally because Hungary really wanted to regain the lands that it had lost after World War I. And as a result of the peace treaty, Hungary had sort of been separated from about two thirds of the rest of its country from before

World War I that had been given to Romania and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. And so they really, it really wanted to gain that land back. And so it allied with Nazi Germany and then was on the losing end of World War II. And so, and then after World War, and then toward, you know, towards the end of World War II was when the allied powers sort of divvied up Europe. And the Western powers sort of gave, quote unquote, Eastern Europe to Stalin, not really knowing what was going to happen at all, but just sort of hoping that Stalin wasn't going to try to take over Eastern Europe, which as we know, it did. And so at the end of World War II, Hungary is kind of in ruins, just had been bombed really brutally in the last year, although had not been

kind of destroyed as much as Poland and some other countries, but it's still been bombed pretty heavily, had just lost hundreds of thousands of Jews in addition to Hungarian soldiers who had lost their lives. And so it was pretty, pretty beaten up after World War II. And then the Communist Party takes over in 1948 and sort of starts the road to communism during the Cold War from there. And so I don't want to say we're left, but for such a small culture, it is really kind of an international sporting powerhouse, particularly in the timeframe that we're going to discuss how water, water polo culture develop in a country that's landlocked. Yeah, that's a great question. And one sort of project that I've, I've been, I've had in the

back of my mind for a while, but just haven't started to research, haven't had the time to research enough. But in, I'll try to be really brief about this, but essentially, and Hungary is good at lots of other sports too, but essentially in the 19th century, when Hungary was part of Austria-Hungary, Hungarian nationalist leaders really wanted to demonstrate that Hungary should be an independent nation and that it should be a very strong power compared to like Austria and Germany's other countries. And so Hungarian nationalists really threw a lot of their effort and their money into developing sport and using sports and sport victory as a way to demonstrate its national strength and sort of its validity as a national kind of power. And so Hungary is

actually one of the first members of the international Olympic committee in, um, 1894, even though Hungary was not an independent country, right. It belonged to Austria, Hungary, but it formed a national Olympic committee. And, uh, because it was part of, because it was one half of the Austria Hungarian empire, the IOC or the international Olympic committee allowed Hungary to be one of its founding members. Um, and then in terms of water polo, water polo was one of those sports along with swimming and horseback riding and horse racing that Hungarian nationalists introduced in the sort of public sphere to middle and upper middle-class Hungarians again as a way to sort of teach male men in particular to have strong bodies to be disciplined

to feature hard work and sort of all these things that again they thought to be really key to being a strong nation a strong national power and now Hungary is landlocked but it does have the Danube river, which runs through Budapest in particular, and through much of Hungary, and obviously through many other countries as well. And then there's also a really big lake called Lake Balaton, which is a very popular destination even today for people who want to go to the lake, you know, they don't have a beach nearby, so they go to the lake, and there's like a lake culture is really huge there. But so bodies of water, and there are other rivers as well, but bodies of water became a really key site again for like recreation and also nation building. And so a lot of people start

getting, when I say a lot of people, middle and upper class Hungarian nationalists started getting involved in swimming and canoeing and water sports and water polo was one of them. And then during the interwar period, so in the 1920s and 30s, while Hungary again is trying to kind of scramble back, you know, its lands and kind of again demonstrate that even though it's a much smaller country than before that it again is sort of is a strong european nation and they use sports as a way to do so and in the early 1920s the government passes a really influential physical education bill which again aims to instill like physical culture physical physical activity and national values into into students and young people and um and and for for lots of reasons they kind of

throw a lot of effort into swimming and water polo as a sport that hungarians could and should be good at. And Hungarians are already won lots of medals in swimming and very quickly began to earn a lot of medals in water polo. And it's not just Hungary. Today, Croatia has a really good water polo team. Serbia has a really good water polo team. Italy, Greece to an extent. So it's sort of a lot of those Central European and Mediterranean countries that today still have a really strong water polo culture, but arguably Hungary has one of the strongest because it's one, I think it's something like Olympic, sorry, nine Olympic gold medals, not to mention lots of silver and bronze and world championship medals. And so it's really just repeatedly been an enormous water polo sort of powerhouse, as you talked about before.

