When eight‑year‑old Vladlen Putistin saw his father play soccer against a German team in summer 1942, he couldn’t have imagined that he was witnessing the birth of a legend.
The legend maintains that the Soviet soccer team, consisting mostly of Dynamo Kyiv players, was executed after having beaten the Nazi squad in a critical match on Aug. 9, 1942. Soviet historians and writers depicted the game, later dubbed the “Match of Death,” as a chilling story of the Soviet athletes’ strong ideological convictions. The story went that the players were aware that they would be killed if they won, but won nonetheless. Local authorities erected a monument to the players at the Start stadium in Kyiv’s Lukyanivska district.
Sports officials organized a friendly match to mark the 60th anniversary of the game on Aug. 9. Three hours of festivities preceded the game.
Putistin is now one of several people who say the Soviet story was wrong.
He said Start, the team compiled of eight Dynamo players and several players from other squads, played a total of nine games back in 1942 crushing opponents from German, Ukrainian and Hungarian teams. Those teams were mostly composed of soccer players who happened to be in occupied Kyiv at the time.
“Word began to circulate that our team beat the Germans,” Putistin said. “That’s why the Germans started gathering a strong team for a revenge game on Aug. 9.”
The German squad, named Flakelf, consisted mostly of pilots and officers of anti‑aircraft forces. The Soviets defeated the German team again, 5‑3, bringing their total goal difference in the tournament of nine games to 56‑11.
Putistin said the Soviet players weren’t arrested until a month later, and that the arrests weren’t related to sports.
“They were arrested after members of a local team told the Nazis that the players were NKVD agents,” he said. “During interrogation, they were asked if they were Komsomol or Communist Party members.”
Marina Shevchenko, a historian at the Kyiv World War II museum, said Putistin’s story is only one of the theories of what really happened.
“There are as many versions of those events as there are people,” she said.
Though she agreed the arrests weren’t related to the soccer matches, she said a theory based on other witnesses’ comments suggested a different scenario. She said the players may have been arrested for sabotaging a bread factory where they worked. She said some witnesses claimed that the Dynamo Kyiv players were sent to concentration camps for adding bits of crushed glass to flour used to bake bread for German troops. Four of the players were executed while in the camps for unrelated offenses, she said.
Putistin, whose father survived the camps and died in 1981, said that theories that varied from the Soviet propaganda stories didn’t surface until recently, when publications started running stories about the match focusing on what really happened.
“Until the mid‑1970s, my father was regularly questioned by the KGB as a witness because he had helped to organize the games,” he said.
He said that during Soviet times, few people believed that his father had taken part in the game. Most of them, believing the Soviet story that the squad had been summarily executed after the game, had one question to counter: If your father was on the team, how come he is still alive?
Shevchenko said witnesses and relatives of the players who participated in the game were reluctant to expose the Soviet story as a propaganda myth.
“I think if these events were not surrounded by the heroic and patriotic halo, the players would probably be regarded as traitors by the system,” she said.
Until the 1970’s, questionnaires for job and university applicants contained questions on whether a person had ever lived in a Nazi‑occupied area or stayed in a concentration camp. A person giving a positive answer was often regarded as a potential spy.
Shevchenko said a large concert marking the match’s anniversary this year wasn’t a good idea. She said it was time to destroy the myths.
“These people were undoubtedly heroes,” she said. “But it would be better if their descendants were given some kind of support, instead of a concert.”
