Nikolai Starostin, the people’s team, and the secret police chief

Nikolai Starostin – hero and founding father of Spartak Moscow

In the Soviet Union sport and politics were often treated as one and the same thing. Being the first to realise the political power of sport in modern times, the Soviets set about the systemic manipulation of sporting talent for the purposes of propaganda.

Successful athletes were greatly rewarded. Those that fell foul of the regime, however, paid the ultimate price. As sports popularity grew, the bizarre trend of the arrest and execution of sports personalities became well established. No one can be sure of the exact numbers taken but sports ministers, Olympic Committee members, heads of physical education colleges, sports scientists and probably thousands of leading athletes were victims of the purges. This is the story of one man who survived such a fate, Nikolai Starostin.

Physical education was used as a tool to condition people so as they could become more effective workers and faithful followers and defenders of communism. Internationally, sport was used as a device to demonstrate the strength and supposed primacy of the Soviet people so as to score political points against the West. Within the Soviet Union itself sport was used primarily as a means to control the masses and as with all aspects of Soviet life, sport was directed and controlled by the Communist Party.

Due to its growing popularity in the 1920’s and 30’s football was identified as a potential propaganda vehicle. Public interest led to various Soviet organisations backing Moscow based teams. Dynamo Moscow was backed by the secret police, CSKA Moscow by the army, Torpedo Moscow by the Zil vehicle plant and Locomotiv Moscow by the railways. The intention was to create successful footballing sides that were affiliated with the Soviet elite. The only independent club in Moscow was Spartak. Due to this supporting Spartak Moscow was seen as a small way of saying ‘no’ to Soviet society and to this day the club still goes by the nickname of ‘The People’s Team’. Founded in 1935, by Nikolai, Spartak won the Soviet league title in only their second season in 1936 and then went on to win again in 1938 and 1939 before the outbreak of the Second World War. Spartak’s early history intertwined with, and played a small but significant role in, the internal politics of power of Soviet Russia and also coincided with Stalin’s campaign of political repression known as the Great Purge. The club’s early successes and self-determination had inevitably riled some within Soviet society. None more so than the head of the secret police, Lavrenty Beria, who just so happened to be the president of Spartak’s biggest rivals, Dynamo. Beria’s jealousy fuelled vendetta against Nikolai and his brothers, Alexander, Andrei, and Pyotr (who all helped run and played for Spartak) is a tale which has become a part of the Spartak mythos and made heroes out of the Starostin’s.

The Starostin Brothers

Born in a Moscow suburb in 1902, Nikolai was the eldest of the four brothers. His father was a hunter but he died in the typhus epidemic of 1920 which make Nikolai the family’s provider at just 18. Owing to his talent for football and ice hockey, he made a living playing football in the summer and ice hockey in the winter becoming Soviet national team captain in both sports. Nikolai was a prominent member of the Moscow Sports Circle and helped the football branch of the sports club to grow. He not only was the sides star striker but he also held an administrative role with the club, an experience which would help him in later life. His stature within sport brought him into contact with Alexander Kosarev, Secretary of the Young Communist League (Komsomol).

With Kosarev’s backing, Nikolai set up a new sports society to compete with the dominant security forces sponsored clubs. The Spartak Sports Society, named after Spartacus, the leader of the slave uprising in ancient Rome, was established in March 1935 and mostly catered to civilians working for the local cooperatives. Spartak attracted top athletes from various sports. This was largely due to the fact that it was run by the athletes themselves and was free from the more oppressive clubs, such as Dynamo. Prior to the foundation of Spartak, Dynamo had been the dominant player in Soviet sport, and in football in particular. Spartak’s arrival heralded the beginning of the fiercest rivalry in Russian football.

Red Square hosts Spartak

The first clash between the two sides was to take place in rather surreal surroundings. Kosarev had arranged for a match between the two sides on the cobblestones of Red Square as part of the Physical Culture Day celebrations in 1936. It was to be the first football match ever seen by Stalin. However, at the last moment Dynamo withdrew their team fearing the repercussions should the ball hit the Kremlin walls, or worse Stalin himself. Instead two Spartak teams (including Nikolai as captain and his three brothers) arranged an exhibition match on the green felt pitch with a variety of goals planned to entertain Uncle Joe. Nikolai and Kosarev, who stood beside Stalin for the entire game, had arranged beforehand that, should Stalin become noticeably bored, Kosarev would signal to Nikolai to end of the match with a white handkerchief.

