Professional wrestler played Soviet villain
Nikolai Volkoff, a Croatian-born professional wrestler who played a villainous communist in the ring, belting out the Soviet national anthem before matches against Hulk Hogan and other Cold War-era giants of World Wrestling Entertainment, died July 29. He was 70.
WWE confirmed the death but did not provide details. He reportedly had heart problems and was recently released from a hospital in Maryland, where he was being treated for dehydration. According to WWE, he died on the same day as two other former wrestling stars: Brickhouse Brown and Brian Christopher Lawler, who performed as Grand Master Sexay and was the son of wrestler Jerry Lawler.
Volkoff, who was born Josip Peruzovic, was one of the most notorious “heels” in pro wrestling, known for entering the ring with a fur ushanka hat and a red-andgold turtleneck emblazoned with “USSR.”
The burly 300-pounder made his biggest mark in 1985, partnering with the Iron Sheik — Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, an Iranian supervillain — at the first WrestleMania. To the dismay of more than 19,000 fans at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the duo won the tag-team championship against Barry Windham and Mike Rotunda, a team known as the U.S. Express.
While Volkoff portrayed a staunch anti-American in his matches, in reality he had fled communist Yugoslavia. At the suggestion of his manager, he took on the Volkoff persona as a way of making fun of communism.
Wrestling fans greeted him with jeers and sometimes violence, tossing garbage at him while he insisted they stand for his performance of the Soviet anthem. As tensions with fans escalated in the mid1980s, Volkoff asked that his matches take place earlier in the show, rather than serving as the main event, so he could leave stadiums before the crowds. He said he sometimes wore a wig while dining with his family, to avoid public attention.
In a 2016 interview with the Hannibal TV, a wrestling channel on YouTube, Volkoff said “the first time and only time I got scared in the ring” was while singing the Soviet anthem for the first time, at the Superdome in New Orleans in 1984. “I thought the whole building was going to come down,” he said.
After the fall of the Soviet Union — which Volkoff said he helped hasten, by fomenting anti-Soviet sentiment in the West — Volkoff decided he had had enough of the communist gimmick. He took on various roles of good guys and even sympathetic bad guys before retiring from wrestling in 1997.
Settling near Baltimore, he worked as a code-enforcement inspector and, as a Republican, ran an unsuccessful 2006 campaign for a seat in the Maryland General Assembly. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005.
Josip Nikolai Peruzovic was born in Split, Croatia — then part of Yugoslavia — on Oct. 14, 1947, to a Russian mother and Croatian father. He started out as a weightlifter, becoming a European junior champion before taking after his grandfather, who had also been a wrestler.
Volkoff defected from Yugoslavia in 1968 while at a weightlifting tournament in Vienna. He made his way to Calgary, Alberta, where he met up with wrestling trainer Stu Hart, who showed him the ropes of entertainment-style wrestling. During his career at WWE and other companies, he wrestled the biggest names in the business, including Bruno Sammartino and Sgt. Slaughter.
Peruzovic and his wife, Lynn Peruzovic, had two daughters. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Asked how he viewed his legacy, he told the Hannibal TV: “I escaped from communism, I come here to this country, and I live American Dream. And I’m happy I’m here.”