Posted on February 21, 2012 - by Venik

Jim Riordan obituary

Writer and translator who specialised in the sport and folk tales of the Soviet Union and also achieved success with his novels for children

Jim Riordan, who has died aged 75, described himself as “a working-class oik from Portsmouth” yet he became the academic world’s foremost authority on sport in the Soviet Union, as well as a respected voice in Russian studies and a translator and children’s author. His most important work was perhaps the groundbreaking Sport in Soviet Society (1977). Riordan lived in Moscow for many years during the cold war, and his status as a respected, if sometimes troublesome, visiting communist from the west helped him to gain access to many important players, coaches and administrators who helped to build the Soviet system.

The Soviets had ignored the Olympics for 40 years because they were run by “capitalists and aristocrats”, but when they adopted a resolution in 1949 to “help Soviet athletes win world supremacy”, sport changed globally. The communist countries, with the Soviet Union at the forefront, dominated the Olympics for decades, and in Seoul in 1988, the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviets won nearly a quarter of the gold medals at the summer Games.

The means by which the Soviets had brought about this sporting revolution was summed up by Riordan in a 1993 article for Olympika, the International Journal of Olympic Studies. The west saw sport as open, non-political, self-financing, and conducted with a sense of fair play. For the communists, it was political-ideological, financed by the state, and their win-at-all-costs attitude led to drug abuse and exploitation of children.

While many in the west might have suspected as much, nobody had previously written about it in depth, and with authority. Few would have known that, as Riordan pointed out, vast numbers of ordinary Soviet citizens believed that the Soviet sport system represented all that was bad in the regime’s policies: hypocrisy and sham, paramilitary coercion, grossly and immorally distorted priorities, and the abuse of children.

Riordan was born in Portsmouth and attended Southern grammar school for boys. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1959, when on a Russian studies degree at Birmingham University, and had “a chip on my shoulder about the officer class and a general dismay about social injustice”. He encountered the officer class in the RAF on his national service, which he spent in Cornwall and Berlin, studying Russian then listening in to military conversations.

Riordan went to study in Moscow in 1961, sent by the CPGB but financed, as he later discovered, by the Soviets. His fellow students at the Higher Party school in Moscow included Alexander Dubcek, and he met Ho Chi Minh and other political leaders. He mixed socially with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the Cambridge spies who defected to the Soviet Union in 1951. Riordan was a pallbearer at Burgess’s funeral.

He remained a member of the CPGB until it disbanded in 1991. He survived a vote to expel him for “bourgeois bohemianism” in 1965, on his return from Moscow, when his views of life in the Soviet Union did not match those of his fellow travellers who had never been there.

Riordan was attache to the British team at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. He was a keen footballer and lifelong fan of Portsmouth FC, whose fortunes he would follow in the 1960s by having the Saturday pink’un from his home city posted to Moscow. While in Moscow he followed Spartak, and in his autobiography, Comrade Jim (2008), he recalled how he made two appearances for them in 1963, under an assumed name, becoming the only foreigner to play in the Soviet league. “Football taught me much and has given me many of the happiest memories of my life,” he said.

Riordan was sceptical about much of what he was taught in Moscow, but he completed his studies and, unlike his fellow British students who returned, he stayed to work as a translator for Progress Publishing. He wrote about 20 academic books, lectured at Bradford University and the University of Surrey, and travelled the world to give professorial presentations on a range of Russian- and Soviet-related issues.

Riordan was married three times, to a Frenchwoman, Annick; a Soviet Tatar, Rachida; and a Russian, Elena. They survive him, along with his children, Tanya, Nadine, Sean, Nathalie and Catherine. Four of his offspring, all of whom were brought up in England, speak Russian, and two of them work in Russia.

Julia Eccleshare writes: Jim Riordan was a prolific author of children’s books. Drawing on the 640 stories gathered together in eight volumes by Alexander Afanasyev between 1855 and 1867, he retold Russian folk tales in two books. The first, Tales from Central Russia: Russian Tales, published in 1976 by Kestrel, the upmarket hardback imprint of Puffin Books, was illustrated with black-and-white illustrations by Krystyna Turska. These atmospheric – if a little static – retellings were combined with Riordan’s lengthy and detailed commentary on the original tales, how Afanasyev had collected them and their relevance to children in contemporary Soviet Russia. The volume chimed perfectly with the then fashionable commitment in British schools to teaching Russian and opening up children’s understanding of the country. A companion volume, Tales from Tartar, followed in 1979.

Riordan then produced a steady flow of anthologies of various kinds from across Russia and its near neighbours, acting as both collector and translator. He also diversified into other folk-story traditions, including The 12 Labours of Hercules (1998), which won the UK Reading Association award. His collection The Woman in the Moon and Other Tales of Forgotten Heroines (1985), including stories from Japan, Ghana, Sicily, Lapland and the UK, was celebrated for its strong female characters.

Breaking away from other people’s stories, he wrote his first novel, Sweet Clarinet (1998), the touching story of a boy overcoming injuries sustained in the London Blitz through his love of playing music. Nine more novels followed; all have something of the folk tale about them in terms of a child overcoming adversity through courage and belief. Many, such as Rebel Cargo (2007), the story of children sold into slavery and his final novel, Blood Runner (2011), the story of a young black boy whose parents are killed by the South African police, carry strong socio-political messages. Russia never lost its appeal as a source of stories for him and he returned there with the setting of his penultimate novel, The Sniper (2008), which is based on the true story of a teenage marksman at the siege of Stalingrad.

• James William Riordan, writer and scholar of sport, born 10 October 1936; died 11 February 2012

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