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."
For historic film of Spartak Moscow playing against the Wolverhampton Wanderers (the "Wolves") in 1954 and 1955, click here:
Robert Edelman is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His previous books include Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR, winner of the North American Society of Sports Historians Book of the Year. His research for Spartak Moscow was supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
What People are Saying About This
Andrei S. Markovits
Robert Edelman has written a gem of a book. Letting his fine skills as a historian of the Soviet Union and Russia shine and bringing to bear his expertise about sports as a simultaneous vehicle for conformity and opposition, Edelman offers us a page turner not only about a Soviet and Russian soccer club but also about the lives of everyday people in this world about which we have actually known very little. This book is a wonderful read for anybody interested in culture and identity, well beyond the confines of Russia and soccer.
Book Award Committee
This is an ambitious and very well-documented story, merging culture, identity and politics, ideology and the state with the history of Spartak, Moscow’s leading soccer team, reminding us that politics often has a sporting edge, and providing a sophisticated, subtle and nuanced analysis of the club’s relationship with the state as well as the fans’ relationship with the club. Edelman shows how Moscow soccer could simultaneously be a vehicle for conformity and also opposition, most obviously by showing how support for Spartak, the people’s team, contrasted with that for Moscow Dinamo, the secret police team.... Edelman examines developments from multiple perspectives, drawing on social, cultural, and political history, as well as aspects derived from the more recent interests in body culture.
Louise McReynolds
Today's savvy sports fan accepts that favorite games have a political dimension, without allowing that to deter from the thrill of competition. In this fascinating study of one of Moscow's preeminent soccer teams, Robert Edelman reminds that the opposite is also true, that politics has an athletic edge. Permitting fans, managers, and athletes to tell the history of their team, Spartak, Edelman provides unique insights into the USSR and Russia. Soccer fans no less than Russian specialists will enjoy this story.
