Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  The Lenin Stadium is the site of the worst soccer disaster in history. In October 1982, Spartak was playing the Dutch club Haarlem in freezing weather, and all 10,000 spectators were packed into a single section of the stadium. With seconds of the match remaining, and Spartak 1-0 up, the fans were making for the exit, when Shvezov scored Spartak’s second goal. Many were already descending the icy, unlit steps behind the stand, but when they heard cheers they rushed back up. Meanwhile, those inside were leaving, as the match had ended straight after the goal. The two groups collided, and could not escape, because police refused to open other exits. What followed was a human avalanche down the steps, and it now seems that as many as 340 people were killed.

  It was long rumored that something terrible had happened, but the authorities kept mum for years. The bodies of the victims were carried off straight after the disaster. To keep the sheer number of deaths secret, parents had to take leave of their children 40 minutes before the mass funeral, in the presence of policemen. For a long time afterwards, no matches were played at the Lenin Stadium. The pretext given was that the pitch was in poor condition.

  Thanks to glasnost, by 1989 Sovietski Sport could tell the full story. The magazine also revealed that there had been an identical catastrophe in Moscow’s Sokolniki Sport Palace, in 1976: after an ice-hockey match between the USSR and Canada, scores of people were crushed to death because only one exit was opened.

  So there we were at the Lenin Stadium (there is a statue of Lenin in front), four of us English and two Russians, ten years on, and this time in midsummer and in broad daylight. The Lenin Stadium is several sizes too big, and yet the Hotel Ukraine towers over it—everything in Moscow is too big. The match, CSKA against Spartak, was the main Moscow championship, their Arsenal vs. Spurs, the main difference being that unlike either Arsenal or Spurs, CSKA is the club of the Russian Army. Spartak, on the other hand, is the only Moscow club without an official backer. That afternoon, there were about 15,000 spectators, and though CSKA and Spartak share the Lenin Stadium, they were virtually all Spartak fans. Shinkaryov had told me: “When I was young I asked my father, ‘Father, why do you support Spartak?’ and he said, ‘Because Spartak is not connected to a definite part of Soviet society.’ ” Dynamo is the club of the KGB, his father had explained, CSKA of the army, Torpedo of the Zil plant, Lokomotive of the railways, but Spartak alone were independent. Supporting Spartak was a small way of saying “No.” Spartak fans like to call theirs “The Club of the People,” though oddly enough, Konstantin Chernenko, the geriatric general secretary who preceded Gorbachev, was also a supporter.

  “Horses! Horses!” the Spartakists chanted at the CSKA fans, following the logical link that army equals cavalry equals horses. The four horses in front of us were small boys, which apparently was typical. One young man told us: “We Russians support CSKA until we are 18, because until then we worship army officers. At 18 we join the Army, learn the truth, and never support CSKA again.” The text on the boys’ hats read “Red Army,” written in English. Here a less logical link was at work: Manchester United fans had once named themselves after the Russian army, and now the Russian army team’s fans were taking their name from United’s fans. We had borrowed the glamor of their Red Army, and they had taken back ours.

  The scoreboard gave a phone number for fans to call who wanted to spend a few years’ wages on following Spartak away to Luxembourg, for a first round match in the European Cupwinners’ Cup. No doubt there would be takers. The crowd at the Lenin Stadium was the only committed one I saw in Russia. Endless Spartak songs were sung, and each time we turned eagerly to our Russian companions for translation. Vassily would explain, “They are singing, ‘Spartak is the Best Team in the World.’ ‘Very interesting. And this one?’ ‘Spartak Will Win the Championship.’ ”

  It was a gorgeous, sunny day in August (already autumn, in Russia), and I reflected what a perfect tourist event a Russian soccer match was: it was an authentic Russian occasion, for the game was not being staged for our benefit, and nobody even cared that we were there; the setting and the fans’ behavior was so familiar that we could recognize differences between it and England; there were real local passions on display; good sport; and all that for three pence.