Between water polo and the Hungarian national football or what we would call soccer team, is fair to say that the mid 50s were a golden age of Hungarian sport? And if so, why was that the case? yeah so this is actually something that i've i've been revising so i i in my my scholarship i've said for a long time and others have said this too that the 1950s indeed is a time a sort of golden age of sport right as you mentioned football team the hungarian football team is undefeated for for about um half of the decade and and the 1952 so that sorry the 1948 um olympic games summer olympic games in london um hungary wins um the fourth most medals of all participating nations um you know even you know compared to like the u.s and germany 1952 in helsinki they

win the third most medals of all competing nations only the soviet union and the u.s win more medals than them again for a small nation of 10 million that's really amazing um and so sort of when it comes to like the medal count when it comes to wins and losses hungary is definitely like a global sport power. But this also is the first decade of communism during the Cold War. And this actually overlaps almost perfectly, well, not perfectly, but neatly with the sort of high point of Stalinist, of sort of the most harsh repression of communism. And as a result, this is the period when athletes in particular are the most harshly repressed compared to any other moment in Hungarian history. For example, there's a Hungarian football or soccer player who is really mercilessly

killed in 1954 because he tries to defect to the West to get a contract to play abroad. And he also wants, he's trying to defect with his lover because they're having an illicit affair. And the secret police find out about it and they essentially set him up and they catch him and they execute him as sort of an example of this is what will happen if you try to defect. So that's why I say I'm sort of trying to still working to figure out, you know, how to call this time period when, as you said, Hungarians are so, so successful at so many sports, but then it is also a period of really intense repression and the harshest repression of the broader public and Hungarian athletes. So on the one hand, in terms of wins and losses, it is a golden age, but in terms of like athlete

repression, it's the worst period in its history. So I haven't really actually figured out sort of a phrase to call it. But I think it's an interesting conversation to have is sort of when we have repression, but also medals, sort of how do we reconcile this? And I haven't really come up with a good answer for that. That's a really good point about the repression piece. I guess I hadn't fully considered that. Obviously, there's going to be some of that that's going to come up as we discuss this. But as you mentioned, post-World War II, Hungary falls behind the Iron Curtain and the Soviets start to take advantage of that relationship for their own sporting purposes here. And at one point, the Hungarians actually asked to train the Soviets.

Is that correct? Yes, absolutely. And I actually meant I looked up the date, but I didn't write it down. So I forgot what date it was. I can't remember if it's 1950 or 1953 or another date. But essentially, the Soviets, the Soviets were sort of behind the other Eastern Bloc countries in the sense that during the interwar period, the Soviets really were not sure were sort of debating internally whether they should participate in things such as such like the Olympic Games, such as the FIFA World Cup, because they really they believe that if they were going to compete, they needed to win, but they weren't sure if they were going to win. And so there are a lot of internal debates. And Jennifer Parks is a fabulous historian who does research on this. And there are all these debates about whether they should participate in these international sporting

events. Meanwhile, Hungary and Romania and Poland and all these other countries that fall under the East under communist rule during the Cold War, during the interwar period, they had I mean, they had been long participating in these international competitions. And so when these countries fall under the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, a lot of these sort of, quote, unquote, we call satellite countries as in satellites of the Soviet Union, they help, or they are sort of required to help the Soviet Union get up to speed and sort of learn training techniques. And so water polo was one way that the Hungarians do this. The Soviets come to Hungary to videotape and to learn what the Hungarians are doing.

The Soviets also send their gymnasts to Hungary to sort of do the same thing. There are a lot of these stories and the Soviets go to Czechoslovakia to learn hockey, right? So it's happening in sort of many different forms. But essentially the Hungarians in these other countries helped to lay the foundation for the Soviets to be very successful at many sports,

especially in the early 1950s. And what's the sequence of events starting in 1955 that culminates in the Hungarian Revolution. Absolutely. And I'll actually sort of take it back a little bit earlier than that. 1953 is considered a really huge watershed moment when it comes communism in Eastern Europe

and the Cold War, because 1953 is when Stalin dies. And up until that point, so about from 1947-ish to 1953, and each of the satellite, you know, Eastern European countries, They had had really harsh, really harsh sort of Stalinist oppression where there had been show trials and lots of people thrown in sort of local gulags or labor camps and just really, really harsh repression, really long bread lines for bread and other sort of basic consumer items. And then Stalin dies in 1953. And even though a lot of Soviets actually genuinely mourn Stalin's death, you know, a lot of Eastern Europeans are kind of thinking like, oh, what's going to happen now? Like, what is the form of communism going to take? And actually in Hungary, Hungarian leaders, they get rid of the Stalinist ruler who is Matyash Rákosi, and they implement a sort of more moderate communist leader who starts implementing a lot of moderate reforms.

And so that's a 1953 and sort of life in 1953, 54, 55 are a little bit easier than before. And sort of things are starting to relax a little bit. And then in 1954, there is a really famous football. There's a famous World Cup match between West Germany and Hungary and Hungary because the football team had been so successful. Hungary was slated to win. And then the West Germans famously defeated the Hungarians. And it is such a shock and people are so upset about it in Budapest that there are actually really massive riots in Budapest where essentially fans who had been gathered in the national football stadium to listen to the radio broadcasting of the match. They are all together and they essentially express their frustration against, you know, for the team losing and against the state. And there's a massive right in Budapest. And actually, Hungarians call this like a quote unquote soccer revolution that predates the 1956 revolution. And then in 1955, again, even though repression in Hungary is much less, in 1955, Austria and the Soviet Union signed a neutrality act to declare Austria as officially a neutral country.

