Comrade Jim
The incredible life of Jim Riordan, scholar, author, and the first ever Briton to play for the Soviet league. An interview by Sean O’Connor.
Jim Riordan was an English scholar, author and prominent voice in sport studies. He lead an all-round exceptional life, that revolved around his love for Soviet Russia and football. Born in Portsmouth on the eve of the First World War, Riordan learned Russian during National Service training in the RAF. In 1960, he graduated in Russian Studies at the University of Birmingham, and started a successful academic career, that led him to become one of the world’s most respected experts on Sport in the USSR.
Jim Riordan, described himself as “a working-class oik”, and it’s certainly this spirit that helped him to do such groundbreaking work investigating Soviet sport philosophy, which culminated in his book, Sport in Soviet Society (1977). For five long years, during the cold war, Riordan was based in Moscow and his status of ‘visiting communist from the west’ helped him to gain access to many important people in the Soviet Union both in sports and politics: Igor Netto, Guy Burgess, Yuri Gagarin, Nikita Khrushchev, just to name a few.
But even more remarkably, Jim Riordan played twice for Spartak Moscow, making him the first ever Briton to ever play in the Soviet league.
Eventually he found himself ostracized and denounced as anti-Soviet in a Kafka-esque scenario, and returned to England, where he went on to teach Russian at Surrey University. His eye-opening autobiography, Comrade Jim: The Spy who Played for Spartak (although Riordan was never actually a spy) is a first-hand account of a key period in post-war history, with an amazing football story at its heart.
Sean O’Connor interviewed Riordan just a few years before his death in 2012, about his Moscow days and the rise of Russian football today.
Jim, your book is an autobiography and somewhat an ode to football. How did the idea for ‘Comrade Jim’ come about?
John Foot had published a book on Italian football (Calcio) and I thought I could bang out a book on Russian football, which I thought was far more interesting than Italian football. The publishers were not interested in that but asked me four times if I wanted to write my life story. In turn, I thought that topic wasn’t that interesting. I was really dumbfounded but so many things happened in Moscow that when you look back you think why weren’t you just knocked for six?
The book was not easy to write. I was somewhat hesitant because many of people I had met, including British ex-communists and Russian footballers I had known very well did not want to talk about the past. They claimed to have had an illness and could not remember. Their refusal to speak was absolutely incredible for me.
Tell us about when you were asked to play for Spartak Moscow.
I had started having kickabouts on the practice pitches behind Spartak’s stadium. One morning I noticed a mate of mine, Gennady Logofet, standing on the touchline. Gennady had been assigned to help me in my PhD on the history of Russian sport, and also happened to play right back for Spartak and the national team. Gennady was my best friend from those years. I was recently in Moscow recently and he wouldn’t meet me. It makes me incredibly and painfully sad to hear that he ‘lost his memory’ of that period.
Gennady wasn’t alone that morning. There was another big, black-haired, Armenian-looking fellow. It was Nikita Simonyan, Spartak’s manager. They saw me play and he eventually invited me to Tarasovka, the team’s main training ground.
I accepted happily and I joined the practice, trying not to get too much in the way. That next Sunday, I played, as I always did with the Diplomatic Corps. I was a Sunday league played for fun by lots of Brits and Irish expats. After the game I got the call––‘Can you come along this afternoon?’. I went over at 2 o’clock all sweaty and dusty and they dropped the bombshell: I was going to play for Spartak!
I was told to stand in the middle and not get caught out against a pacy centre-forward. Fortunately, I didn’t have one against me. I played again two or three weeks later so I obviously wasn’t that bad. I think we drew one and won the other.
Some of the players weren’t terribly friendly I have to say, especially the captain, Igor Netto. He hadn’t changed his attitude many years later: at a veterans game here in Portsmouth, he remembered me at once and instead of saying ‘Oh Jim, how nice to see you’, he said: ‘you weren’t fit, you let us down!’
You played regularly with British Embassy staff in Moscow. Wasn’t it odd for a communist to be knocking around with the UK diplomats? Did they ever suspect you of being a spy?
I never believed there shouldn’t be contacts between fellow Brits, whether journalists, students or ‘diplomats’. Also, I did not go around with a communist badge on my chest. The British community was quite amazing. As long as you had a passport, it was: ‘Come on in mate! Have a pint and join our football team on the Sunday!’. I was amazed with how Burgess and Maclean got away with spying for so long but their old school tie protected them from suspicion. I became very close with both of them. I was a pallbearer Guy Burgess’s funeral alongside Donald.
I’ve read people questioning you ever played for Spartak
I know. I’ve even read people questioning whether I was ever at the Higher Party School. Fortunately when I went back to Moscow to film a documentary for the BBC, I found a copy of my school registration in the archives, and it’s in the book.
At Spartak, our kit was always taken from us. Sometimes there would be a little slip of paper with the lineups as you went in, but often there wasn’t. There was no TV coverage. The crowd relied on the stadium announcer for the team news and I was told I was introduced as ‘Yakov Eeordahnov’, a Russian version of my name. As we were filming, my idea was to ask Simonyan directly for his testimony of my playing days. But the BBC Russian service correspondent correctly predicted that, since I wasn’t registered, he would never admit it. Spartak just don’t want to go there, even this long after the event.
The crowd relied on the stadium announcer for the team news and I was told I was introduced as ‘Yakov Eeordahnov’, a Russian version of my name.
A lot of things went on in Russian football at the time. There were riots, bribes, political interference. A team was even killed in a plane crash, and the news wasn’t divulgated. There was an enormous amount of corruption, and rules weren’t always abided to.