  The match was a placid affair which ended in a 1-1 draw, so that once again it was hard to dispute the referee’s fairness, though once or twice the ancient Russian chant, “The Referee’s a Pedophile,” did sound. Neither team looked very special, and I was taken aback a couple of months later when Spartak thrashed Liverpool in the Cupwinners’ Cup, and CSKA knocked Barcelona out of the European Cup. These Russians knew the way to get rich. “I can understand that the current generation thinks mainly about money. If I was still playing I’d do the same,” said Anatoly Byshovets, manager of the CIS in 1992. Apparently, even Russian referees do better abroad than at home: abroad no one is bribing them.

  The Brothers Starostin. The founder of Spartak Moscow is over 90 years old. Nikolai Starostin was born in 1902, the son of a hunter who died in the typhoid epidemic of 1920. Nikolai, as the oldest son, fed his brothers by playing soccer in the summer and ice hockey in the winter. He went on to captain his country at both sports, to found Spartak, to manage it and the Soviet national team, and to spend ten years in Stalin’s gulags. In 1989, he published his final memoirs.

  The villain of Soccer Through the Years is Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. Beria was Stalin’s secret police-chief and one of the least genteel characters in Soviet history. When he was not purging millions of people he was cruising through Moscow in his limousine picking up adolescent girls, or watching soccer. Like all previous secret police chiefs, Beria was honorary president of Dynamo Moscow, the sports club of the secret police, but unlike his predecessors, he cared about soccer.

  Like Stalin, Beria came from Georgia, and it was there that he had learned the game. He was a left-half, who, as one would expect, relied on his muscle. He played against Starostin in the early 1920s and was run ragged. Then he began his political rise, and years later, when he next met Starostin, he hissed: “Now here’s the little so-and-so who escaped from me in Tblisi. Let’s see if you can get away now!”

  Starostin founded Spartak in 1935, as a rival to Beria’s Dynamo and CSKA. Starostin’s three brothers, Alexander, Andrei and Pyotr, also played for the club, and according to Starostin the four became the “symbol of Spartak.” Spartak won the Soviet title in 1938 and 1939, and Beria seethed. The story goes that he called the Dynamo coach to his office. Starostin reconstructs the meeting in his book:“I have only one question,” said Lavrenty Pavlovich. “What is wrong?” These were the words that sounded in the deep frightening silence of the huge room. “Well,” and there followed the flash of his famous glasses, “I am waiting.”

  “Spartak pays higher wages,” the coach answered at last. “Really?” Beria was surprised. “ ‘Feather and Down’ gets more than NKVD servants?” And he said to his officer, “This must quickly be rectified!”

  “What else?” Beria asked. “There are some problems with the defense, but we hope . . .” Beria interrupted the coach: “Maybe a company of machinegunners would be a good defense? It can be arranged. But remember that they will also be trained at your back. I advise you to think about this conversation.”

  Starostin spent years waiting to be arrested. At last, one night in 1942, he was woken by a flashlight shining in his eyes and two pistols pointed at his head. He was taken to the Lubyanka, the secret police headquarters, and was interrogated there for the next two years. Rassypinsky, his interrogator, accused him of plotting to murder Stalin. And, in truth, Starostin had had an opportunity.

  Red Square looks like a soccer match waiting to happen. On Sportsman’s Day in 1936, a vast green felt carpet was actually unrolled on it, and the Spartak first team and reserves climbed out of a car decorated as a soccer shoe to play a demonstration match before Stalin: Spartak vs. Spartak Reserves. Initially, the game was to have been between Spartak and Dyn
amo, but the secret police had pulled out their side at the last minute for fear of what would ensue if the ball were to hit the Kremlin walls, or worst of all, Stalin himself.

  It was thought to be the first soccer match The Best Friend of Sportsmen had ever seen, and the aim was to put on a great show. The teams had planned a diversity of goals—goals scored with a header, with a back heel, from a corner kick, from a penalty, and so on—and the first team won 4-3. Next to Stalin stood an official with a white handkerchief, which he was to wave to end the match the moment Stalin began to look bored; but the play so amused Stalin that he allowed it to continue for 43 minutes instead of the planned half hour. Possibly, of course, he was simply daydreaming. His perceived delight at the game made Beria all the more jealous of Spartak.

