by Simon Kuper
Then, under Gorbachev, the republics began to taste independence. At matches against Zhalgiris, or against an Estonian team, the Yerevan fans would chant “Lithuania!” or “Estonia!” to show solidarity with their opponents. When a Russian team visited a southern republic, a local policeman would often suggest to the Russians that if they won, there might be a regrettable riot. “To leave these parts in sound health, even with broken glasses, is considered no bad thing,” wrote a Belorussian coach.
An Armenian nationalist movement formed at this time, and it borrowed the songs of the Yerevan Ararat fans. One soccer chant was, “Hayer!” (meaning “Armenians!”) followed by three short claps, a chant copied from the “Ajax!” and three short claps of the Ajax Amsterdam fans; and chants like this were adopted by the crowds at anti-Soviet demonstrations. “I remember,” said Levon, “my sister and her friend, who had never been to the stadium, saying, ‘There is something romantic, nostalgic in this cry of “Hayer,” ’ and I thought, ‘No there isn’t! It’s a soccer chant.’”
Armenian women did not go to the stadium, so it was a place for male rituals. “When you go the stadium,” said Levon, “you can do some free things.” For instance, only in the stadium was it acceptable to curse. There, it was even considered an art to invent terrible curses. Levon told me of the fan who shouted, “Referee, fuck your wife in front of the Lenin Mausoleum!” The point here was that to the provinces of the USSR, Lenin’s Mausoleum seemed the center of the world, a place which all could see. The crowd would laugh: they appreciated good curses. “But there was a debate,” Levon said, “between those who wanted to invent new curses and those who preferred traditional curses. Once, a man shouted, ‘Referee, I piss on you!’ Another man turned round and asked, ‘Why “piss?” For this was not a traditional curse. But the other man replied, ‘Why not? It’s what I feel like doing.’”
The cursing stopped when a bigger ground was built. Now the fans were spread out and their curses could not be heard, and, Levon told me, “people need to be heard, not only to cry. In the old stadium you could make a policeman look up shocked at a particularly awful curse.”
In the stadium you were free, to curse, to chant, to be with your own. The normal psychological state of a Soviet citizen was one of frustration. “Now,” Levon said, “Spartak fans can go anywhere to express themselves: to a political meeting, to a church, to a rock concert. OK, they don’t go to political meetings, but they know that they can. Once you know you are free to express yourself as you like, you don’t need actually to do it.” So attendance dropped.
The Brothers Charnock. Beria’s Dynamo Moscow was founded by Englishmen. Hardly surprising, in a way, because Englishmen founded clubs all over the world, but not, one would have thought, Dynamo Moscow.
Of course Clement and Harry Charnock, textile manufacturers, did not call their club “Dynamo.” They named it Orekhovo Sport Club. It was Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of Lenin’s secret police, who rechristened Orekhovo as “Dynamo.” One Charnock tradition survived, and does to this day: Dynamo still plays in the blue and white of the Orekhovo Sport Club. The brothers were Blackburn Rovers fans.
For decades the chiefs of the KGB watched Dynamo Moscow from the club’s equivalent of the Royal Box. Later, when the USSR invaded Eastern Europe, the teams funded and run by the secret police were all named Dynamo: Dynamo Bucharest, Berlin, Dresden, Kiev, and so forth. Dynamos Dresden and Kiev escaped the stigma of the name to become popular clubs, because they were seen to represent their regions—Saxony and Ukraine—and not the secret police. The other Dynamos were hated. There was a startling scene in 1937, when all the spectators at a Dynamo Moscow match spontaneously began to whistle: not at the players, but at the character of the club. At that time, the height of Stalin’s purges, the only place where a gathering could express its hatred was in the anonymity of a soccer stadium. Today, Dynamo Moscow has very few spectators, and few of those are fans.
When I first visited Dynamo Moscow, the players were training, and in the parking lot were their Audis, Mercedes, Volvos, and Fords, almost all without license plates as they presumably had not been registered. The stadium was oversized, gray, and uncovered with a running track. On matchdays it sees crowds of two or three thousand. I met the club’s chairman, the cheerless Nikolai Tolstich, who told me that he wanted to give the ground an “English atmosphere.” He had visited English clubs—he mentioned Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, and Manchester City—and even now, he said, cafés were opening inside the stadium, and the club was planning to get rid of the running track and to build a roof. “We are also currently painting the stadium,” he concluded. That would explain the brown patches I had seen on the ground’s gray walls: Dynamo was painting their stadium brown! When I told a friend, she pointed out that the undercoat of paint is always brown, but I am still not convinced. Brown is the color that Tolstich would have chosen.
