One of my favorites as a kid growing up!
Lots of wrestlers cosplayed as commies during the Cold War. Nikolai Volkoff, who died over the weekend, was way closer to the real thing, and took his act far more seriously, than all the rest. He was 70 years old.
Volkoff, a WWE Hall of Famer and ring legend, was born as Josip Nikolai Peruzovic in October 1947 in Yugoslavia to a Russian mother and Croatian father. He told me in a 2004 interview that as a very large teen he was desperate to escape the oppression of his country’s Communist-ruled government, and scared that the Soviet Union would do to his people what he’d heard they did to neighboring Hungary when he was a boy. He began plotting his defection to the West. He always knew he wanted to end up in America, home of his hero Muhammad Ali, but he had to start out in the Great White North.
“I heard that the wait was three years for the U.S.,” he said. “For Canada, it was six months. I had to get out.”
So he sought asylum in the Canadian embassy in Austria during a trip with the Yugoslav national weightlifting team. He went to Calgary and, influenced by Ali, thought about a boxing career. But the only ring gigs he was offered were as a professional wrestler. By the early ‘70s, he had already gotten some buzz in a tag team called the Mongols when idolmaking manager “Classy” Freddie Blassie told Peruzovic his future was as a Soviet character.
Read the rest here
Volkoff, a WWE Hall of Famer and ring legend, was born as Josip Nikolai Peruzovic in October 1947 in Yugoslavia to a Russian mother and Croatian father. He told me in a 2004 interview that as a very large teen he was desperate to escape the oppression of his country’s Communist-ruled government, and scared that the Soviet Union would do to his people what he’d heard they did to neighboring Hungary when he was a boy. He began plotting his defection to the West. He always knew he wanted to end up in America, home of his hero Muhammad Ali, but he had to start out in the Great White North.
“I heard that the wait was three years for the U.S.,” he said. “For Canada, it was six months. I had to get out.”
So he sought asylum in the Canadian embassy in Austria during a trip with the Yugoslav national weightlifting team. He went to Calgary and, influenced by Ali, thought about a boxing career. But the only ring gigs he was offered were as a professional wrestler. By the early ‘70s, he had already gotten some buzz in a tag team called the Mongols when idolmaking manager “Classy” Freddie Blassie told Peruzovic his future was as a Soviet character.
Read the rest here
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