VOLUNTARY SPORTS ASSOCIATIONS IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY KAZAN: HISTORICAL, METHODOLOGICAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS

Fan-Yung German Yurievich, Shchigortsova Elena Sergeevna

The presented article attempts to analyze the relationship between the rapid development of large and advanced private capitalist industry and the emergence of voluntary sports societies in the administrative center of the Kazan province before 1917. Based on the studied corpus of published and unpublished sources deposited in the State Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan and stored in the Scientific Library of the Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, the author concluded about the objective influence of large private capitalist industries on the formation of an “all-class” urban environment. In turn, some of its facilities were adapted to the recreational needs of city residents, including amateur athletics and weightlifting, swimming, wrestling, regular cycling, tennis and even yachting. The purpose of our research is a very brief analysis of the influence of the largest “city-forming” Kazan industries on the formation of an “all-class” urban environment and new forms of leisure for citizens. The objectives are, firstly, the theoretical and methodological substantiation of the emergence of new forms of leisure, one of which was sport, in the specified historical period; secondly, a description of the most important provisions of the charters of some city sports societies; thirdly, systematization of the results obtained and their presentation. In our work we used: universal (general scientific) methods of scientific knowledge, both empirical (description, comparison, juxtaposition, etc.) and theoretical (axiomatic method, deduction, induction, classification, analysis, synthesis, modeling, etc.); the most important principles of historical knowledge (scientificity, historicism, objectivity, etc.); special methods of historical research (historical-genetic, comparative-historical, cause-and-effect analysis, etc.).

Keywords:industrial revolution, “all-class” urban environment, “city-forming” enterprises, amateur sports, voluntary sports societies in pre-revolutionary Russia, pre-revolutionary Kazan