Spartak Moscow

A History of the People's Team in the Workers' State

Robert Edelman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801466137
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In the informative, entertaining, and generously illustrated Spartak Moscow, a book that will be cheered by soccer fans worldwide, Robert Edelman finds in the stands and on the pitch keys to understanding everyday life under Stalin, Khrushchev, and their successors. Millions attended matches and obsessed about their favorite club, and their rowdiness on game day stood out as a moment of relative freedom in a society that championed conformity. This was particularly the case for the supporters of Spartak, which emerged from the rough proletarian Presnia district of Moscow and spent much of its history in fierce rivalry with Dinamo, the team of the secret police. To cheer for Spartak, Edelman shows, was a small and safe way of saying "no" to the fears and absurdities of high Stalinism; to understand Spartak is to understand how soccer explains Soviet life.

Champions of the Soviet Elite League twelve times and eleven-time winner of the USSR Cup, Spartak was founded and led for seven decades by the four Starostin brothers, the most visible of whom were Nikolai and Andrei. Brilliant players turned skilled entrepreneurs, they were flexible enough to constantly change their business model to accommodate the dramatic shifts in Soviet policy. Whether because of their own financial wheeling and dealing or Spartak's too frequent success against state-sponsored teams, they were arrested in 1942 and spent twelve years in the gulag. Instead of facing hard labor and likely death, they were spared the harshness of their places of exile when they were asked by local camp commandants to coach the prisoners' football teams. Returning from the camps after Stalin's death, they took back the reins of a club whose mystique as the "people's team" was only enhanced by its status as a victim of Stalinist tyranny.

Edelman covers the team from its days on the wild fields of prerevolutionary Russia through the post-Soviet period. Given its history, it was hardly surprising that Spartak adjusted quickly to the new, capitalist world of postsocialist Russia, going on to win the championship of the Russian Premier League nine times, the Russian Cup three times, and the CIS Commonwealth of Independent States Cup six times. In addition to providing a fresh and authoritative history of Soviet society as seen through its obsession with the world's most popular sport, Edelman, a well-known sports commentator, also provides biographies of Spartak's leading players over the course of a century and riveting play-by-play accounts of Spartak's most important matches-including such highlights as the day in 1989 when Spartak last won the Soviet Elite League on a Valery Shmarov free kick at the ninety-second minute. Throughout, he palpably evokes what it was like to cheer for the "Red and White."

1

Spartak’s Roots

Futbol in the ’Hood, 1900–1917

Recollecting his tour of duty in prerevolutionary Moscow, the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart mused about the relationship between football and the upheaval he had so recently witnessed. Had Russian workers played and watched soccer as avidly as their British comrades, he wrote, the Bolshevik Revolution might never have occurred at all.1 It seemed as if Lockhart had read the writings of prewar socialists on what they thought to be the pernicious influence of the game. Certainly he agreed with his political opponents that there was a connection between sport and politics, but Lockhart’s conclusions were precisely opposite those of the revolutionaries. For leftist intellectuals, the “people’s game” was a hated diversion from the class struggle, but for a conservative British politician, it was a godsend.2

Could it then be that Lockhart, in his naive sporting romanticism, was actually right? Did the absence of a professional football league make a workers’ revolution more likely in the Russian Empire? The opposite argument, after all, had been made more than once about Britain. If, as many then claimed, the secular religion of sport was the glue that kept an often fractious Victorian society together, could its relative absence in Russia explain the fall of the Romanovs?3 Needless to say, a dose of caution is in order before embracing the notion that, after decades of exemplary, archivally based scholarship on the causes of the Russian Revolution, football, overlooked by most historians, should turn out to have been the central contradiction. Tempting as it would be to make such a claim, I will refrain from offering what is, admittedly, the kind of counterfactual argument historians are ill equipped to evaluate.

The actual number of working people in Russia touched by soccer before 1917 was quite small. On the eve of the war, there were some eight thousand formally registered players in the entire empire, and those on official lists were scarcely likely to have been artisans or factory hands.4 It is best instead to turn Lockhart’s formulation around and look not at football’s impact on society but at society’s impact on the practices of football. If soccer in Russia was insufficiently important as a cultural activity to attract the attention of all the empire’s toilers, we can still usefully examine the sporting practices of those males, nearly all youthful, who were part of the soccer subculture. How did their participation in this modern, urban activity affect their political, cultural, national, and gendered identities, and how did those evolving and multiple identities reflect the rapid social changes of the prerevolutionary period?

