Cult Heroes: The legend of FC Start

The game of football – and footballers themselves – has an almost mythical status on this rain-drenched island of ours. Holidays are arranged around it, social functions can fall by the wayside because of it, and even, sometimes, people can fall back on the old Bill Shankly sound bite that ‘football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s much more than that.’

When, however, you have been discarded from a forced labour camp by the armed presence that occupies your home city and are challenged to a football match by those occupiers, football creeps into the realm of life and death. Especially as the prospect of another forced labour camp follows the outcome of the match. And when that match is recorded in history as the ‘Death Match’.

The Ukraine is a nation that has allowed football to acquire the same mythical status as ours. But football in this part of the world hasn’t always had the smoothest of geopolitical rides, best illustrated with the dismantling of the 1941 season as Hitler’s ferocious Wehrmacht, acting out Operation Barbarossa, invaded the Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union.

The men who made up the nation’s most celebrated team, Dynamo Kyiv, either enlisted with the Red Army to defend the honour of the nation or formed civil resistance forces as the Wehrmacht stormed Kyiv. The furious Blitzkrieg that had seen much of Western Europe fall into German hands had now cemented its hold on the near eastern reaches of the continent.

Those Dynamo Kyiv players that had fought in the battle to defend Kyiv and those involved in civil resistance in the city were soon captured by Wehrmacht forces and thrown into the makeshift Darnitsa prisoner of war camp with 600,000 other defenders of the Ukraine. Here the prisoners were ‘categorised’ and ‘processed’ into three different groups: those for near-immediate execution, others destined for slave labour in Germany and the rest released back into the general populace, deemed too harmless to require the time and effort to imprison. It is among the last groups that we have our former Dynamo players – Nikolya Trusevich, Alexei Klimenko, Ivan Kuzmenko, Mykola Korotkykh, Pavel Komarov, Makar Goncharenko, Fyodor Tyutchev, Mikhail Sviridovsky and Mikhail Putsin – released back into Kyiv homeless and hungry.

It was then that the former prisoners of war were given something of a lifeline. Local businessman and Dynamo enthusiast Iosif Kordik, able to hold on to his Bakery Number Three due to German origins, approached the former goalkeeper Trusevich and offered the slender figure the job of a sweeper on the bakery floor. As Trusevich continued to take care of the excess flour, yeast and other ingredients from the shop, Kordik developed the idea to recreate the Dynamo team he so loved and place them in the local league that the Germans had founded to restore some ‘normality’. Kordik, therefore, set Trusevich the task of locating his former teammates in war-torn, Gestapo-strewn Kyiv.

Trusevich’s first discovery was the fleet-footed winger Goncharenko. Soon the trusty Trusevich had managed to reunite the eight Kyiv players previously mentioned, complementing that assembly with three players from another former Kyiv side, Lokomotyv (Vladimir Balakin, Vasil Sukharev and Mikhail Melnyk).

As the players were suitably employed, fed and sheltered in Bakery Number Three, they joined the local league set up by Ukrainian collaborator Georgi Shvestov, a former player and sports instructor. Playing under the name FC Start, the former Dynamo and Lokomotyv players inaugurated their campaign with a 7-2 thrashing of Shvestov’s team Rukh. From here on they defeated three Hungarian regiments, one Romanian regiment, a team made up of railway workers and two German regiments, wearing the red of the Soviet Union with Trusevich, a central figure of the team, indicating ‘the Fascists should know that this colour cannot be defeated.’

The final match of the aforementioned run, on August 6 1942, was a fairly carefree 5-1 victory of the finest team the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe could muster, Flakelf. The Germans, wary of the perceived morale boost that the evidently patriotic FC Start was giving to the Ukrainians of Kyiv, insisted upon a rematch, to be played three days later at Kyiv’s Zenit Stadium.

The match, seen by Ukrainians as a form of solidarity against the occupying German forces, and by the Germans as a way to quash any rebellious spirit, reached high levels of anticipation beforehand, with a heavy military and police presence illustrating the importance of the event.

An SS officer was appointed as the match’s referee, seemingly to aid the previously defeated Flakelf, paying a visit to FC Start’s dressing room pre-match. Here he asked the players to ‘follow all the rules, do not break any of the rules, and before the game greet your opponents in our fashion.’ The mention of ‘our fashion’ of greeting clearly alluded to the Nazi salute.

Prior to kick off, the Start side raised their hands in the traditional Nazi fashion, but as their German counterparts shouted the traditional toast to the Fuhrer, the Ukrainians bellowed a Soviet slogan praising sporting achievement. The German forces present were furious, the Ukrainians, on the other hand, were ecstatic.

The match started tempestuously with Flakelf having the aim of reducing their opponents to rubble – a tactic that paid off early in the first half as a kick to the head left keeper Trusevich grounded whilst the Germans capitalised to score. That changed rapidly and after Kuzmanov rifled in a long-range free-kick, Start picked up the pace, eventually leading by 3-1 at half time.

As the players arrived back in the dressing room, however, they were greeted by another unwelcome visitor, Shvestov, who urged the team to throw the match. He was followed by another SS officer who warned of the consequences of victory. Rebellious and ignorant as ever of the German demands, Start refused to be beaten and ran out 5-3 winners. But the damage to German pride was ruthlessly done when Alexei Klimenko, a defender, effortlessly glided past the whole of the Flakelf team, goalkeeper included, and stopped deadly still on the goal-line, before turning round and booting the ball back towards his own goal. Game, set and match.

The fixture has entered into the realm of Ukrainian folklore as an illustration of national defiance against the occupying Nazi regime. The German forces, on the other hand, couldn’t accept humiliation to a group of local footballers who were subsequently arrested and tortured by Gestapo members after raiding Bakery Number Three a week after the match. One of the players Mykola Korotkykh, after being outed as a former member of the NKVD by a Gestapo informant died under the horror of torture, becoming the first victim of the ‘Death Match’.

The rest of the players were sent to Siretz labour camp to face the hardships and brutality of Hitler’s war machine. Attacked by guerrilla forces in 1943, the commanders of the camp ordered that every third prisoner should be executed as punishment.

Here Kuzmenko, the free-kick scorer, Trusevich, the goalkeeper, and Klimenko, the German’s tormentor-in-chief, were mercilessly shot and discarded into the Babi Yar ravine. Fortunately, Goncharenko, Tyutchev and Sviridovsky were then posted as forced labour workers in the city, successfully going into hiding until the Red Army liberated Ukraine. Records of the other team members, however, have been harder to find.

Here, then, we have an example of a rare moment in time when Bill Shankly’s quip has had a significant degree of truth. The FC Start players were willing to dismiss the warnings of their German occupiers and put their lives on the line for their nation, their family and their neighbours.

Draped in the red of the Soviet Union the players were an unwelcome reminder to Nazism that spirit, talent and honour cannot be crushed by repression. Lest we forget.