And Hungarians are pretty upset about this because they're like, we share a border with Austria. Why can't we also be neutral, right? Like we, you know, Austria-Hungary having these historically strong relations. And so Hungarians, you know, have been hoping that maybe the Soviet Union would do the same, but they do not. And then 1956 and then 1955-56, there are major shakeups in the Soviet Union where Nikita Khrushchev has the quote unquote secret speech where there's there's a huge meaning of the

Communist Party and and Khrushchev in order to sort of discredit Stalin and legitimize his own rule he essentially denounces Stalin and his crimes and essentially lays bare to people at the meeting you know these were all of Stalin's crimes and we need to do better like we cannot treat people this way and then the secret speech gets leaked and it's no longer secret and so there are these massive verbal effects all over the eastern bloc and in the summer in june of 1956 there are massive protests in poznan in a polish city a massive protest there and so this is all leading up to 1956 and hungary where um essentially and um on october 23rd which was um actually just We're recording on October 24th. So a day before the day recording on October 23rd, 1956, is when Hungarian students begin sort of gathering and they're not quite protesting, but they're gathering and they're coming up with sort of these demands saying we want to reform the version of communism we have.

And we want to sort of have more freedom of speech. We want to have more freedom to learn what we want education wise. And then they start marching in the streets and it starts off very peaceful. But then the communists start sort of shooting at these student revolutionaries. And that's when it breaks out into a full on revolution. And so it sort of is like a really long and sort of process by which Hungarians are increasingly more fed up with first, you know, the harsh Stalinist rule. And then even though communist life gets a little bit easier, you know, there are these broader international developments going on that convince Hungarians like this might be that kind of the time to strike. This might be the time to do it. And so all of this is leading up to the events of October and November 1956 in Hungary. I want to go back to one thing you talked about, the 1954 World Cup match between West Germany and Hungary.

And that was kind of my first introduction to Hungarian sporting dominances. As I was learning German, our instructor showed us a film called Das Wunder von Bern or The Miracle of Bern, which German language film about that told mostly from a German perspective. But there's a whole lead up at the beginning of the movie where they describe the dominance of the Hungarian football team in the early 1950s. And as you said before, I don't think they had lost an international match in something like half a decade before. So I'll throw a note for that or a link to that in the show notes at the beginning for the listeners if you want to go watch that. It pairs pretty well with the documentary that we're going to talk about in a little bit here. But while all those events were going on that you were talking about, particularly like the 1956 piece of it, where was the water polo team and how did the water polo team find out about the revolution? Absolutely.

So, I mean, when the revolution broke out, right, so this is sort of the end of October 1956, and I know we're going to talk about the blood and the water match, but the blood and the water match was going to be in Melbourne, Australia during their summer months, which was going to be at the end of November through December 1956. So the revolution breaks out really like a month before the 1956 Summer Olympics began. And so the various Hungarian Olympic teams have been training for a long time and were gearing up to leave. And so when the protests and the revolution breaks out, it's really unclear about whether the Hungarian Olympic team is actually going to leave to go to Melbourne. and, um, you know, athletes are, you know, like running all over the city, trying to make sure that their families are safe, trying to make sure that they are safe, that their friends and family are safe. Um, the Olympic, um, the Hungarian Olympic team actually releases a statement and one of the newspapers declare that they support the freedom fighters, that they support the

revolutionaries. And, and it's actually a very bold statement because at that point, they don't know what's going to happen. There are a few days from sort of very late October to very early November when the Soviet tanks retreat from Hungary and kind of leave Hungary. And the revolutionaries think that they win. And Imran Nagy, who was actually the person who was installed in power in 1953, he's put back in power in 1956 and sort of tries to mediate between the different revolutionary groups and emerges as a leader and announces that Hungary is going to leave the Warsaw Pact. And so the Olympian, the Olympic athletes are really kind of debating, like, should they go? Should they not go? And also, you know, flights are not really going

in and out of Hungary. So there's also sort of a transportation issue. So the International Olympic Committee, which famously even today proclaims that it does not involve itself in domestic matters. The IOC very much wanted the Hungarian Olympic team to go to Melbourne. And so they actually intercede for the Hungarians, again, getting involved in domestic political affairs. And they try to convince like the Czechoslovaks and the French and the French airline to help the Hungarian Olympic team leave and sort of defund because there's like no funding. Like, you know, bills are not getting paid because the country is in chaos. And so they can't pay the plane tickets, for example. And so what happens is that the Olympic team is able to leave finally, and they get on, I think it's, they get on a bus to go to Austria. Sorry, they get on a bus already, go to Czechoslovakia. And then from Czechoslovakia, they fly to Melbourne.

