Nikolai Starostin
Encyclopedia
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
: Никола́й Петро́вич Ста́ростин; 26 February 1902 – 17 February 1996) was a Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n footballer
Football (soccer)
Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a sport played between two teams of eleven players with a spherical ball...
and ice hockey
Ice hockey
Ice hockey, often referred to as hockey, is a team sport played on ice, in which skaters use wooden or composite sticks to shoot a hard rubber puck into their opponent's net. The game is played between two teams of six players each. Five members of each team skate up and down the ice trying to take...
player, and founder of Spartak Moscow
FC Spartak Moscow
FC Spartak Moscow is a Russian football club from Moscow. Having won 12 Soviet championships and 9 of 19 Russian championships they are one of the country's most successful clubs. They have also won the Soviet Cup 10 times and the Russian Cup 3 times...
.
Early life and Spartak Moscow
The eldest of four brothers, Starostin was born in Presnensky District, MoscowMoscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
where he enjoyed a comfortable upbringing courtesy of his father's reasonably well paid job as a hunting guide for the Imperial Hunting Society. Nikolai studied at a commercial academy where he first began playing football. Football was a minor concern in the Russia in this period, but it was growing. A Moscow league had been founded in 1910 but this died away in the years following the revolution of 1917. Starostin is said to have welcomed the revolution, though he played no active role in it. Following the death of his father from typhoid in 1920, Starostin supported his family by playing football in the summer and ice hockey in the winter.
In 1921 the Moscow Sport Circle (later Krasnaia Presnia) was formed by Ivan Artemev and involved Starostin, especially in its football team. The team grew, building a stadium, supporting itself from ticket sales and playing matches across Russia. As part of a 1926 reorganisation of football in the USSR, Starostin arranged for the club to be sponsored by the food workers union and the club moved to the 13,000 seat Tomskii Stadium. The team changed sponsors repeatedly over the following years as it competed with Dinamo Moscow
FC Dynamo Moscow
Dynamo Moscow is a Russian football club based in Moscow, currently playing in the Russian Premier League. Dynamo's traditional kit colours are blue and white...
, whose 35,000 seat Dinamo Stadium lay close by.
As a high-profile sportsman, Starostin came into close contact with Alexander Kosarev, secretary of the Komsomol
Komsomol
The Communist Union of Youth , usually known as Komsomol , was the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Komsomol in its earliest form was established in urban centers in 1918. During the early years, it was a Russian organization, known as the Russian Communist Union of...
(Communist Union of Youth) who already had a strong influence on sport and wanted to extend it. In November 1934, with funding from Promkooperatsiia, Kosarev employed Starostin and his brothers to develop his team to make it more powerful. Again the team changed its name, this time to Spartak Moscow
FC Spartak Moscow
FC Spartak Moscow is a Russian football club from Moscow. Having won 12 Soviet championships and 9 of 19 Russian championships they are one of the country's most successful clubs. They have also won the Soviet Cup 10 times and the Russian Cup 3 times...
. It took its name from the Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
slave rebel
Rebellion
Rebellion, uprising or insurrection, is a refusal of obedience or order. It may, therefore, be seen as encompassing a range of behaviors aimed at destroying or replacing an established authority such as a government or a head of state...
and athlete Spartacus
Spartacus
Spartacus was a famous leader of the slaves in the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. Little is known about Spartacus beyond the events of the war, and surviving historical accounts are sometimes contradictory and may not always be reliable...
. Like Spartacus, the club seemed to represent the exploited, as opposed to their rivals Dynamo Moscow (run by the secret police
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
) and CSKA Moscow (run by the army
Soviet Army
The Soviet Army is the name given to the main part of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1992. Previously, it had been known as the Red Army. Informally, Армия referred to all the MOD armed forces, except, in some cases, the Soviet Navy.This article covers the Soviet Ground...
.) Starostin played for and managed Spartak, and his three brothers also played for the team.
In 1936 new league and cup competitions were introduced in Russia. In the first year Dinamo won the league and Spartak the cup. In 1937 the positions were reversed but Spartak won both league and cup in 1938 and 1939, much to the annoyance of Lavrenty Beria, the head of the secret police, who was also the president of Dynamo. A keen footballer in his youth, Beria had played against Starostin in the 1920s, suffering humiliating defeat. The Dinamo-Spartak rivalry became the bitterest in Soviet sport.
Arrest
In the late 1930s many of Starostin's friends and associates were arrested as part of the Great PurgeGreat Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, including Kosarev. There were also attempts to more closely control sporting matters, including forcing the Semi-final of the 1939 cup to be replayed after Spartak won the first match by a disputed goal. They went on to win the replay, which did not take place until after Spartak had already won the final. On March 20, 1942, Starostin was arrested, along with his three brothers and other fellow players, facing accusations of involvement in a plot to kill Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
. Following two years of interrogation in the Lubyanka
Lubyanka
Lubyanka or Lubianka may refer to:*Lubyanka Square, Moscow*Bolshaya Lubyanka Street, Moscow*Lubyanka Building, former KGB headquarters and prison at Lubyanka Square, Moscow*Lubyanka , a metro station in MoscowPlaces in Poland called Lubianka...