However, Stalin’s interest was held long enough and, instead of the planned 30 minutes, the game lasted 43 minutes. Beria was jealous of the attention Stalin had apparently given Spartak. Then came Spartak’s successes in winning the league title in 1936 and back to back league and cup doubles in 1938 and 1939 knocking Dynamo from their dominant position in the process. The ramifications of Dynamo’s swift demise, and Spartak’s remarkable rise, were to be felt throughout sporting society. The arrest and persecution of enemies of the regime from all walks of life was common place in the mid-1930’s and sport was no exception. Hundreds of athletes and dozens of Nikolai’s friends were arrested. This included his own his brother-in-law and former Spartak player Volodya Strepikhleev who had refereed a match between Dynamo and a touring Basque side which Dynamo lost 7-4. His part in this match and arrest are unlikely to have been a coincidence.

Then in 1938 came the arrest and execution of Kosarev having been branded an ‘enemy of the people’. A common tag for those who fell foul of the regime. Spartak and their associates were being repressed. See unlike most political leaders and previous police chiefs, Beria was a football fan. Football was his passion. (In his spare time when he wasn’t purging millions or watching football, Beria would cruise the streets of Moscow in his limousine picking up adolescent girls.) In his youth Beria played at a reasonably high level in his native Georgia and even faced a visiting team lead by Nikolai. Nikolai’s side won and Beria was humiliated. Nikolai remembered him being a ‘crude and dirty left-half’. Years later when then two next met Beria, clearly affected by the incident, remarked, ‘now here’s the little so-and-so who escaped from me in Tbilisi. Let’s see if you can get away now!’

Lavrentiy Beria – the villian of the piece

Beria was certainly the type to hold a grudge and he did everything in his power to stop Spartak and help Dynamo Moscow. One such example came after a Soviet Cup semi-final in 1939. Spartak beat the Georgian side Dinamo Tbilisi due to a disputed goal. It is important to note that clubs in the Soviet Union named Dynamo/Dinamo belonged to the same state police funded organisation as Dynamo Moscow and were affiliated with local secret police forces. Beria was furious and, even though final had already been won by Spartak 3-1, ordered that a match be replayed to the astonishment of the sports authorities.

The original referee, the highly respected Ivan Gorelkin, was disqualified and arrested soon after. Finding a replacement was understandably difficult and the Sports Minister Colonel Snegov had to order the credible Nikolai Usov to officiate. However, Beria’s efforts were in vain as Spartak won the rematch 3-2. According to Nikolai, ‘when I glanced up at the dignitaries’ box, I saw Beria get up, furiously kick over his chair and storm out of the stadium’. Beria would ensure that the Starostins were to pay for their insolence.

Three years later, on 20th March 1942, Nikolai was awoken in the night by a torch shining in his eyes and two pistols pointed at his head. The country’s most famous footballer was arrested and taken to the Lubyanka, the secret police’s Moscow headquarters, along with his three brothers, two brothers-in-law and two Spartak team-mates. Nikolai spent the next two years in isolation and under constant interrogation at the Lubyanka. He and his brothers were originally charged with plotting to murder Stalin. When no plot was uncovered they were instead charged with ‘propagandising bourgeois sport’ and sentenced to ten years hard labour each in the infamous Gulags. The Starostins were then written out of official records. Pictures of Spartak teams would list any Starostin as N.N.

Yet Nikolai wrote, ‘ten years in a labour camp was, for those times, a virtual “not guilty” verdict. The future seemed not so gloomy after all!’  Nikolai knew to what he owed this ‘leniency’. ‘The Starostins were more than mere human beings. In the minds of the public they personified Spartak. That altered a great deal…I’m sure it was the authority of Spartak that lightened our destiny’. Such was the power of their fame, it seems the leaders could not afford to have the blood of the nation’s most famous brothers on their hands.

