Spartak v. Dinamo

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Spartak-Dinamo, 1939: The Semifinal After the Final

Subject essay: Sergey Bondarenko and Robert Edelman

The 1939 cup semifinal between Moscow Spartak and Dinamo Tbilisi had a bizarre problem: the final had already been played. Three weeks earlier, in fact. Spartak had even won it, beating Leningrad’s Stalinets 3-1. A semifinal held after the final was a new one, even for the famously creative administrators of the Stalinist era. The whole mess started because Lavrentii Beria, the powerful Georgian who had recently taken over the NKVD, wasn’t happy. In the original semi, Spartak had squeaked by Dinamo Tbilisi 1-0 on a disputed goal. Beria had been a decent player himself as a young man in Tbilisi and, as the patron of the NKVD Dinamo sports society, he expected his teams to win.

The rivalry between Spartak and Dinamo was more than just football; it was one of the few places you could see a real clash of ideals play out in the USSR in the 1930s. Dinamo, the team of the police, played a rigid, disciplined style of long passes and perpetual motion. Spartak, backed by the union of small industrial co-ops, played a looser, more creative game, built on intricate ball control and the surprising pass. The team’s roots were with the people; before the co-ops, they were sponsored by the food workers’ union, and before that, they were just a local club from Krasnaia Presnia, the Moscow neighborhood where the four founding Starostin brothers grew up. It was precisely because Spartak had no ties to the army or the police that they became the most popular team in Moscow.

Dinamo Tbilisi's official protest was, predictably, thrown out by the Football Section of the sports committee. After all, you can't replay a semifinal for a final that's already history. The Central Committee of the Communist Party, however, wasn’t about to let rules get in the way. The order to replay the match came down from Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin's top lieutenants. The news was announced in the Georgian press long before anyone at Spartak had any idea what was happening. Nikolai Starostin tried to call in favors, but his most powerful ally, Komsomol head Aleksandr Kosarev, had recently been arrested by Beria and shot. Eighty thousand people packed into Dinamo Stadium for the rematch. The odds were stacked against Spartak. Andrei Starostin was playing with a broken hand. Their top scorer, Aleksei Sokolov, was suspended for punching another player. Late in the game, their goalkeeper was injured and had to be replaced by a little-known backup. The Georgians attacked relentlessly, wave after wave. And yet, Spartak won, 3-2. Lev Filatov, who’d go on to become one of the Soviet Union’s most respected football writers, was there as a schoolboy. He later called it the most important match he’d ever witnessed, believing that the very fate of Soviet football hung in the balance that day.

But what Beria couldn’t get on the field, he could get through other means. He’d already tried to have the Starostin brothers arrested in 1939 on charges of running a professional team like a business, but the order needed Molotov’s signature. In a strange twist of fate, Molotov’s daughter was best friends with Nikolai Starostin’s daughter, and he refused to sign. In 1942, a second attempt worked. The four brothers spent the rest of the Stalin years in the labor camps. As a post-war sporting juggernaut, the Soviet Union would go on to dominate the Olympics, winning gold medals by margins that often embarrassed the West. Football was the exception. Throughout the entire Soviet century, it was the one sport where they were never quite the best in the world. and the one their fans loved more than any other.

17 Moments in Soviet History - Spartak-Dinamo, 1939: The Semifinal After the Final by Sergey Bondarenko and Robert Edelman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.