um and but but when the olympic team leave they think that the hungarians have won the revolution right so they are traveling on their way out of melbourne thinking let that hopefully their families are safe thinking that the revolutionaries are the revolutionaries are winning and then they get to melbourne and that's when they realize like oh crap actually the soviets have returned they are corrupt we think it seems that they are crushing the revolution the revolutionaries and they don't know what's happening to their families and um out of the whole olympic team um only one person really knows english with any kind of fluency um and so he is like reading the newspapers and essentially explaining to everybody this is what's happening which i can't imagine like the

trauma of having to kind of explain what what is going on you know we don't know what's happening with your families and um athletes are totally i mean you just can imagine they they don't know what to think. Um, some of them are not sure, like, should we even compete? Should we even be there? You know, I don't know my family's alive. Um, and so there are all of these like internal discussions within the team about what to do. Some athletes want to like denounce the communist party in Melbourne and like make a really bold statement. Some athletes really don't want to do that. So there's a lot of even like, I don't want to say turmoil, but like, you know, disagreements, um within the hungarian olympic team members about what to do um and and so and so again this is all

leading up to the blood and the water match um now one thing that's interesting though is that the olympic team in melbourne including the the um including the representatives of the communist party who were there and that's the thing about um communist rule during this time in these countries is that because the government placed so much importance on using um victories using sport as a means to sort of demonstrate the validity and the strength of the communist political system is that the leadership, sort of the sport officials who govern sports were communist bureaucrats, like they were communist through and through. But what I found in my research actually is that they were representatives of the communist state, but they actually had

really good relationships with athletes. They really tried to look out for them, especially after the athlete is killed by the government in 1951. So these officials are actually in pretty relationships with athletes. And there's this really famous picture on people can listeners can Google it if they want. And in the Olympic village in Melbourne, the entire Olympic team with the communist bureaucrats are standing at attention at the flagpole and they raise the flag of the revolutionaries. This is after the Soviets are like crushing, you know, crushing the revolution. So this is actually a really interesting moment where communist sport officials sort of side with the revolutionaries and sort of agree to support athletes and what

they want to do. Um, and then I know we're going to talk about sort of the defections and what some of the athletes do later on in the episode, but, um, you know, the, the officials are actually really sympathetic to the athletes because they also don't know what's happening, right. They also don't know what's going to happen to their families. And so, you know, you would think that like these communist officials would be trying to like repress these athletes. And I say, think, you know, according to like our sort of American sense of what communism was like, but there's actually pretty good relations between athletes, between these communist officials. And there actually much more sort of in support of each other and sort of more of a team than maybe we

would sort of think from our sort of American lens about what communism was like at the time. The team, as you mentioned, ultimately, they still participate in the Olympics, and then they wind up meeting the Soviets in the semifinals, the team that they had been forced to train years prior, and now they're going to participate in what's going to come to be known as the blood and the water match. So what was the mood in the stadium as that match approached? Absolutely. I'll say it is a little bit hard to get a sense of what the atmosphere was like, in part because we have to sort of rely on like Australian press and sort of Western press about what was going on in the Western press and Australia and the US and UK and essentially people who were like, quote unquote, you know, like on the capitalist side. you know, they very much wanted to portray, you know, any kind of matchup between Hungarians and Soviets as like a real moment of sort of East versus West battles. And, you know, this is

communism. You know, we're trying to defeat communism because we're part of sort of the capitalist and democratic West. So it's a little bit hard to kind of parse out the mood. But I mean, in general, people are pretty in agreement that it is very tense and that they don't really know if sort of politics are going to spew out between players. That's kind of the big mystery It's like what's going to happen if the Soviet athletes compete against Hungarian athletes? And this isn't just in water polo or the water polo again, because it's sort of what happens during the match ends up kind of being the big flashpoint that we know about. But it also kind of manifests in different and different sports as well. Although I know we're going to talk about the documentary later on, but some of the athletes in the documentary themselves kind of admit that, you know, they knew these athletes.

right? Like even though there were tensions between them, they also, there also was a fair amount of respect between them and they've been competing each other for years. Um, so again, there are, their politics are involved and there are tensions, but between the athletes, they also know that they're just athletes and they're just sort of normal human beings. But in terms of the mood of like the spectators, I think people are really on edge to kind of find out what is going to happen during this game. Is this game going to represent politics or is it going to be kind more about sports or somewhere in between. Now, we've mentioned the documentary a couple of times for a second hand. Now, the documentary is called Freedom's Fury. I think I found it on

Amazon. It's a documentary about this match, very specifically the events leading up to it, a little bit about the aftermath as well. And I'd recommend it to anybody who's more curious about this because it's really good. You've got all these first person interviews with the participants, both on the Soviet and the Hungarian side. When you think about what I guess I would call from the western impression soviet olympics malfeasance so i think like the 1972 basketball game all the way up to um i'm trying to remember what my mother was so uh upset about is that the 1994 olympics uh figure skating with victor petrenko versus paul wiley and paul wiley finishing second um and thinking about who the judges were but it's always a sort of the soviets is the

aggressors bad actors um was that the case in this game because i did not lead the documentary with that impression necessarily. Yeah, and I mean, I want to echo first, like definitely, I think it's a fantastic documentary and I used to show it all the time in class because as you said, the first person narratives are so gripping. Actually, a lot of those people have sadly died

because that was made in, I think, 2004, between 2004 and 2006 or something. And also just shows the mechanics of water polo. It's a very brutal sport. I was a swimmer and we would play water polo during the holidays And like someone would always end up with a bloody nose because it is a very brutal game, which actually, again, shows that it's actually not a surprise that there were sort of blood in the quote unquote water. Yeah. So I don't this is not going to be a great answer.