And so began life in the dreaded camps. Wherever he went camp commandants vied for Nikolai’s services as a coach and he became much sought after as coach of local Dynamo teams, remarking, ‘their unbridled power over human lives was nothing compared to the power of soccer over them’. Inmates and guards treated him as a hero. No one could lay a hand on him. Nikolai thinks he knows why football was so important to the people: ‘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.’

The saving grace of Nikolai’s time in the camps was that he missed the war. When it finished he was thousands of miles away coaching local gulag and Dynamo teams. However, his story was to take another curious turn when one night in 1948, the local party secretary of his Siberian outpost woke him with the news: ‘Stalin is on the phone. Come quickly!’ On the other end was Stalin’s son, Vassily.

Nikolai had become acquainted with Vassily when his daughter had made friends with a boy named ‘Volkov’ when she was a member of the Spartak horse riding club. Being a Spartak director, Nikolai knew that Volkov was a pseudonym and that he was really Vassily Stalin. During the war, Vassily was made the world’s youngest general at 18 and commander-in-chief of the air force. A sports fan himself, he had tried to bring the best footballers together at VVS, the air force team he had founded, and now he wanted Nikolai to serve as coach. Vassily despised Beria so, knowing the history between the two, hiring Nikolai appealed to him. A plane was sent to pick Nikolai up and bring him to Moscow to make him a pawn in their game.

Soon after returning to the capital, Beria’s agents visited Nikolai at his home and gave him 24 hours to leave town. Nikolai was immediately put into the protection of Vassily’s own residence. The two became close, even sleeping together in the same huge bed. Vassily slept with a revolver under his pillow. It was a bizarre and uncomfortable situation for Nikolai to find himself in.

One day, while Vassily was drunk, Nikolai evaded his guards and escaped out of an open window to see his family. Early the next morning Beria’s men came for him and put him on a train for the North Caucasus and a return to exile. Vassily intervened and sent his head of counter-espionage to intercept the train. However, Nikolai, tired of being a piece in a much large struggle, begged Vassily to let him live in the relative calm of southern Russia. Vassily reluctantly agreed, acknowledging that he couldn’t match Beria’s vast network of power. However, Beria was not satisfied. Nikolai was once more intercepted on his travels and exiled for life to Kazakhstan on the desert frontier with China and Mongolia.

In March 1953 came the death of Stalin senior and the new Soviet leadership embarked on the process of de-Stalinisation, this was the process of eliminating the cult of personality of Stalin, the Stalinist political system and also many policies from his rule, such as the Gulag camp system. There was also an amnesty for some prisoners as many sentences from the Stalin era were declared illegal. The change in leadership, however, spelt the end for Beria. Members of the Politburo disliked Beria for his part in the Stalin regime and his purges. He was arrested and accused of spying for the West, committing sabotage, and plotting to restore capitalism. 3 months later, following a show trial, he was shot. Few will have mourned his passing.

The same twist of fate which ended Beria was the start of a new beginning for the Starostins. A month after Beria’s demise Nikolai was told that his sentence was under review. Nikolai and his brothers returned to Moscow and had their party cards returned having had their sentences declared illegal. At 50, Nikolai was put in charge of the Soviet national team. A year later, in 1955, he returned to Spartak as president. A post he held both full-time and in an honorary capacity until his 90th birthday in 1992. In February 1996 Nikolai died at the fine old age of 93. The club he created is now one of the most successful in Russia having won the Russian league a record 9 times and the Russian Cup 3 times. On top of these honours the club won the Soviet Top League 12 times (a record only bettered by Dynamo Kiev’s 13 wins) and the Soviet Cup 10 times.

Nikolai’s remarkable story teaches us what power sport has over the collective consciousness and the influence it can have over political and social discourse.

“I naturally regret the lost ‘camp’ years…Yet, however strange it may seem, everywhere I went the soccer ball was always out of Beria’s reach; even though the notorious police chief had once been a player himself, he was never able to defeat me.”

– Nikolai Starostin