Dynamo Moscow vs. Asmaral. Asmaral was a tiny club named Krasnaya Prenya until a couple of years ago, when they were bought by an Iraqi businessman. Husam Al-Halidi renamed the club “Asmaral,” after one of his companies, and pumped in money, which according to rumor he got from Saddam Hussein. I phoned Al-Halidi’s office on the afternoon of the match and told his secretary that I was an English journalist who wanted to interview her boss. “An English journalist? How soon can you be here?,” was the message. We agreed that I would meet him at the match.
There were, of course, very few people at the stadium, yet we had trouble gaining entry. By dint of seeing thousands of bureaucrats, I had obtained the official Moscow soccer press pass, but I was with a friend from the Moscow Times who only had a general pass. The old man guarding the press box stopped us. “Your pass is fine,” he said to me, “but yours,” he told my companion, “is invalid.” Then he threw his arms in the air and yelled in delight: “But it DOESN’T MATTER!” This anarchist then let us in.
The match began as slowly as the Torpedo match had. Every couple of minutes, a player fell to the ground and was treated for an injury. These players were not diving to win free kicks. They were going down out of laziness, and because they were playing so unenthusiastically: their adrenaline had gone skiing, so knocks hurt more. Once, when Dynamo lost the ball up front, just ten minutes into the match, three Dynamo midfield players walked back towards their own half, forty yards behind the Asmaral counterattack. They simply could not be bothered.
Gradually, though, the match changed. Dynamo scored a couple, and their players became more interested. They ran into space, chased after opponents, did all the things they previously had not felt like doing, and did them just because they were having fun. Soccer is such a good game, this proved, that even Russian professionals can sometimes enjoy it. Dynamo thrashed Asmaral 6-1. At the start of the second half, I went to the directors’ box, where Beria used to sit, to find Al-Halidi, but he had already gone home.
The President of Soccer. Russian soccer seemed a bit of a mess. The man who presides over it, Vyacheslav Koloskov, is not. Koloskov used to be president of the Soviet Soccer Federation and today he is president of the Russian Soccer Federation. He is renowned for his power within FIFA and UEFA, and travels to the West all the time. A well-groomed character in new clothes that fit him, Koloskov looks considerably less like a Russian than like a German businessman.
It is whispered that Koloskov is responsible for one of the main oddities of the American World Cup: that a European nation the size of France, and with a comparable soccer history, though a disguised one, was not allowed to enter the tournament. That country is Ukraine, for the great Soviet Union teams of the 1970s and 1980s consisted almost exclusively of Ukrainians. Now Ukraine is raging at FIFA, at Russia, and particularly at Koloskov.
Shortly before disintegrating into 15 republics, the Soviet Union was drawn in a qualifying group for the American World Cup. When the Union collapsed, FIFA decided that there was a place for only one republic to replace the USSR. It chose Russia. I asked Koloskov whether
Ukraine was angry. “Georgia is also angry,” he shrugged, and took a file from the cupboard that gave FIFA’s arguments for its decision. Ukrainians prefer their own theories. As one Dynamo Kiev official told me: “Russia is in the World Cup because Koloskov drinks vodka with the gentlemen of FIFA.”
Did Koloskov agree that Soviet soccer had suffered greatly in recent years? “Of course damage was done, very great damage, in all the republics.” The problem, as he saw it, was the demise of the all-Soviet league. “Dynamo Kiev of Ukraine, Dynamo Minsk of Belorussia, Tblisi in Georgia, and Yerevan Ararat of Armenia were all very good teams, but more importantly, they were consistent soccer cultures, who enriched themselves by playing against each other.” The Armenians and the Georgians were renowned for their skill, the Ukrainians of Dynamo Kiev for their tactical discipline, and so on. Now each republic had its own league, and the level in each league was low.
