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
Republics of the Soviet Union but the offer was rejected. During the Soviet–Afghan War, the Soviet Union proposed to annex Northern Afghanistan as its 16th union republic in what was to become the Afghan Soviet Socialist Republic. Several of the Union Republics themselves, most notably Russia, were further subdivided into Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSRs). Though administratively part of their respective Union Republics, ASSRs were also established based on ethnic/cultural lines. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, "openness" and "restructuring" were intended to liberalise and open up the Soviet Union. However, they had a number of effects which caused the power of the republics to increase. First, political