I don't actually know if I've sort of decided about how much the match is about sort of Soviet malfeasance or not. I mean, I think that water polo water polo is a very brutal game, as I said. I mean, I had a friend in college who played water polo for her high school club team and this is going to sound this is going to be gross. but her eyeball was almost detached like this is such a brutal sport and sorry if listeners are really grossed out by that i do apologize but like it is kind of an inherently brutal not inherently brutal sport but it lends itself for for athletes to kind of to get very physical with one another and because there's all this water splashing i think it's really hard for officials to sort of see what's going on but so what happens is that you know this match is going on and there are

already sort of some pox shots or some cheap shots um by from both players but what makes this are you know the quote-unquote blood in the water match is that there again there's some tussles between players that have been going on throughout the match and then there's a soviet player that seems to punch a hungarian player in the eye and the hungarian player is named ervin zador he ends up defecting and coming to the u.s and he's the youngest player on i think the youngest player on the team and is like a real sort of up and comer and is a very sort of young energetic energetic guy now what's interesting is that that happens and immediately like you know people are kind of getting agitated and like whistles are blown and the game is halted but what's interesting

is that uh one of the main one of hungary's best water polo players ever his name is uh deju jarmatin and he is the captain of the hungarian water polo team and he claims in his memoir that uh what happens is that after after uh right after the the the punch is thrown and the athletes get out of the water that he claims that he instructed zador to like to like show the camera what happened and to like again give that image to the camera so the pictures are taken i haven't been able to corroborate that like that's just mentioned as memoir and you know some people want to kind of portray themselves as having a bigger moment in history than maybe actually did so that's why again i'm sort of um on the fence about you know to what extent to sort

of believe what he says or how much is it that him is sort of puffing up his chest um but even even so that does demonstrate a bit of an awareness of sort of the role of the press and sort of how this might be portrayed and also an awareness of how you know the western audience members might see this match as being something that's more about politics um i mean i do i would bet that the athletes especially the hungarian athletes i would bet that they were bound to have tensions pent up about like we're playing representatives of the country that might be killing our family and friends back home right i think that's like a very real and very sort of human response to have again whether that should evolve into like punching i don't agree with that

of course but i i i guess it's not a surprise that sort of tensions spill over um but i think to your point about sort of the impression that you leave from the documentary. What I do appreciate about that documentary is that, you know, the athletes do seem to see each other as humans and as humans that they relate to. And like they refer to each other by name. And then, you know, there's the kind of real cool scene at the end where you see the athletes get back in the water and they're playing with each other, which I think is actually really good. And like you said, really kind of upends our sort of Western perspective of like, well, it must have been Soviets versus Hungarians.

Like it must have been like a battle and people must still be mad at each other now. And like, actually, no, these athletes are playing with each other and they're laughing and joking and it doesn't actually seem to be staged. Although, you know, it might've been sort of encouraged, but it doesn't actually seem to be staged. Um, so that's why, like, you know, just to reiterate your point, I really think viewers should watch it. Cause I think you could get a lot out of it and it's just kind of an easy watch.

But that's where, again, I'm just not quite sure how much of it is actual aggression. I'm sure that existed. But I think in terms of it being this huge thing that like Westerners tend to know about, I do think it's a little bit overblown. And then the last thing I'll say, and I know we need to move on, is that it's not actually clear to me to what extent from a Hungarian perspective back home, to what extent it served as any kind of sort of moment of triumph or resistance for Hungarians back home. And that's because I've actually looked at the newspapers in Hungary to get a sense of what how what did people know about the match back home? And, you know, after the match, you know, the Hungarian Communist Party, you know, they're in the middle of trying to quell the rebellion. And so they're trying to eliminate any kind of mention of any, you know, Hungarian Soviet tensions. um so so the the the newspaper reports report that they lost the match but they don't report really anything about the punch or the blood or anything like that so it's unclear even back home what the reception was of the match and you know naturally some other athletes return home and word

spreads about what happens but again it's unclear literally until after 1989 it's unclear how much people actually view this match as like a moment of anti-soviet resistance or anti-communist resistance. I have a feeling it's something that emerged more after 1989, and perhaps even more after this documentary. I just don't know, and I haven't been able to do the research for it. You had brought up Freedom Street, and you said that you had some critiques and observations. Would you just discuss, cover all those, or did you have any additional ones that you walked away from the film with? Yeah, I mean, one kind of critique that I have, And it's more, Ben, because just of information that I found out more recently.

