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 to his efforts for reform. Meanwhile, Gorbachev was losing further ground to nationalists. October 1990 saw the founding of DemRossiya, the Russian pro-reform coalition; a few days later, both Ukraine and Russia declared their laws completely sovereign over Soviet laws. The 'war of laws' had become an open battle, with the Supreme Soviet refusing to recognise the actions of the two republics. Gorbachev would publish the draft of a new union treaty in November, which envisioned a continued union called the Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, but, going into 1991, Gorbachev's actions were steadily overpowered by secessionism. January and February