We Want the Olympics to Be a Pure Sporting Event

We Want the Olympics to Be a Pure Sporting Event

While the arrest and incarceration of Anatoly Shcharansky didn't stir up enough popular sentiment alone to inspire a US boycott of the 1980 Olympics, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR did. This cartoon by Edmund Valtman discusses events surrounding that decision. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Russian nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989) called for international pressure to force Soviet withdrawal and advocated a boycott of the Olympic Games to be held in Moscow the following summer. The Soviet government, headed by Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982), arrested Sakharov, stripped him of his honors, and exiled him to Gorky where he could not be interviewed by western reporters. The United States and 54 other countries eventually did boycott the games.

Edmund Valt

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/valtman/presentation.html

eng

Ink, tonal overlay on paper