So I have a good friend who runs this other podcast called Crossing the Lane Lines, which is a really fantastic podcast about like black aquatics and black swimming and water polo and synchronized swimming and stuff like that. And he interviewed this really amazing person named Janai Kerr. He was a Black American, who is a Black American, he's still living, who was a member of the U.S. Olympic water polo teams in the early 2000s. And in this interview, he shares really interestingly about how when Freedom's Fury was being filmed, how the filmmakers hired the U.S. water polo team at the time, the men's water polo team at the time, and they hired them and they filmed them playing water polo to use as sort of um to again to demonstrate what water polo is about to kind of because that's what they do they

show viewers this is what water polo is about this is how it's played and sort of as educational background uh and what he shared during this this interview on cross the lane lines was that um it was he that um he was a member of this team and there was another black uh american player who was a member of this team who were initially included in the filming of these scenes but what happened was that the filmmakers decided that um and i should say that anytime a filmmaker whether it's a document documentary filmmaker or anything else of whether they're doing like historical fiction um they always have to make decisions about what details to include and exclude in order to maintain like historical accuracy these are these are decisions that every filmmaker always

makes um and these are very difficult decisions but what the filmmakers decided to do is that they decided that because there were no water polo players of color and the initial water polo match that they needed to refilm all of the scenes in order to exclude the two black water polo players and I mean I I'm actually kind of curious how much it must have cost to do that because I mean any like delay of filming can cost like hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more in terms of you know, renting pool space, paying, you know, camera crew, paying lighting crew, sound, not to mention, you know, the directors and, you know, everybody else and of course the athletes. And so that's just kind of a minor critique that I've had is that, you know, again, while every documentarian

and sort of filmmaker has to make decisions about which details to kind of stick to and which ones to kind of flub or whatever, is that they chose to essentially ensure that sort of the white character of the match was maintained um actually even though i'm pretty sure actually that there were some jewish players that's actually something i've been meaning to look into um at the time at the time in 1950s with um you know jews both in the u.s and hungary not quite being white the way many of them are today um but i just kind of found that really interesting and sort of what details um documentarians the filmmakers choose to include or exclude and for whatever reason you know this was something they wanted to maintain, even though I'm sure there were like many details

that they decided to flub or flat out falsify in order to film the documentary. It is still a fantastic documentary to watch. I still think people wish to watch it, right? But just sort of like a minor critique of sort of something to think about as we're watching it. I had a couple of impressions I want to share with you, and you can tell me what you think of my takes here, but these are just a few things that caught my attention. The first being, I walked away from the documentary thinking that Blood in the Water is a little bit of an overstatement it's based almost entirely on that post-match photograph like i did not have the i understand that water polo is inherently physical game and like it's it is that way because you know

only maybe 10 of the human body is actually exposed at any one time so you can't see what the other 90 of the two bodies are doing to one another beneath the water service surface but is that like do you think that is an accurate statement as as we talk about this game or is that more a reflection of the political environment rather than the actual physicality of the game? That's a wonderful question. And actually one I haven't even really thought about before. So thank you for asking it. I mean, I guess, I mean, I think you kind of pointed a little bit to it is that, right. It sort of depends on what is meant by when we're talking about blood in the water. I do think that when people say that, I think they're referring to

both the actual like bloodiness and then also the politics, I think they're seeing them as kind of going hand in hand, but you're right. And that it isn't like a, you know, a blood match, right. It isn't that there is like an all out fight and, you know, like, it isn't like, you know, a hockey match where like, you do see like entire teams kind of going at each other, right. Isn't that kind of level of bloodiness? Um, I do think that I, I do think that it's overblown in the sense that right, it's sort of based on one, like, you know, real visible image of there being blood there. And I think, and I think it's also a lot of people reading politics into it. And that's kind of where, again, I, and I haven't had time and people have kind of approached me. I have a

colleague who's approached me and has wanted to sort of write about this. And I just have my hands full and I've been able to, but I just, I think it's something that needs to be interrogated more, which is actually why I really like your question, right? I think it's something that needs to be interrogated more it's seen as like one of the as you mentioned you know you mentioned like a slew of kind of really famous kind of soviet u.s or soviet other you know they're also like in 1968 after the prague spring they're like the czechoslovak hockey riots um was sort of a similar thing um there's also the 1980 80 i think it's a night 80 or 84 the the miracle game the lake placid hockey game i always get 80 and 84 mixed up when it comes to that the winter olympics