I asked him about Ovchinikov-Bormann’s admission of bribery. “It was a joke,” said Koloskov. “Two weeks ago Ovchinikov stood on this very carpet and swore he was joking.” Did Koloskov believe him? “There is an old Russian saying: ‘He who is not caught is not a thief.’ ” He added: “We have a match delegate watching every match. If the referee is bad, then this referee is no more. This year, we disqualified five referees for inconsistent refereeing. It is possible that some of them were cheating.”
I had one last question. Hundreds of Russian soccer players already played abroad. Did Koloskov have a plan to prevent a further exodus? “Yes, we have a plan.” What was it? “Our plan,” he grinned, “is to increase living standards in Russia to the level of Germany. At least!”
“Or England,” the interpreter suggested politely. “England is not that rich anymore,” I confessed. “That is what Dr. Koloskov says,” replied the interpreter. Koloskov was a worldly man.
CHAPTER 6
RULERS OF UKRAINE
A FIRST-CLASS TICKET on the overnight train from Moscow to Kiev cost me £1.50 in September 1992, but would be cheaper now. I shared a compartment with a talkative Chinese man. He spoke no English (and I no Chinese), but with my 100 words of Russian we established that he was the Moscow correspondent of the Worker’s Daily. “What is the circulation of the Worker’s Daily?” I managed to convey. “Twenty million,” he said.
We arrived in Kiev on a Monday morning. I already had a flat to go to. The woman who had rented me an apartment in Moscow was the daughter of a Red Army officer who had helped conquer Germany. In this officer’s regiment there had been a Ukrainian, and this Ukrainian’s daughter now lived in Kiev and had a flat to spare—or at least a tenant whom she could easily expel. So the Red Army network got me an apartment.
On the way to and from it I invariably got lost, because all the streets in Kiev look the same. The city was destroyed in the war, and rebuilt in the 1950s, a bad time for Soviet architecture. Kiev has gray flats, wide streets, and the occasional large statue. Everything is on a superhuman scale. One night I decided to eat in a restaurant that I knew to be further along my street, and I got on a bus. It trekked ten miles down the road until it reached a forest. By then it was dark, and raining. The restaurant had to be a little further along, but was the forest safe at night? Would the food be worth it? And so I took the bus home again. I stayed alive because, inexplicably, Kiev street vendors sell New Zealand kiwis, and Dynamo Kiev runs a snack bar. Once, struggling through its Soviet cuisine, I watched the club president’s secretary pass carrying an electric kettle. Not much good in the West, I know, but in Kiev the kettle was the difference between Them and Us.
Ukraine has 50 million inhabitants and is poorer than Russia. Kiev has four million inhabitants but no McDonald’s, and is a one-club town. Valeri Lobanovski, the great postwar Soviet manager, turned Dynamo Kiev into one of the best clubs in Europe, and led them to the European Cupwinners’ Cup in 1975 and 1986. “Loba,” as his players never dared call him, liked discipline. Once, seeing a player drunk, he set him to work as a groundsman for five months, and then sold him to a lesser club. When perestroika came, the Dynamo players moved west and flopped: Alexander Zavarov at Juventus, Igor Belanov at Borussia Mönchengladbach, Alexei Mikhailichenko at Sampdoria, and he and Oleg Kutznetsov at Rangers. They could not cope without Loba.
Everyone who saw the Dynamo of the mid-1980s came away talking of robots. The players were constantly moving off the ball, yet found one another without looking, and appeared fitter and quicker than other soccer players. It was said that Dynamo had been using science, and it was true. On my first morning in Kiev, I changed money with my landlady’s 14-year-old son, a hard bargainer, and made for the city center. About five minutes from the Dynamo Stadium, in the basement of a rare ancient house, I found Professor Anatoly Zelentsov.
Lobanovski was a trained plumber, but at heart he was a scientist. In 1967, when he was manager of Dnepr Dnepropetrowsk and Zelentsov was dean of the Dnepropetrowsk Institute of Physical Science, the two became collaborators. “Our aim was to invent the science of soccer,” the professor, a robust, cheery man in a large sweater, told me. In his basement, he and his assistants think up ways of improving Dynamo’s game.