My focus in this chapter will be on that relatively small group of boys from a single Moscow neighborhood who went on to play and root for the succession of teams that in 1935 became Spartak. In doing this, I have two purposes: first, to examine football as an element of the links between popular culture and the politics of working people in the empire’s second city, and second, to foreshadow Spartak’s postrevolutionary development. As we shall see, those connections were attenuated. The direct involvement of the future Spartakovtsy in prerevolutionary party politics was minimal. Their names do not appear in either the Western or Soviet-era literature on labor before and during the revolution, nor were they an immense fraction of the working population in prerevolutionary Moscow. Beyond this, their formal contributions to Russian football before 1917 were not immense. Only after the 1917 revolution, and especially after the formation of the Spartak Sport Society in 1935, did this cohort of young males become historically important. Yet their earliest sporting experiences very much influenced the ways they came to run, on the one hand, and support, on the other, what began as a local club.

With its larger community of foreigners, St. Petersburg was usually ahead of Moscow in adopting most forms of Western popular culture. Football was no exception. In 1912, Boris Chesnokov (1891-1979), a player, organizer, and chronicler of working-class football, wrote that the game was Moscow’s most popular sport, but he also took pains to mention that only a thousand men, most of them from propertied families, actually played soccer on an organized basis. Before 1917, lower-class groups also played and watched, but it is not likely they did so in similar numbers. Football was not yet a form of mass culture, given that the masses did not yet play it. Nevertheless, the prehistory of Spartak affords an opportunity to deal with a number of important matters that go beyond the empirically limited connections between proletarians and sport.5

For Russian males of all social stations, sport was a way of accepting modernity. Athletic activities demanded much the same discipline, organization, and structure as the industrial capitalism then growing so rapidly in Russia’s cities. The constant striving for improvement characteristic of sport, along with its related bodily pleasures, expressed the dynamism and joys, as well as the dangers and risks, of the new age. Both subordinate and dominant social groups shared these particular values, but the ways sporting activity came to be practiced in Russia divided rather than united men along what can properly be called class lines. While games provided the working- and middle-class males who practiced them with a variety of new ways of seeing themselves, those new identities were not universal. Bourgeois and proletarian men differed not only from their forebears but also from each other in the way they used their bodies. Consequently, these two groups generated different versions of manhood, which further reinforced the polarizations developing between classes in late Imperial Russia.

Without always realizing it, the boys who went on to found Spartak were at the leading edge of these changes. While they lived in one of the city’s largest factory districts, not all of them could strictly be called working-class, nor did they all exhibit something that traditional Marxists would have called “class consciousness.” All, however, were members of subordinate social groups who, as Richard Holt has noted about British workers, were using sport as a way of establishing new urban identities, developing local pride, and enjoying male camaraderie.6 At times, these boys literally had their noses pressed against the glass of department store windows as they watched new forms of popular culture emerging before their eyes. At the same time, these “children of the city” helped create many of those same novel cultural forms. Aside from playing football, they shopped in stores as well as open markets, read detective novels, and went to amusement parks, music halls, and occasionally movies. While we have extremely limited information on their social backgrounds, most of them were born in Moscow, and a sizable portion were sons of workers. Nearly all had grown up in the city and were comfortable on its streets.

This last point is crucial. While the peoples of the Russian Empire had created rich, largely rural folk cultures over the course of centuries, much of the new urban, commercial entertainment was seen as foreign, specifically Western. This was particularly true in the case of sport. Russian peasants played games in their moments away from the burdens of agriculture.7 The best-known pastimes, along with skiing, skating, and hunting, were the ball-and-stick game lapta and the bowlinglike gorodki, not to mention the semiorganized form of fistfighting, known as the stenka. Throughout the world, organized sport with its federations, schedules, rules, referees, leagues, and record-keeping was not part of rural life.8 The same was true in Russia, where sport was decidedly urban and modern. There were no myths of the pastoral, so much a part of British and American sporting ideologies. Those who practiced sports in Russia were instead staking their claims to life in the empire’s rapidly expanding cities. They did not dream of the good old days of “village football,” nor did they harbor fantasies of carving baseball diamonds out of cornfields.

The question of the “peasant-ness” of urban life in the Russian Empire has been central to the study of the historical role of the laboring classes, understood in the broadest possible sense of the term. At one time, the receptivity of Russian workers to revolutionary appeals was explained by their ties to the countryside. The brutalities of rural life had perpetuated, it was said, an irrational tendency toward violent behavior.9 This was especially important in a city like Moscow, which was the epicenter of massive and continuous in-migration from the villages.10 In response, a later generation of both Western and Russian scholars with access to archival materials came to associate political militancy and revolutionary activity with extended residence in the city.11 While most lower-class soccer players in Moscow either were born in the city or had moved there at an early age, this fact by itself did not make them revolutionaries. It is, however, important to remember that those working people, nearly all male, who had come to take part in sports, especially football, were far more likely to have cut their ties to the countryside. If they were not all radical militants, they were at least drawn from the same milieu that produced those militants.