  At the Lubyanka, Rassypinsky showed Starostin a photograph that had been found in his flat. The shoe-car, the photo showed, had passed just ten yards from Lenin’s Mausoleum, in front of the Kremlin. “It’s direct evidence,” said Rassypinsky. “Well, what can you say?”

  These charges were dropped—the fact that there had been no plot to kill Stalin was a problem—but Starostin and his three brothers were tried all the same, and all four were found guilty. However, they were given just ten years in Siberia each. This was considered such a mild sentence that it was practically a let off. “The future seemed not so gloomy after all,” writes Starostin. He knows to what he owed his luck: “The Starostins did not exist by themselves. In people’s minds, they personified Spartak. Beria had to deal with the hopes of millions of fans, ordinary Soviet people.”

  Starostin was the most popular soccer player in the country, and in each of his gulags over the next few years the camp commander tried to appoint him soccer coach. The poet Osip Mandelstam died in a camp, but no one was permitted to touch Starostin. “Even inveterate recidivists would sit quiet as mice to listen to my soccer stories.” He thinks he knows why soccer was so important: “For most people soccer was the only, and sometimes the last, chance and hope of retaining in their souls a tiny island of sincere feelings and human relations.” Meanwhile, in the capital, the regime was trying to Sovietize the game. The word futbol was changed to nozhnoi myach, gandbol to fuchnoi myach, and bootsy to botinki. The Starostins were written out of history. The captions to old team photographs would name eight or nine players and list the others as N.N.s—the Starostins.

  Starostin missed the war: when it ended, he was coaching local gulag and Dynamo teams thousands of miles from the front. One night in a Siberian camp a few years into the peace, the local Party secretary shook Starostin awake: “Come quickly! Stalin is on the phone!” It was Vassily Stalin, Stalin’s son. During the war, at the age of 18, he had become the world’s youngest general, and later he was made commander-in-chief of the Soviet air force. He loved sports, and tried to bring together the state’s best soccer players in VVS, the Air Force club he had founded. Frequently, he invited sportsmen to his house for chats about sport, and one evening a brave player had suggested that he appoint Starostin as club coach. The idea amused the young Stalin, who loathed Beria.

  As soon as Starostin arrived in the capital, Beria visited him at home to give him 24 hours to leave, so Vassily Stalin put him up in his own house. “We even slept together on the huge bed,” Starostin reports. “Vassily Stalin always slept with a pistol beneath his pillow.” Even when Stalin went to the Kremlin, he left Starostin under guard, and even when Starostin managed to slip past his guards he could see two delegates of Beria sitting on a bench in the park facing the mansion. Once, when Vassily was drunk, Starostin fled through the open window to visit his family. Early next morning Beria’s men came for him and put him on a train to the North Caucasus. Vassily intervened, but later the police exiled Starostin to a desert town in Kazakhstan.

  The age of terror ended in March 1953, when Stalin père became one of the few Soviet citizens of his generation to die of old age. Starostin returned to Moscow. Beria made a bid to succeed Stalin as sole dictator, failed, and was put on trial. He was found guilty of being an “imperialist agent” and of carrying on “criminal anti-party and anti-state activities,” both familiar crimes, and was executed. Several million sighs of relief were breathed, one of them by Martyn Merezov. Merezov, as a referee in the 1920s, had once sent off Beria, and he was very upset when the offender became chief of the secret police.

  Gathered and free. The crowd of 15,000 at CSKA vs. Spartak was the largest I saw in Russia, but nonetheless distressingly small. A couple of years before, Spartak’s average crowd had been 25,000, and a derby like this would have attracted many more. All the big clubs have lost support, and not just in the old USSR, but in all the nations of Eastern Europe. By 1991, the best-supported club in the USSR was a certain Novbakhor, from Uzbekistan in Central Asia, who, though not in the Soviet premier division, was averaging crowds of 35,000. The Uzbeks still care about their soccer, often to the extent of shooting at visiting players.

  There are lots of reasons why crowds have declined: the news of bribery disillusioned fans; hundreds of ex-Soviet players are going West; each republic now has its own league, and Muscovites miss opponents like Dynamo Kiev and Zhalgiris Vilnius; and people have less money now. But there is more to it than that.

