However, when the first nation-wide team championships began in
the Soviet Union in 1936 – quite late by European standards – winning them
became an exclusive Moscow affair. Moreover, for a long time only three teams –
Spartak, Dynamo and, after the end of the war, the Red Army – alternated as
champions. Only in 1960 the trio was joined by another Moscow champion,
Torpedo. The following year, for the first time ever, a team from outside of
the capital – and in fact outside the Russian Federation – finally won the
national title. It was Ukraine’s flagship club, Dynamo Kyiv.
That was the beginning of a glorious run for the Ukrainians.
The team went on to win three straight titles in 1966-68 and finished as a
runner-up in 1965 and 1969; in 1966, moreover, it won both the title and the
cup, completing a golden double. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed and
Union-wide competitions were suspended, the Kyiv team had become the most
successful franchise in Soviet history. It finished first 13 times in the final
31 years of the Soviet Union. Overall, it won one more title than Spartak
Moscow and two more than Dynamo Moscow.
It was also a prime supplier of players for the USSR national
team during those years, including leading scorers Anatoliy Byshovets, Oleh
Blokhin and the brightest international star to come out of the Soviet Union,
Andriy Shevchenko. Valeriy Lobanovskiy, a Dynamo Kyiv forward and then head
coach, was also a Soviet national team skipper. He has been recognized as by
far the best coach of the Soviet era.
The Soviet soccer system, like much else under communism, was a
pretty strange mongrel. For some misguided propaganda reason, the Soviet Union
stubbornly insisted that all of its athletes, including top-flight soccer
players, were amateurs. Supposedly, they drew no salary for playing the sport
and practiced and played an entire grueling season while holding down a
full-time job.
In keeping with this idiotic fiction – which no one believed,
anyway, and which did nothing to the Soviet national team or clubs perform
better in international soccer competitions – teams were supposed to be
associations for sports enthusiasts maintained by factories, ministries and
entities such as the military and the police. Their employees played soccer to
stay fit, no more than that.
Thus, Torpedo belonged to the automotive industry,
Spartak to the food processing industry, Lokomotive to the railways ministry,
etc. Dynamo was part of the police – including the secret police, or the KGB –
and, since it was the most powerful institution in the USSR, the Dynamo sports
association had the largest number of teams across the Soviet Union, including
leading soccer clubs in Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi and Minsk and a very strong
hockey team in Riga.
By the 1960s, when Stalinist terror became a thing of the past,
leading clubs in ethnic republics became national standard-bearers. Dynamo Kyiv
was still supported by the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, and all
players were officers of the militsia with
ranks ranging from lieutenant to colonel. However, it was effectively a Ukrainian
national club, representing the republic on the All-Union stage.
Many Soviet republics had such national teams. There was, for
instance, Pakhtakor Tashkent, Kayrat Alma-Ata, Neftchi Baku, Ararat Yerevan,
Moldova Kishinev, etc. The republic’s
party boss regarded the national team as his property. He took pride in its
performance and took care of its needs. Promising national players were
immediately drafted to that club as a matter of course.
Dynamo Kyiv was no exception. It had players drawn from all
over Ukraine, and in addition to ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, it included
every national minority found in the republic – Hungarians, Moldovans, Poles,
Germans and Jews. Forward Valeriy Porkuyan, for instance, was summarily drafted
into Dynamo from Odessa, much against his will. There were plenty of such
stories throughout the history of Ukrainian soccer during the Soviet era.
What is extraordinary, however, was that unlike all other
Soviet republics, where one, or at most two, teams played in the first and
second divisions, Ukraine was crawling with successful soccer clubs. After
Dynamo Kyiv won its first championships, the floodgates of Ukrainian soccer
were thrown wide open. Zorya Luhansk and then Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, twice.
finished atop national standings before the Soviet Union collapsed. Dnipro was
the best Soviet team in the 1983-89, finishing in the top three six times in
seven years. Shakhtar Donetsk was second and third twice, and Chornomorets
Odessa once took the bronze. Shakhtar won the Soviet cup four times, while
Zorya, Dnipro, Metalist Kharkiv and Karpaty Lviv once each.
What does it say about Ukraine?
Quite a lot, actually. In all of the Russian Federation, an
enormous territory stretching from Vladivostok in the Far East to Kaliningrad
in the heart of Central Europe, only one non-Moscow club, Zenit
Saint-Petersburg, hauling from the country’s second largest city, ever managed
to win gold, and it did so only once. In another year Zenit was third. The Army
team from Rostov-Don finished second back in 1966 – but then again, Rostov-Don
is a Don Cossack capital and just as easily could be construed as part of
Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Moscow teams won 33 of 54 Soviet titles. This is the
best illustration of how totally centralized and Moscow-centric Russia really
is. It also suggests that the Russian Federation has always been run from the
Moscow, and that no local party boss ever had enough authority to protect his
soccer talent when it was being summoned to the capital.
Ukraine, on the other hand, was more decentralized even in the
Soviet times. Local officials had more power and could stand up to Kyiv. This
reality was reflected on the soccer field, allowing many cities in the republic
to have strong, fairly competitive clubs.
Soccer is life, claim the game’s numerous fans. The different
paths Russia and Ukraine are taking today – one centralized and subservient to
the one ruler in the Kremlin while the other opting, however slowly and
painfully, for the liberal democracy – could have perhaps been predicted by
looking on the standings of Soviet soccer championships.
