"... for a brief time in the 1930s, it appears that baseball was going to take off in Soviet Russia. In the spring of 1933, American workers living in Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and Petrozavodsk organized games. A team dubbed the Moscow Anglo-Americans drew 25,000 spectators to an exhibition game at the city's famed Dynamo stadium, according to the *Moscow News.* The next year, baseball classes were opened at Moscow's Physiculture Institute. the game was being taaught by Americans and a Russia who learned to play in Japan. The Soviet's Supreme Council of Physical Culture even reported extensive baseball growth with teams springing up in Petrozavodsk, Kondopoga, Leningrad, Gorki and Erevan. Inter-city competition began on 6 June 1934 with the Moscow Foreign Worker's Club beating the Gorki Auto Plant 16–5 in an all–American tilt at Dynamo Stadium. Along with the company teams, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt, assembled squads from the U.S. diplomatic corps. Maybe Bullitt, who was a close friend of Sigmund Freud and would also become an outspoken anticommunist, was trying to subtly push baseball on the Soviets. Whatever the case, the ambassador ordered equipment for four teams-—there would be two made up of embassy staff and two others comprised of americans in Russia. Bullitt, who was 43 in 1934, agreed to play for one of the teams. His greatest piece of diplomacy on the issue: he secured the use of a field from the Soviet government. The 1935 season was shaping up to be a big one. Uniforms were being made by the Central Sports Equipment Laboratory at the Institute of Physical Culture, and the Dynamo Sports Good Factories in Moscow and Leningrad were producing other equipment. One Moscow team had a budget of 8,000 rubles and scheduled two out-of-town baseball trips. Even the Stalin Auto Plant in Moscow, which was one of the country's biggest factories, had plans to start a team.
"Alas, the efforts of Bullitt and other Americans failed, as baseball seemed to be wiped off the Soviet sporting landscape faster than it took for it to become popular. What happened? In their article “Soviet Baseball: History and Prospects,” Kim Steven Juhas and Blair A. Ruble suggested that the rise and fall of baseball in this era mirrored the prevailing politics of this turbulent time. In November 1933, the United States recognized the Soviet Union. That fact plus the large number of Americans in the country at the time made baseball palatable to the communists' sporting culture. but Juhas and Ruble point out that "[a]fter 1935 Russia was engulfed in the turmoil of communist purges and show trials. Nazi Germany was preparing for war. The central authorities apparently saw no need to continue to support a foreign sport that did not directly contirubute toward building a strong armed force as would parachute jumping, a frequently referred-to poular sport..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=USi7PA151vIC&pg=PA129
(I see some parallels here to my post on jazz, which was widespread in the USSR in 1932-35 and then declined amidst the purge trials and suspicion of all things foreign in the later 1930's.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/bQWnpTFdTQ0/kzFIYZBKJdMJ)
Did Soviet baseball have to die, though? The reasoning that it didn't contribute directly to the national defense may be fallacious. Finland has its own variant of baseball, called Pesäpallo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesäpallo and, according to a Finnish friend of mine, it "was specifically adopted for national defense, and it was very closely linked to the training of the paramilitary Civil Guards! Pitching was training for grenade-throwing, diving to the base was diving for cover or diving for trench, and so on. Shouldn't be too difficult for the Komsomol to notice the same..."
Of course you can say it was just too foreign, in an era (the late 1930's--and again in the Cold War after 1945) when foreign, western, and especially American things were viewed with suspicion. But remember that another "western" game--basketball, which was invented by a Canadian and had mostly flourished in the US--eventually became popular in the USSR. And the Cold War actually stimulated the Soviets to prove that "we can beat the Americans at the game they invented."
https://books.google.com/books?id=pGdOCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA129 Couldn't the same thing have been true about baseball? (And further proof that anti-Americanism need not be an obstacle to baseball: Japanese baseball went on even when the country was at war with the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Baseball_League)