but whichever ones are in lake placid where again it's the soviets and the u.s team and there's the miracle the disney movie that's really popularized that right so it's hard to get a sense of how much were these things actually meaningful significant at the time compared to how much are they significant kind of now that we're looking back and we're sort of looking for examples and sort what role does the press play? So, I mean, I'm inclined to agree, actually, because I'm thinking it through, you know, when you asked me that question. I do think it's overblown. And I think it's a matter of, a lot of it is people wanting to read communist and Cold War politics into it. When, you know, like you said, blood is really, you know, physicality is part of any kind of match,

right? It just so happened to kind of happen in this match. And then people really jumped into it wanted to kind of read into it. So one of the other things I found really odd here was that everybody in the film, whether they're Hungarian or, well, I think the Hungarians use Soviet more frequently, but I did not hear a single quote unquote Soviet player refer to themselves as a Soviet team. They all said Russian over and over and over again. I'm trying to think what the atmosphere was in 2004 that could have contributed to that, but there was nothing that really struck me is, do you have any impression based on that observation of why they were leaning away from referring themselves as Soviet? Yeah, this is a fantastic question and kind of a

difficult one. I mean, I do think there's been a general attempt for people to sort of distance themselves from certain terms such as like Soviet and really kind of refer to themselves as like ethnically Russian or something else as a way to kind of distance themselves from that time period. The other thing is that maybe at the time, maybe in the 1950s, they saw themselves as Russian and not as Soviet, right? So I think it kind of depends, it's sort of a, it's a fascinating question. It's very sort of multi-layered in that. I think it depends, you know, I think if we were to study it, it would sort of be, you know, like how, how did people view themselves in the 1950s? It's like, yes, the Soviet Union had been in existence for decades, but I don't know, maybe people had sort of closer affiliations with their ethnic identity.

And this is not my specialty. And my colleagues who might listen to this and have have expertise and sort of issues of ethnicity and identity could answer this much more definitively than I can. So sorry if listeners are rolling in their eyes because I don't have a great answer to this. Um, but I mean, and even in the other interesting thing is that even like Hungarians today, like they would never refer to themselves as Soviet, but they would, a lot of them would refer to the communist period of rule as like the Soviet rule or as foreign rule, even though officially the people who are running their country were Hungarians, right? They were ethnically Hungarian. A lot of them who had been educated and trained in the Soviet Union, but were ethnically

Hungarian. um so i i think it's a matter of people wanting to kind of distance themselves from like the kind of identifier of the soviet union or being soviet um the other thing is that in order for russia as a country you know as an independent country after 1991 which is after uh when the soviet when the soviet union dissolves in order for russia to kind of um connect itself how do i say in order for Russia to sort of demonstrate some kind of continuity in like a sport sense, right? It's not going to call sort of victories under when it was the Soviet Union as Soviet victories, right? They would want to call it Russian victories to kind of demonstrate this long history of Soviet sport

victory. So I think it might be that as well. And then also, you know, it's called like Russia in like United Russia after 1991. So it could be an attempt to sort of demonstrate some kind of continuity there. But that's a really excellent question. Excellent. So my last observation there too, is you mentioned the reunion scene at the end, so the Hungarian teams, they get together, they're in Budapest, there's lots of shots on them by the bridge. I think they're up on, what is the castle that's up on the hill there, the Fisherman's Bastion. And then they get in the pool together in Budapest. And it was obvious that these old guys are all 70 plus years old, but there were still athletes. You could see like the way that they move in the pool is very

live and, you know, cat-like in some instances. And it was, I don't know, it was still a bit, a little, maybe less intimidating for you as a former division one athlete, but for like a normal human being walking around and it's like, oh, these guys, they were actually Olympic athletes in the past. And I don't know if you left with that impression or not. Absolutely. I love seeing that at the end, they just, they slip into the water and it looks like they haven't skipped a beat. I mean, that's, I think really, really cool is that, and they, they are so clearly like professionals and experts. And I mean, I mentioned earlier, like we will play water polo during the holidays and we would have like a half of a practice off

or something. I was terrible. I mean, I can swim, I can, I haven't swam in years, but, um, you know, I could swim very, very well and I could tread water, but when it came to like throwing a ball, I mean, I don't, I don't have good hand-eye coordination and I'm not like a good basketball player um so that those skills just didn't quite transfer and like and one time I actually did get a bloody nose actually when I was playing water polo like someone I think it was someone threw a ball and it hit me in the nose or something and that was not you know these again are you know was were not guys I was something that they were not like super strong at throwing per se because it wasn't like what we practiced um but just again to kind of show how brutal the game can be

um but I mean I love that I love kind of seeing them they're real experts in the water and I think what's cool like you said you know they're older men in their 70s and actually i actually meant to look and didn't have time but i'm pretty sure a lot a lot of them the the men have passed um since that was filmed um and it's just really cool to see that um and and and obviously see that water polo meant a huge deal on their lives the other thing that i would say is i think i think that's something that's different between european sort of physical uh culture and sort of sport culture is that whereas in the u.s i feel like people do if you do sports you do it really really intensely when you're younger and then you don't always keep it up as you get older

