Starostin Confesses to the NKVD

From the investigative file of Nikolai Starostin, interrogation materials (1942)

In 1942 Nikolai Starostin, founder of Spartak, was arrested at the reported initiative of Dinamo's patron Lavrentii Beria. The charges included currency speculation, embezzlement, anti-Soviet agitation, and attempted treason. His "confession" reads as a near-verbatim mirror of the 1938 Krasnyi sport polemic and the 1939 Snegov order, recycling "buying-off and luring-away" and "mass physical-culture servicing." Whether he spoke the words or his interrogator wrote them, the protocol feeds the regime's own rhetoric back in the voice of the accused.

Original Source: Эдуард Нисенбойм.Советский спорт "Век Футбола" (2018)

The traditions of bourgeois sport which I was transferring into Soviet sport are the following:

professionalism in sport; 2, the sharp material betterment of masters of sport;
the all-around exaltation of the significance of record-setting and championship-winning;
the staging of international sporting meetings for the sake of naked record-chasing;
the free transfer of athletes from one society to another, that is, the so-called 'buying-off and luring-away.'

I clarify that all these measures were alien to Soviet sport and naturally led to a diminution of the role of the mass physical-culture servicing of the working people."

— From the investigative file of Nikolai Starostin, interrogation materials