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3 November 2011

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‘Soviet Soccer Saturday’

HOSE OF US of a certain vintage and who used to go to dodgy parties with people who had congealed Guinness foam in their beards will recall the sort of sing-songs that Dublin republicans and lefties used to have before they started to go to late-night wine bars and eat tofu.
If there were Stalinists present then you were certain to hear Red Fly the Banners, O! It is one of those songs that everyone can join in and seems never to end as extra lines are added. A bit like The Bog Down in the Valley Oh actually now that I come to think of it.
So at some point one of the Stickies [Ed’s note for younger readers who haven’t yet grown beards to congeal Guinness in: Stickies = the Workers’ Party] or a Communist Party tankie would leave off for a moment telling a nurse from Roscommon why her Da should be forced into a collective farm and her brothers sent to cut turf in Offaly to start off the verse:
I’ll sing you one-O!
Red fly the banners, O!
What is your on -O!
One is workers’ unity and ever more shall be so.
And so it went on. Three was The Rights of Man. As in: “Three, three the rights of man.” Then you went back to the start and added more. Usually, the biggest audience participation came for the verse about 13 being for the holes in Trotsky’s head. And if there were any Trots present they might have to hide in the kitchen for a while behind parcels of stout until the Stalinists had forgotten their mental note to give them a slap with a copy of Eoghan Harris’s The Irish Industrial Revolution.
Anyway, the reason for all of this nostalgia and what brings me back to sport (sort of)  is that one of the lines was about the Moscow Dynamos. ‘The what?’ you say.
Dynamo Moscow (Dinamo Moscow or Dinamo Moskva, back in the USSR). They finished seventh in the Russian Premier league last year and played Celtic in something or other but have never recaptured their glory days when they won the league eleven times and the cup six times. The Soviet league and cup, of course.
Because they, like the holes in Trotsky’s head in fact, are inseparable from the Soviet era. Although the club was founded in the 1880s, it came under the control of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, the Soviet security agency, in 1917, and adopted the title Dynamo in 1923. The club’s motto, “Power in Motion”, was coined by the author Maxim Gorky who was a member of the sporting club that was attached to the Ministry of the Interior.
There is no record of Stalin having been a big football fan (which is probably just as well) but his chum Lavrenty Beria, who was the main man at the NKVD secret police, was a big Dynamo fan and technically chair of the club.
He took revenge on their rivals, Spartak, who beat Dynamo in the 1939 Cup semi-final by having the four Starostin brothers, who were involved with Spartak, and several players arrested in 1942 and charged with conspiring to murder Stalin! (If only Pillar Caffrey had put his position within the Garda to such purpose for the Dubs.)
That charge was later dropped but they were found guilty of “lauding bourgeois sport and attempting to drag bourgeois motives into Soviet sport”. That earned them ten bowlers a piece in the gulags.
It all got a bit weird then.
Stalin’s son, Vassily, got Nikolai Starostin out early to manage the Soviet air force team in 1948 but they were so afraid of Beria that they used to sleep together in the same bed. (Now there’s an excuse that might come in handy some time: ‘So why are you two in the same bed?’; ‘Well, you know that Beria chap . . .’)
After the Greatest Leader of the World Proletariat passed on (just reading from a legal letter I have here before me )  and his chum Beria got his comeuppance, Starostin was rehabilitated and returned to Moscow where he coached the Soviet team and became President of Spartak.
His autobiography is called Football Through the Years. Now that’s what you call masterly understatement!
Dynamo, meanwhile, is currently mainly owned by the state VTB bank. Worth a line in an oul song, I suppose.
All of this, by the way, was brought to mind by talking to someone in The Flowing Tide who was wearing a blue jersey with a large cryllic ‘D’ on it. She had never heard of Red Fly the Banners, O! And you don’t talk about Stalin in polite company  these days . . .

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