whereas european sort of sport culture is much more that like a lot of people do it recreationally throughout their entire lives like whenever i'm there there are so many people playing i mean what we would consider to be like pick up basketball or pick up soccer but like do it like once or twice a week and play for decades with the same people. So I actually would not be surprised if a lot of these men continue to play in like adult leagues or sort of continue to at least get in the water and play around. And then the other thing is Budapest and the scenes where they film those scenes. It's at one of the most beautiful baths in the world. It's called the Gellert Baths. And it's clear that a lot, I mean, a lot of older people go to these baths when they're retired to

like play chess and they hang out with their friends. So sort of water culture is a bit more, I mean, you're around, but also as much more kind of ingrained in their culture, at least in Hungary. I don't know about Russia, but in Hungary than it is here. But I absolutely, I love that part at the end when you kind of seeing them play around. I just think that's really cool. Well, then a final question to wrap up. What happens to the majority of the water polo team post Olympics? Yeah. So, um, I only know, um, the Hungarians, although I can sort of guess about the Russians, right. So a lot of the, so I'll kind of look at more broadly. Um, so there are something like 120 members of the Hungarian Olympic team delegation. And so that means like not only

athletes, but coaches and sort of sport officials who represent the communist state. Um, now at least um uh it's between a third and a quarter at least a third to a quarter of them end up defecting to the west um and a lot of them basically it's like 34 hungarian um athletes and or coaches and officials end up defecting to the u.s um and actually four romanian uh four romanian water polo players also leave and come to the u.s they are ethnically hungarian from um transylvania but they are officially like um in terms of citizenship they're romanian But they're also water polo players and they end up coming to the U.S. and they come because there's this secret operation between the CIA and Sports Illustrated and the State Department and Time magazine where they essentially help. they essentially gather interest from Hungarian athletes in Melbourne to figure out, you know,

do any of them want to come to the U S and they want to use these athletes as a propaganda coup to demonstrate, to kind of parade them around the U S to demonstrate like, this is what freedom is like. We rescue these athletes and they are living in sort of a free world and look, they're great athletes and they're going to help us train great American water polo players or swimmers or gymnasts or fencers. And so 34 Hungarian, um, athletes and coaches come to the U S um, and then actually in total over 300, um, Hungarian athletes defect to the West total. So not just to the U S a lot of them go to Switzerland and Austria. Um, and that those are the numbers I've been able to corroborate. And I don't, there are, I'm sure many more, um, some of the, um,

athletes and coming back to Hungary, including a couple of water, there are three water polo players in particular, including Desu Jarmati, who I mentioned earlier, who is the captain. He comes to the U S in February, 1957 or March, February, March, 1957. And then he ends up coming back. Um, and some of them come back cause they miss family. Some of them are coerced to come back. Some of them come back because they realize that they're not going to get a job that pays them enough money to be an athlete or a coach in the U S. And so the communist government at home can give them a good paying job and give them benefits and all these things for being an athlete, whereas in the US, they'd have to live in poverty. The ones that come to the US, most of

them don't continue to be athletes, because at that time, you couldn't really have a career being an athlete, unless you came from unless you came from wealth. So a lot of them end up having to sort of ditch their careers and go on to other sports. Some athletes have a poverty. But but because sort of the revolution essentially opens up this door, where athletes can leave, right, they're not sure what's going on at home. And then also other countries are willing to take them in. Some of them go to fascist Spain to, to play for a Franco state. Some of them stay in Australia. So it sort of is a window of opportunity for athletes to leave, to go somewhere, somewhere differently. And that's what I've focused on in a fair bit of my research. Well, I'd like to thank

my guest, Dr. Joanna Millis. Joanna, where can we find you online and what's your next project? yeah so um i'm extremely active on twitter i spend probably too much time there um hi there um my handle is um at johanna mellis and i'm a co-host of the end of sport podcast where we examine sort of the ways that people use sports to be sort of harmful or abusive discriminating and sort of we examine ways to make it to be all the things that we want it to be to kind of support healthy, um, healthy people and, and sort of allow people to, to do, um, achieve what they want to achieve for it. Um, and my, my project that I'm working on right now, very slowly as I'm working on my book, which is, um, about, um, how Hungarians, um, use sport as a way to navigate

Cold War and international politics. So I looked at Hungarian athletes, such as the ones I've talked about here and the work at communist, um, state, uh, communist sport officials, which I talked about a little bit here and sort of how they collaborate with athletes. Um, and then I look at the International Olympic Committee and sort of how these three groups interacted during the Cold War, when we kind of think of sport as a site of sort of a lot of competition and sort of clashing and kind of East-West politics. And my research shows that actually a lot of people use sport as a site of cooperation to kind of agree to sporting terms, to agree to participate in games, agree to work with each other to achieve their own ends. And yeah, that's what I'm working

on. Well, thank you again to listeners. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021