Glasnost Bowl "Boomers") in Moscow, Leningrad, and Tallinn, Estonia in 1989. These were the first organized American football games played in the Soviet Union. Shortly after these games the Soviet national American football team formed, as well as the first Soviet league, marking the start of domestic American football in the Soviet Union and Russia. Glasnost Bowl The Glasnost Bowl was a planned attempt to stage an American college football game in Moscow, USSR at the beginning of the 1989 season. The game was named after the policy of glasnost ("openness") introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Scheduled for the
Mikhail Gorbachev Another of those promoted by Gorbachev was Boris Yeltsin, who was made Secretary of the Central Committee in July 1985. For the first two years of his leadership, Gorbachev's watchword was "acceleration". He claimed that the Soviet Union would accelerate industrial output to the extent that it would match that of the United States by 2000. To boost agricultural productivity, he merged five ministries and a state committee into a single entity, Agroprom. By late 1986, he was referring to this reform as a failure. Drunkenness was a major social problem in the 1980s, and Andropov had planned for a