, the charges were dropped but the Starostins were tried and sentenced to ten years in Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
anyway, having been found guilty of "lauding bourgeois sport and attempting to drag bourgeois motives into Soviet sport". The sentence was very lenient in view of the popularity of football and Starostin. When details from the actual court sentence were published in 2003, it turned out Starostins were not convicted for political crimes, but rather for stealing sporting goods from the stores they were supposed to oversee and selling those goods on. Nikolai Starostin profited for 28,000 rubles, Aleksandr for 12,000, Andrei and Pyotr - for 6,000 each. Also, Nikolai Starostin was convicted of bribing the military commisar of the Bauman district of Moscow, Kutarzhevskiy. Kutarzhevskiy, using his power arranged so that several people who were supposed to have been conscripted to serve in the Army during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
were not sent to the front and stayed in Moscow instead. Those people included food distributors and food store managers, who in turn provided Starostin with unlimited food supply during the war time, when food shortages were common (according to the sentence, food store manager Zvyozdkin gave Starostin 60 kilograms of butter and 50 kilograms of meat products).
During his time in the gulags, Starostin's skills were highly sought after and he served as coach at various camps. He was treated benevolently by commanders who looked kindly on soccer and gave him extensive privileges. Unlike other notable inmates, Starostin was never mistreated and was well liked among both guards and prisoners, who would gather to listen to his football stories.
In 1948 Starostin received a phone call in the camp from Stalin's son Vasily
Vasily Dzhugashvili
Vasily Iosifovich Dzhugashvili , known also as Vasily Stalin , , was the son of Joseph Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva....
. The two had known each other in the 1930s when Starostin's daughter had made friends with him at the Spartak horse riding club, when he was using the name 'Volkov'. He was now commander in chief of the Soviet Air Forces and brought Starostin back to Moscow to coach the Air Force's football team, in which role he became a pawn in the conflict between Vasily and Lavrentiy Beria. Beria's secret police soon visited Starostin at his home, giving him 24 hours to leave Moscow. Vasily reacted by taking Starostin into his protection. The two spent all their time together, even sleeping in the same wide bed (Vasily with a gun under his pillow).
On one occasion when Vasily was drunk Starostin slipped out of an open window to see his family. He was apprehended by the secret police at 6am the next morning and sent to the Maykop
Maykop
Maykop is the capital city of the Republic of Adygea, Russia, located on the right bank of the Belaya River . Population: -History:...
gulag. At Orel
Oryol
Oryol or Orel is a city and the administrative center of Oryol Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River, approximately south-southwest of Moscow...
, however, Vasily's head of counter espionage met the train to return Starostin to Moscow. Starostin instead asked to be allowed to live in Southern Russia. Vasily agreed on condition that he coach the local Dinamo team. The secret police intercepted him, however, and he was exiled for life to Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
. Starostin was initially sent to Akmolinsk, where he coached the local football team. He later moved to Alma Ata to coach ice hockey and football with the Kairat
FC Kairat Almaty
FC Kairat Almaty is a Kazakh football club, playing in Almaty Central Stadium, Almaty.Like many clubs in the Soviet Union they went through a number of name changes in their history. They were known Dinamo Almaty when founded in 1952, before changing in 1954 to Lokomotiv Almaty, and later Urozhai...
team. Starostin's efforts contributed to the club's position as the leading Kazakh team in the Soviet era.
Release
Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Beria, who had initially been part of the leading group after Stalin's death, was executed later that year. As part of the movement towards "Destalinisation" an amnestyAmnesty
Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...
was declared for various political prisoners and this included Starostin. His sentence and those of his brothers were declared illegal, and they were set free. Nikolai was appointed as coach to the Soviet national football team
USSR national football team
The Soviet Union National Football Team was the national football team of the Soviet Union. It ceased to exist after the break up of the Union...
, and in 1955 returned to Spartak as president, a position he maintained until 1992. Starostin published his memoirs, titled Futbol skvoz gody (Football Through the Years) in 1989.
Further reading
- Simon Kuper. Football Against the Enemy. Orion Paperbacks, 2003 (ISBN 0-7528-4877-1).
- Anne Applebaum. Gulag: A History of the Soviet CampsGulag: A HistoryGulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the...
. Doubleday, 2003 (ISBN 0-14-028310-2). - Robert Edelman. Spartak Moscow: A History of the People's Team in the Worker's State. Cornell University Press, 2009 (ISBN 0801447429).