That morning we talked only briefly. He outlined the science of soccer, and stressed that it is highly practical. When Lobanovski said things like, “A team that commits errors in no more than 15 to 18 percent of its acts is unbeatable,” he was not guessing: Zelentsov’s team had collated statistics. Zelentsov worked from the premise that since a fraction of a second’s thought can be too long in modern soccer, a player had to know where to pass before he got the ball. To this end, Dynamo’s players had to memorize set plays, as if they were American football players, and had to run off the ball in set patterns. As to the superman look of the players: Zelentsov pointed out that when players train for stamina, their speed drops, and vice versa. To assure both qualities, a coach had to alternate training exercises in a certain sequence, and Zelentsov devised a training model. He told me that Italy had used the model to win the 1982 World Cup.
Then he took me to a room where an assistant was watching the latest Dynamo match, on a screen divided into nine squares. Here, Zelentsov said, a computer program automatically analyzed each game Dynamo played. The squares on the screen were there to measure how often each player went into each part of the pitch, who should replace him when he left a zone, and how much work he did with and without the ball. It also showed which players were compatible with one another. In the West German team of the 1980s, for instance, Manni Kaltz and Hans-Peter Briegel disliked each other but combined well on the field. It was a fertile program: Zelentsov handed me a computer printout that measured, for each Dynamo player in the match, “intensitivity,” “activity,” “error rate,” “effectivity” (“absolute” and “relative”) and “realization,” and awarded each player a final mark computed to the third decimal point. It almost put to shame the stars Match Weekly hands out.
Science, boasted Zelentsov, had made Dynamo the most successful club in the USSR. So good were they that they often masqueraded as the national side, and at the 1976 Olympics “Dynamo” (he meant the USSR) had won bronze. But that was a catastrophe—it should have been gold—and Zelentsov began to mutter about the referee.
He had something special to show me, but I had to go to the club. I arranged to come back to see him on Thursday morning, the day after Dynamo was to play Rapid Vienna in the UEFA Cup.
A dolphinarium stands in front of the Dynamo Stadium, and shaven-headed men in tracksuits directed me to the club offices. Dynamo offer various sports, and these characters did not play Ping-Pong.
Inside, in an office with a view of the pitch, I met a neat, gangling young man named Roman Obchenko, head of international relations at Dynamo. Like many other people, I had thought that Dynamo were a sports club. Roman was to tell me how wrong I had been.
The club, he told me, was the richest in the old USSR: “That is like an axiom which does not need stating.” Each player earned about $1,125
per month, almost all of it paid in dollars, and 14 members of the squad drove a Mercedes. Victor Bezverkhy, the Dynamo president, drove two. By way of comparison: the Ukrainian President Kravchuk earns around $40 per month, paid in Ukrainian coupons.
Roman spoke perfect English, so I said, “You speak very good English.” He nodded: “I have an Oxford degree.” I had an Oxford degree too, and we became friendly. We discussed England—he had disliked it—and then I ventured: “Journalists in Moscow tell me that Dynamo are in with the mafia.” I had spoken the password: Roman suggested we continue our chat over a drink. It was a pleasure to find the old boy network at work here.
We were taken to the Hotel Intourist in a Mercedes driven by a Dynamo chauffeur, whom Roman asked me to tip. I gave the man $2 (which I was sure was a fortune to him), and paid for the beers in Deutschmarks. Roman and I settled down on brown armchairs, German businessmen all around us.
Roman proved the best single source I met all year, a lazy journalist’s dream. I have often wondered what made him talk to me, but I suspect this: that he was simply bursting to tell someone what he had seen at the club. For Roman had become quite Western, and the ways of Ukraine could still surprise him. As well as in Oxford he had lived in Canada, where his father had been a Soviet diplomat. Also, he wanted my book to do well. He was writing a novel himself, about life after Communism, though he really wanted to become a politician. “The route to the top must be short for someone like you,” I suggested, and he replied: “That’s correct!” The children of the old nomenklatura, with their contacts and foreign languages, will be the next rulers of the old Soviet countries. Roman’s father was one of President Kravchuk’s seven advisors.
Then Roman began to talk. “The mafia in this part of the world is very old,” he said. There was not one big mafia in the old USSR, but several thousand small ones. “When the Party was responsible for everything, the mafia made money by producing legal things illegally. For instance, the Odessa mafia bought cotton in Turkey and produced with it jeans in state factories, by paying the factory workers to do overtime.” The early mafiosi were often sportsmen, he told me. “This is because the first stage of mafia activity is always racketeering—demanding money from private businesses with threats—and for that you need strong men, who are sportsmen.” I thought of the shaven-headed people at the stadium.