This article sets Timoshenko's 1936 musical comedy Goalkeeper (Vratar') into the social, cultural and political context of debates on the functions and organization of sports and physical culture in ...Soviet society of the 1930s. In doing so it draws on research into participants in, and spectators of these disciplines, emphasizing aspects of the film's form and style as destabilizing any 'preferred' reading the film might be trying to promote regarding what James Riordan has referred to as 'abuses of amateur status' in Soviet physical culture.
