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    The story of food and football in Russia

    Synopsis

    Any major sporting event like the World Cup is, when conducted by an authoritarian state, an exercise in the bread-and-circuses approach to government.

    kremlin


    If Putin’s Russia is propped up by oil exports, the Tsarist economy depended on grain exports.

    When the Argentina vs Iceland match at World Cup 2018 kicks off at the Otkritie stadium in Moscow on June 16, viewers should look out for a group of four statues rather oddly placed at the edge of the field just below the north stands.

    These are the statues of the four Starostin brothers who founded the Spartak football club, which will finally get a permanent home in the newly built stadium (it will be called the Spartak Stadium during the World Cup).
    Most of the other famous Moscow football clubs — Dynamo, CSKA, Lokomotiv — had their own home stadium, but Spartak didn’t and the reason for that is linked to the Starostins. Their story sheds interesting light on the wider position that football has in Russia, and on what it takes to survive in this most complex of countries.
    The statues of the four Starostin brothers who founded the Spartak football club

    Any major sporting event like the World Cup is, when conducted by an authoritarian state, an exercise in the bread-and-circuses approach to government. This was the policy formulated by the Roman empire: a restive populace could be kept in check by doling out basic food (panem, bread) to fill their stomachs and entertainment (circenses, pubic spectacles) to distract their minds.

    This has never been quite true. Really free people tend to resent having to eat and enjoy as enjoined. But autocrats like the policy because it extends their power into intimate aspects of their subjects’ lives. And, if they have reached the point where they start believing their own propaganda, it enables them to see themselves as benevolent patrons of their people, meeting their needs and hence justifying their rule.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin is too smart, or cynical, to have reached the second stage, so his control is pure power play. His justification for the autocracy via democracy he practises, and propagates to increasingly receptive politicians around the world is based primarily on a fear of chaos — in Russia’s case, the instability that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and historical memories of periods of revolution and repression. Putin’s Russia may be stale and stifling, but at least it’s not that.
    Vladimir Putin
    Russian President Putin plays with a ball following a meeting with FIFA president Gianni Infantino at the Kremlin

    This practical appeal comes wrapped in a more emotive one of nationalism, and resentment at how the country has been treated by the West that it both aspires to and resents. This is, again, a feeling with long historical roots, going back to Tsar Peter the Great’s semiclandestine trip to Europe in 1697 to learn about Western technology and culture in order to force his medieval country to modernise.

    Drink Up
    An important aspect was food. Russian aristocrats started importing French chefs to create a new cuisine. Russian Salad, for example, is called Olivier Salad in Russia, after the French chef who invented it at the restaurant he opened in Moscow in the 1880s.

    Its use of boiled, chopped vegetables was a response to the problem of getting fresh salad greens in Russian winters, though as Lesley Chamberlain notes in her book on Russian food, the use of meat from roasted game birds, abundant in the country, made the original rather nicer than the dense, mayonnaise sodden and purely vegetarian versions we know.
    Stalin
    Among the things that impressed Miyokan in the US were ice cream and hamburgers. At some point the buns got dropped, but the meat patties survived and became the popular Mikoyan cutlets. “You, Anastas, care more about ice cream, than about communism,” joked Stalin

    Another innovation was a new way to serve food. Earlier in Europe, dishes were served in two or three courses with tables piled with a range of dishes for people to serve themselves.

    But in Russian palaces, food got cold fast so chefs switched to individually plated portions served in a succession of seven to eight courses, often with one server to each diner — servants, like game birds, being abundant in Russia.

    Service a la russe, as this luxurious style was called, became standard for fine dining across the world.

    All this, of course, barely affected the vast mass of Russia’s population. They continued to eat the diet of grains, dairy, freshwater fish and occasional pork or beef they had eaten for centuries when not fasting, as dictated by the Orthodox Church for large chunks of the year, or starving, due to famines induced by government policy.

    If Putin’s Russia is propped up by oil exports, the Tsarist economy depended on grain exports and in August 1899 the Times of India — which keenly followed Russian affairs due to the fears of a Russian invasion of India — ran an editorial criticising “the essentially unsound basis of the Russian export grain trade”.

    These exports, it noted, rarely came from a real surplus but were “forced upon the peasantry in order to meet the constant pressure of direct and indirect taxation”. This took a terrible toll on the health of peasants and were forcing them off the land into cities. The shortfall of grain was also made up by “frequent adulteration with dirt, sand, stones and other extraneous material,” which had hugely reduced the reputation of Russian wheat.

    A lot of Russian wheat went into making vodka. As Mark Lawrence Schrad points out in his book Vodka Politics, for owners, making vodka was an efficient way to process grain: by building a distillery, a mountain of grain could become barrels of vodka that could be transported easily and wouldn’t go bad. The state could also tax it easily and hope that the population that consumed it would be too drunk to revolt.

    Yet, the ruin of agriculture and growth of a disaffected urban population were clearly creating conditions for the revolution that duly arrived in 1917. But this didn’t quite result in a return to purely Russian foods. Many of the Bolsheviks who now ruled the country had, like Lenin, lived for years in exile away from their home foods, and also saw an interest in food as a bourgeois distraction.
    Starostin brothers
    The statues of the four Starostin brothers who founded the Spartak football club

    Anya von Bremzen, in her wonderful history-cum-memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, notes that Lenin’s indifference to food probably also stemmed from the fact that “his wife, Krupskaya, was a lousy cook”. She burned her stews so regularly that Lenin ironically called them “roasts”, but she didn’t care. “Lenin, she reported later, ‘pretty submissively ate everything given to him.’” And he saw no problem in the citizens of the new communist society doing the same.