  There are no congenial cafés in Moscow, so one day, trying to answer this question, Levon Abramian and I wandered through Gorky Park. Levon is an Armenian who leads a full life. He works as an anthropologist, draws celebrated political and erotic cartoons, has turned down an offer to join the Armenian cabinet, and is a soccer fan.

  As a sideline to our chat, we were looking for a group of Communist statues. A year before, these statues had stood in the central squares of Moscow, but after the coup against Gorbachev the crowds had torn them down. Now they were thought to be somewhere in the park. Nobody could direct us, but eventually we found them: four or five enormous creations growing old in the grass. The nameplates had gone, but we recognized the statue of Dzerzhinsky that had stood in front of KGB headquarters, and with the help of two women passing with prams, Levon identified the others. Apparently, just as St. Christopher is always depicted with the Christ child on his back, each Socialist hero has certain set attributes, so that a trained Russian can see whether a particular statue is meant to be, say, Yuri Gagarin, Rosa Luxemburg, or Lenin in Switzerland.

  The puzzle completed, Levon told me why people no longer watched soccer matches. In a Communist country, he said, the soccer club you supported was a community to which you yourself had chosen to belong. The regime did not send you to support a club, and, perhaps excepting Western teams, you could choose your team. It might be your only chance to choose a community, and also, in that community you could express yourself as you wished. “To be a fan,” concluded Levon, “is to be gathered with others and to be free.”

  Levon had believed, in the 1980s, that if there was going to be a revolution against Communism it would come from the soccer fans. He admitted: “I thought this would happen in Moscow, because only there were there several teams, each representing a different social class.” His theory was that only a unified social class could make a revolution, and this idea ruled out fans in the other republics. Zalgiris Vilnius in Lithuania, for instance, or Yerevan Ararat in Armenia, united the whole nation, and not a social class. Soccer in Moscow was more fragmented. “Most CSKA fans are army people, so they are a social unit. Most Spartak fans belonged to a low social class, wore a Spartak uniform, were a bit violent, and hated intellectuals—they were a social unit too.”

  Levon’s theory was wrong, but only slightly wrong. The soccer fans did make the revolution, but not the fans in Moscow. “What happened in fact was that the teams of the republics became a focus for national revolutions against Soviet rule.” And he told me how this had worked in Armenia.

  Armenia is a small pile of rocks which used to belong to the Soviet Union. It is now an independent country that lies between Turkey and Iran, and which is fighting a war with its neighbor,
Azerbaijan. Yerevan Ararat is the main soccer club in Armenia. Like many republics, Armenia had only one premier division team—similarly Georgia had Dynamo Tblisi, and Azerbaijan had Nevchi Baku—and this team was seen as the republic’s national side. “When we played Georgia . . . ,” Levon would say, and I would correct him: “You mean Dynamo Tblisi.” “Yes,” he would agree, “but we never saw it that way.”

  Armenia, or Yerevan Ararat, won the Soviet title only once, in 1973, and that year it won the Cup as well. Armenian soccer tends to produce erratic dribblers, but that year everything came right. The winning goal in the Cup final fell in the last minute, so the double was particularly dramatic. “There was a real festival,” said Levon, “a national festival, which was permitted because our Communist officials were elated too. Cars were hooting all over the town of Yerevan all night but no one complained. My neighbor, who was a poet, was told by his father to play the accordion on his balcony. He played some songs, and then he played one, which was forbidden, about Kars, a town in Turkey which was once Armenian: ‘Oh Kars, when will you return to Armenia?’ He was playing the song without the words, but everyone knew them. This was not a nationalist family, just an average Armenian family. But with this feeling of mutual joy, which was not directed against anything, national feelings come up.”

  In the Soviet era, when Yerevan Ararat won a match, it was customary for fans to walk through the city of Yerevan chanting slogans. Their favorite chant was, “Ararat,” which had a double meaning: Ararat is the name of the team, but also the name of a mountain in Turkey that had belonged to Armenia. Yet the demonstrators were not demanding Armenian independence or war against Turkey, said Levon. They were simply saying that Armenia was best.