Dynamo (sports society)

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For "Dinamo" and "Dynamo" sports clubs and other uses see Dynamo.

Dinamo, also Dynamo, (Russian and Ukrainian: Динамо, Belarusian: Дына́ма) was the oldest sports and physical training society of the Soviet Union, created in 1923. The name given to the society was supposed to mean "Power in Motion" from Greek: δύναμις; dynamis -power, and Latin: motio, -motion. Not coincidentally, this term was first coined earlier by a German inventor Ernst Werner von Siemens (1816 - 1892) for the electrical generator. Dynamo, together with Armed Forces sports society and Voluntary Sports Societies made up the universal system of physical education and sports of the USSR. 45 sports disciplines were cultivated in the society in 1971. It had some 6,000 sports constructions and 43 Children and Youth Sport Schools.

The "Dinamo" society was officially created on April 18, 1923 on Felix Dzerzhinsky's initiative^[1] and under the sponsorship of the State Political Directorate (GPU), the Soviet political police, the predessesor of other later created Soviet security structures such as KGB, NKVD and MVD. For the rest of the society's history in the Soviet period, it maintained some connection with the state security apparatus although this connection had little, if any, relation to the sportmen that competed under the Dinamo flag.

The name of the society also became well-known internationally through many clubs in various sports, initially created under the auspecies of the Soviet Dynamo society (only a partial list of sports includes football (soccer), ice hockey, basketball, volleyball, handball) or just bore the name "Dynamo", with many such clubs attaining much international acclaim, such as in football: FC Dinamo Bucureşti, FC Dynamo Kyiv, FC Dynamo Moscow, FC Dinamo Tbilisi, FC Dinamo Minsk, FC Dinamo Brest, NK Dinamo Zagreb (Croatia), Dynamo Dresden (Germany) in ice hockey: HC Dinamo Moscow. When, following the Second World War, the pro-Soviet governments were installed in much of the Eastern Europe, the similarly named clubs were created in many countries of what became an Eastern bloc. Many clubs, now transformed into the regular private clubs of their respective national leagues, still function under their original Dinamo or Dynamo name but their history is the only connection with the old Dynamo society.