Kalinski as a professional dancer in 1986.

A Secret Revealed

Scholar sheds light on Olympic doping in former Soviet Union

By Lisa Lambert, M.A. ‘05

Dr. Michael Kalinski spreads several photo albums out on a table and begins to flip through the pages. He is the young man in the photos, sharing the stage with similarly costumed men and women. The photos embody a passion for ballroom dancing and for life, visible in Kalinski’s expression then and now.

He explains that though he has devoted his professional energy to exercise biochemistry, he enjoyed unrelated opportunities through dance. Years ago, when his team of dancers was chosen to spend a month in France to represent the culture of the Soviet Union, Kalinski’s love affair with the West began.

“We gave a concert in front of 1,200 diplomats and their families at UNESCO,” Kalinski says. “The Ukrainian representative to UNESCO came to us after the performance and said, ‘You guys in one evening did more for Ukraine than we have done in many years.’”

At that time, Kalinski could not have imagined the circumstances under which he would return to the West more than a decade later.

Starting Over

Next to the photo albums sits a stack of thick textbooks, just a few of the dozen books Kalinski has published throughout his lengthy career. The years of research and scholarly effort poured into their pages meant nothing when Kalinski, and unknown, arrived in the United States in 1990.

Despite his pioneering work in signal transduction, in which he was years ahead of Western scholars, Kalinski found himself in a foreign country with few possessions and little credibility — the Soviet Union did not permit its scientists to travel abroad to interact with their counterparts from around the world, and the government set up numerous obstacles, so it was virtually impossible for most scholars to have their work translated into English and sent to foreign journals.

Michael Kalinski

Kalinski, now associate professor of exercise science at Kent State University, recounts his first attempt to make inroads with the American academic establishment at Columbia University in New York.

“The professor was sitting across the table and I brought out six textbooks [Kaminski had authored] and several published articles and put them on the table,” Kalinski says. The professor gingerly picked up a book, tossing it aside almost in the same motion, and said to Kalinski, “I don’t know this.”

At that moment, Kalinski understood that professionally, he was starting over. Despite 19 years of rigorous scholarship, he says, “I knew I should not feel anymore that I was somebody — I was a nobody.”

While every immigrant faces difficulties in the transition to a new country, Kalinski’s experience was somewhat more difficult because he was 47 years old when he came to the United States. “I started learning English in the beginner’s class in Riverside church in Manhattan,” he says. And, just four years later, he was able to publish his first monograph in English, Exercise and Intracellular Regulation of Cardiac and Skeletal Muscles (1995).

Still, for better or worse, there is no such thing as a clean slate. When he left the Eastern Bloc in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Chernobyl disaster, not only did Kalinski carry with him a vast store of memories and professional knowledge, but he also carried across the Atlantic a document that would end the secrecy of steroid research in the USSR.

A Secret Revealed

The 39-page document confirmed what many in the West had long suspected — a state-sanctioned doping program had fueled the world’s predominant Olympic machine, turning athletes into research subjects and the pursuit of success in sport into something dangerous.

The document, one of 150 numbered copies, remained tucked away, until after Kalinski obtained U.S. citizenship a decade after his arrival. “My top priority during my early years in the United States was to re-establish my academic career,” he says. Kalinski felt that to reveal the document at that time would call his motives into question.

In 1972, when Kalinski was chairman of the department of sport biochemistry at the Kiev Institute of Physical Culture, the institute’s research vice president gave him the classified research report, Anabolic Steroids and Sport Capacity, with instructions to pass the document to fellow department heads.

Kalinski reviewed the report, which touted the use of steroids. Rather than circulate the report, he locked it away in his desk drawer. Two years later, the International Olympic Committee specifically banned steroids after a test was developed to detect their use.

In a totalitarian regime, Kalinski explains, distrust and fear are rampant and secrets well-kept. Soviet scientists had as much incentive as coaches and athletes to participate in the doping program and were rewarded for success with free cars, apartments and other perks otherwise difficult to procure under a communist regime.
Kalinski, like others inside the Soviet sports machine, would have faced severe repercussions for revealing the doping scandal. Only on U.S. soil, with his academic credentials in tact did he feel able to speak out.

His document, the first and last of its kind to be publicly revealed, remains the only hard evidence of the doping program in the former Soviet Union.

To date, no charges have been leveled against former Soviet officials for actions Kalinski considers to be crimes against humanity.