Desirable Imports

While we have several excellent accounts of early Russian football, the story requires retelling, if only in part. Soccer came to Russia late in the nineteenth century. While cricket was the game the soldiers and bureaucrats of the British Empire so graciously gave to the native peoples of their far- flung colonies, football was the sport of the informal commercial empire.12 Where the crown was not supreme, British influence was spread in indirect ways. However, when it was exported to foreign shores, football, the great pastime of the domestic working class, became at first a middle-class activity. With deflated balls and rule books stuffed into their luggage, thousands of merchants, engineers, managers, technicians, diplomats, entrepreneurs, and students proselytized a new secular religion wherever their work took them. This process played out in such disparate places as Spain, Argentina, Germany, Brazil, South Africa, and France. The introduction and absorption of the sport followed nearly universal patterns, to which Russia provided no exception.

The growth of soccer in Russia was one of many signs of the profound changes sweeping through the empire at the end of the nineteenth century. The first football activity appeared a decade after the 1861 abolition of serfdom. The standard Soviet-era histories of the game make mention of sailors visiting the ports of St. Petersburg and Odessa during the 1870s. They occupied their time on shore by kicking around the proverbial pig bladder wherever they could find an open space. English employees of two large St. Petersburg factories organized teams in 1879.13 Much the same thing at much the same time was going on in France, where Britons, especially Scots, formed a club in the port of Le Havre.14 In Russia, however, these episodes do not appear to have made an impression on the local populations. It took some time for capitalist activity in urban Russia to gather pace after the peasant emancipation. As a result, football, in any of its forms, did not catch on immediately. By the late 1880s and 1890s, however, the cityscape of the empire began to change under the impact of the proindustrialization policies of the minister of finance, Count Sergei Witte. Sports and other new urban cultural practices began to appear along with growing middle and working classes who were receptive to them.

Foreigners, attracted by the acceleration of capitalist activity in Russia, brought their new pastimes with them. Following the organizational practices developed at home, they formed a variety of socially exclusive clubs, primarily in the capital. Many of these were single-sport groups, composed entirely of expatriates. The first multisport organization was the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. Founded in 1860, the group included the most elevated of Russian aristocrats along with foreign diplomats. Following the Victorian example, the club specifically excluded anyone who had ever engaged in manual labor. Even before the creation of this body, the royal sport of horse racing had long been hugely popular among Russian elites, along with fencing and swimming.15

The organization of sports changed in the 1880s to encompass activities popular with the increasingly powerful and numerically expanding middle classes. Between 1880 and the turn of the century, clubs were formed for cycling (soon to become the most popular spectator sport), weight lifting, track and field, boxing, ice hockey, and, finally, football. Much of this activity was organized and propagandized by commercial promoters, working with businessmen, especially industrialists, who sought to provide healthy activities for their employees while gaining a measure of social prestige. St. Petersburg was the center of this activity. Moscow trailed behind despite the presence of a vibrant merchant and entrepreneurial community that would eventually embrace sports wholeheartedly. In the second city, a yacht club did appear in 1867, and a gymnastics society was formed the next year. Only much later, in 1898, did a weight-lifting and body-building club appear.16

In the United States and Europe, this period witnessed the bureaucratization of sporting activity with the creation of numerous national and international federations in such sports as gymnastics, swimming, figure skating, track, and dozens of others. While they attracted the participation of politically powerful elites wherever they appeared, these new institutions were formally independent from governments. The founding of international federations led to the emergence of new types of sports officials who came to generate the ideas and practices that eventually gave rise to the modern Olympic movement.17 In the Russian Empire, similar organizations began to emerge alongside the older clubs and circles. Foreigners played leading roles in this process, but the fig leaf of independence from the state, so central an element of British practice, was impossible in the Russian Empire. No group, however innocuous, could exist without official government sanction. All organizations had to pass muster with the authorities, who felt it necessary to observe, if not control, any activity that brought significant numbers of people together.

Soccer was a relative latecomer to the world of Russian sport and entertainment. Foreigners had been playing among themselves for some time, but the first organized group devoted solely to the game was the Victoria Club, formed in St. Petersburg in 1894 and composed of English and German employees from local factories. The impetus for the creation of this new group had come a year before when an exhibition match was staged during the interval between bike races at the Semyonov Hip...