    The other influence on Soviet food wasn’t Russian at all. The revolution empowered Bolsheviks from the nations Russia had absorbed, and they had their own ideas about food. Stalin, above all, was a Georgian who loved the hearty, spicy food and wine of his homeland and rather despised simple Russian food. And after taking over control following Lenin’s death, von Bremzen writes, from being “formerly ascetic in the old Bolshevik manner, Stalin was now developing quite a palate himself”.

    Not coincidentally, this came as he substituted Bolshevik ideals with autocratic rule — and bread and circuses. The person he tapped for the bread was not Russian, but the Armenian Anastas Mikoyan. In the brutal world of Soviet politics, Mikoyan somehow survived it all, from Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev to Brezhnev. (His brother Artem was an aircraft designer who founded the Mikoyan Gurevich aircraft design bureau that would give India its MiGs. A good joint biography of the Mikoyan brothers would be fascinating to read.)

    Mikoyan’s history had brutal moments, but in general he had a distaste for violence and avoided offending people, though knew when to cut ties. But Bremzen suggests his survival also lay in avoiding ideological battles to focus on the innocuous subject of food — and this gave him a humane dimension: “His gait was determined, his gaze unsettlingly sharp. But petitioners in his office would on occasion be offered an orange.”

    In 1926, Mikoyan was put in charge of external trade and 10 years later Stalin asked him to focus on food production, even suggesting he tour the United States to study the latest technology (as a particular sign of favour, and perhaps for a more domestic perspective, Mikoyan was allowed to take his wife).

    Among the things that impressed him was hamburgers. “Mikoyan plunked down Stalinapproved scarce hard currency for twentytwo American hamburger grills,” writes Bremzen. At some point the buns got dropped, but the meat patties survived and became one of the most popular, cheap Soviet foods — called Mikoyan cutlets. American ice cream-making technology was another import. “You, Anastas, care more about ice cream, than about communism,” joked Stalin. Perhaps it helped Mikoyan survive.

    Football Kicks
    In The Starostin brothers provided the circuses to go with the bread. Football had come to Russia in the early 20th century. The team that would become Dynamo was actually started by two British brothers who came to Moscow to start a mill (which raises the tantalising prospect that they might have got the Russians playing cricket if the weather was better).

    But the Bolsheviks initially had as little interest in sports as food. Football was allowed as a way for workers to exercise themselves, and teams were linked to where they worked. CSKA was for the army, Lokomotiv for railway workers, Torpedo for automotive workers and, most notoriously, Dynamo was taken over by the secret services, the precursors to the KGB. Inevitably work politics came to interfere with playing.

    Nikolai Starostin changed that. A natural sportsman, he was the head of both the Soviet national football and ice hockey teams, and this attracted the attention of a few Bolshevik leaders. With their support, and the help of his brothers, he set up Spartak, named after Spartan warriors, ostensibly as the team of craftsmen and professionals but essentially the one team where football players ran things themselves.


    This did mean that without large institutional support Spartak could not hope to have its own stadium. But it was free to take risks in other ways —and none was larger than the one Starostin took in 1936 when he staged an exhibition football match at the heart of Russian power, in Red Square itself, before Stalin, who had shown no interest in football till then.
    Otkritie stadium
    Otkritie stadium, which will be called the Spartak Stadium during the World Cup

    This was such a scary prospect that no other team was willing to play them, so two Spartak teams faced off in an elaborately choreographed game. It worked. Stalin was entertained enough to give tacit approval to the growth of football, and Spartak was soon Russia’s leading team.

    But this attracted a powerful enemy. The one football-mad leader was Lavrenty Beria, the sinister head of the secret service. Dinamo was almost his personal team and he was furious at how often it was beaten by Spartak.

    He harassed the Starostins and, in 1942, after Spartak’s high-placed sponsors were destroyed in one of Stalin’s purges, he managed to have them arrested and sent to Siberia. Yet football saved them. At all the prison camps Nikolai was sent to, the officers turned out to be Spartak fans, who treated him well and gave him the job of organising prison football (his brothers didn’t fare quite so well).
    Russian Individuals
    (L-R) Football player Nikolai Starostin, commissar for internal affairs Genrikh Yagoda, Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin, commissar for transport Lazar Kaganovich and member of the Politburo Andrei Andreyev.

    For a while he was even brought back to Moscow by Stalin’s son, a football lover, who had him stay in his own house to protect him from Beria.

    Eventually Beria got him sent to Kazakhstan, where he made their football team one of the most formidable in the Soviet Union. If Beria has seized power after Stalin’s death in 1953, as he tried, Starostin’s fate would have been dire, but luckily the Politburo was as scared of the prospect, and managed to have Beria executed.


    Starostin came back a hero, and an example of how football could help someone survive Stalin’s years of terror, much as food helped Mikoyan survive too. The new stadium, with its statues, is a posthumous tribute. Bread and circuses might keep autocrats in power, but they can sometimes also help a decent person survive.

    World Cup 2018: Detailed Coverage


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