HS Foreign 27.3.2001 - Kiev 1942: When football became a matter of life and death

By Juha Sainio

Shortly before his death in 1981, the former Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly commented on the game he loved in the following words: "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that." Finland's recent World Cup 2002 meeting with England in Liverpool may only have seemed like a life-and-death matter for the English supporters, but on at least one historical occasion, Shankly's statement has been terribly true.

In July of 1941 Germany launched a major offensive against the then Soviet Union. The German armies advanced eastwards rapidly and by the fall they had already stormed and occupied the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

Josif Kordik, a bakery manager, was sitting at a café in the centre of Kiev at the end of 1941, when he saw a familiar-looking figure shuffling past outside the window. Kordik was a dedicated football fan, and the scruffy vagrant whose face he recognised was Nikolai Trusevich, the legendary goalkeeper for Dynamo Kiev in the pre-war years.

Trusevich had only just

got out of a German POW camp and was living rough on the streets of Kiev. Kordik decided to give his footballing idol a helping hand and he fixed him up with a job at the bakery.

Trusevich was by no means the only footballing icon or athlete whom Kordik (who could be seen in some ways as a small-scale Oskar Schindler) had rescued from starvation or a one-way trip to the slave labour camps in Germany. Doing odd jobs around the bakery were a couple of dozen former Dynamo Kiev stars and players from Dynamo's local rivals Lokomotiv. These were the ones who had survived the POW camps and been sent home.

Kordik's dream had long been to put together his own football team. Now he had a chance to realise it. The bakery workers' team were given the name FC Start.

The background to this

was that in the summer of 1942 the occupying German forces decided to set up an ad hoc football league in Kiev, to which were invited teams made up of serving German soldiers and also squads assembled from the Hungarian and Romanian units fighting alongside the army of the Third Reich.

Josif Kordik wanted to get FC Start into the league, but many of the players were rather doubtful about the idea: wouldn't taking part in a competition arranged by the Nazi occupiers be seen as fraternization with the enemy?

When Trusevich accidentally came upon a pile of red team-shirts in a warehouse, he was finally able to win over his fellows. "We may not have weapons, but we can fight for victory on the football field. We will play in the colours of our flag, and the fascists will come to see that our scalps are not easily taken", declared the goalkeeper to his colleagues.

FC Start's success in the league

was so overwhelming as to verge on the embarrassing. When one considers that Dynamo had consistently finished in the top four of the Soviet league between 1936 and 1940, the player material - even undernourished and out of shape - was quite enough to see off German army units.

The team crushed one opponent after another with emphatic scores like 5-0 and 6-0. At the same time, the morale of the local Ukrainian population rose appreciably.

The German occupying forces had imagined they had already snuffed out any intellectual resistance amongst the local population, and that the Ukrainians were nicely subjected into the role of being their humble slaves. The football was supposed to be a bit of harmless bread and circuses fun, but with each victory by the Start XI it became an increasingly visible symbol of Ukrainian resistance and belief in the future.

Of course the Germans

could have resolved the problem with a few well-placed bullets in the back of the Start players' necks, but this would have made martyrs of them and provoked more trouble. No, things had to be settled on the soccer field.

The occupiers put up their best team against FC Start, a crack squad drawn from the ranks of the Luftwaffe and named Flakelf. Flakelf were supposedly invincible. The game went ahead and Start ran out easy winners, 5-1.

The matter was fast becoming a serious embarrassment to the Germans. They immediately challenged FC Start to a rematch, which was played on August 9th, 1942.

It was the grudge game

to end all grudge games. The Flakelf players scythed down the Ukrainians at every possible opportunity, and the German referee turned a blind eye to even the most blatant fouls. In spite of this, Start were 3-1 up at half-time.

Inspired by the performance of their boys, the Ukrainian crowd started to jeer at the Germans, who replied by sending soldiers with dogs into the grandstand.

During the half-time interval, an SS officer entered the Start dressing-room. He confessed that the Ukrainians had played well, but added darkly: "You really cannot expect to win, however. Just consider for a moment what will happen if you do."

Clearly the Start players

did not consider the warning very carefully, for in their view they had no alternative but to go out and win the game. They duly did so, 5-3.

In one immortal coup de grace scene, the Start defender Aleksei Klimenko humiliated the opposition completely: he broke through, dummied the German goalkeeper, and advanced on the empty goal. Instead of scoring, however, he neatly trapped the ball on the goal-line, ran into the goal itself, and then booted the ball back towards midfield.

A week later

, the Gestapo arrived at the bakery and took away the FC Start players. They were interrogated and tortured in the local Gestapo HQ for three weeks. The men were ordered to confess to being spies or partisans, so that the Gestapo would have had a reason to execute them. None of them caved in under torture, however.

One player, Nikolai Korotkykh, was tortured to death, after his sister had claimed her brother was actually a member of the Soviet intelligence corps.

The others were taken to the Siretz concentration camp, located outside Kiev and not far from the infamous Babi Yar. Nikolai Trusevich and two other team-members were among camp inmates who were shot in February 1943 in the summary executions arranged at the camp on Fridays and Saturdays.

When the Red Army

liberated Kiev in November 1943, the Soviet authorities were quick to build a legend for propaganda purposes, according to which there was just the one "Dynamo Death Match", the Start players were arrested immediately after the final whistle, and some of them were shot while still proudly wearing their red shirts.

Those who survived were treated as patriotic heroes, but they were instructed on pain of imprisonment not to divulge the real course of events. The legend stuck, and the real story - which was scarcely less heroic - only finally came out after the collapse of the Soviet regime, when it was revealed by Makar Goncharenko. Goncharenko, who died in 1996, was the last surviving member of the team.

Source: Andy Dougan: Dynamo. Defending the Honour of Kiev. Fourth Estate, London, 2001.

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print, 25.3.2001