So if you were unregistered and there was little recorded information, it’s not surprising some people have questioned your story.
Alexei Smertin has spoken to people in Moscow who said they remembered me. There are traces. I know there’s a cigarette-card of me. Before we had television, that was our way of learning about players.
I still feel a little embarrassment about the fact so many people won’t talk about the past in Moscow. Not just my football past but my communist past too. I am still a member of the communist party. Not that I do anything about it except read the Morning Star now and again and write a journal for Portsmouth pensioners.
This ‘collective amnesia’ in Russia is mentioned a lot in your work.
I went back to do a documentary for the BBC on it called ‘School for Communists’ and found exactly the same thing there — no one wanted to speak to me about it. I was just baffled by the amount of old friends who would not recognize me. My daughter Tanya is named after this girl at the Higher Party School my wife and I were very close to, but even her, on my return said ‘I can’t see you’ and put the phone down.
It is the most weird thing, a Russian thing. I lived there five years and have spent 30 years writing and lecturing on Russian politics and history and I still find it baffling. I can make excuses for it but it is bloody painful.
But sadly it is very common. Even Russian players like Rinat Dassayev (a three-time World Cup hero) refuse to talk about their past in the Soviet Union.
What about your fellow British Communists?
I was sent by the British Communist Party in 1961 to the Higher Party School in Moscow, a secret and prestigious place for training foreign communists, training in Marxism, Leninism, philosophy and the history of the Soviet Union, that is.
When researching for the documentary, I thought to reach out to the other four British communists who were there with me. Only one helped me, the others were either dead, refused to be quoted on the record, or flat out ignored me.
How was your work received in England?
When the book came out, a review in the Morning Star traduced what I had read and slated it as an anti-communist rant! I wrote back and ended with a Russian saying: a country that does not know its past does not know its future. I think the same goes for a political party.
There seemed to be a real enthusiasm in that age about Communism,
one that is unthinkable today.
A third of the world lived under communism then. Cuba and a lot of African countries had chosen socialism rather than capitalism. It felt like communism was on the march and that the Soviet Union was on a par with the US, at least militarily. But it was also ahead in various industries — gas and steel for instance.
But before long the cracks began to appear on the social side of things. There was the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and those in Poland and East Germany of course and the crimes of Stalin were also coming to light.
Because I had a degree in Russian from Birmingham University, I was aware of the cost and was always skeptical whether Soviet communism was the one I wanted. Now I am absolutely certain it was not.
The USSR’s triumph in first European Championship in 1960, is hardly mentioned in your book.
I was just finishing my PGCE at the Institute of Education in London and was about to leave for Moscow then! Until Stalin died in 1953, the attitude was if we can’t win, we won’t take part. But when Dynamo Moscow came to Britain in 1945, they dazzled, yet the Soviets did not capitalize on that at all. I think they were as astonished as the Arsenal and Chelsea fans were at how well they had done.
Stalin concentrated in the period up to 1941 when they entered the War on the workers’ sports movement and criticized the Olympics and World Cup as bourgeois institutions, so there was virtually no contact between Soviet and world football at all.
After the War, when Hitler had more or less destroyed all the worker organizations, and Stalin changed his mind and joined the Olympic movement in 1951. But he focused on the Olympics quite openly to prove that the Soviet sports system was superior to the capitalist one.
Apart from initially in space technology, sport was the only arena where they could beat the West. But football had not yet been deemed that important by the USSR.
How do Vladimir Putin, the de-facto president
and Roman Abramovich fit into it?
I’m a bit uncertain about Putin because he is thoroughly undemocratic and there is an enormous amount of corruption, but he has reined in the oligarchs and he has taken heart from the old Soviet policy of using sport in the Olympic Games to demonstrate superiority over decadent Western nations.
Putin feels there is a need for an injection of patriotism so he has forced the oligarchs to invest in the major sports like basketball (CSKA are European Champions), ice hockey (Russia are world champions) and especially in football and tennis. He has forced Abramovich to pay almost all the wages of Guus Hiddink, the national team manager by implicitly threatening to take his Sibneft (Siberian Oil) assets from him if he does not. There are plenty of examples of Russians who did not play ball with Putin who ended up poisoned or died in mysterious helicopter crashes.
Are we right to assume there is a sinister hand
behind recent Russian soccer success?
The Russian press reported there were 5,000 hit killings in Russia the year before last without anyone being charged. Several of those were in the scramble to gain control of Russian and Ukrainian football teams. Shakhtar Donetsk were taken over by a mafia boss who was blown to smithereens for example.
The managing director of Spartak was shot dead at her dacha. The CSKA owner was murdered and his son had to flee abroad. The clubs are trying to become more respectable now but the threat is still there that you could end up like Mikhail Khordokovski, the Yukos boss who was charged with tax evasion and given nine years in a Siberian prison camp. Abramovich is so rich and like many of the oligarchs he does not know what to do with his money anyway so he uses football as a form of money-laundering.
Will new money propel Russian teams to the top of Europe?
Things have settled down as the oligarchs who have invested in clubs know they are not going to make a profit out of them, because very few people are going to watch Russian football.
Last season the average gate for a Russian Premiership match was only 11,000. When I played, the stadium was filled with 50,000 people! This is a very big drop since Soviet times. And they are not making a lot of money from television because they have matches from all over the world on TV at the same time.
Football is a gloss on the oligarchs’ more nefarious activities. Abramovich is also paying about £10m for a new national stadium along with other oligarchs. Smertin tells me the Altai region––not too far from the Chinese border––has seen a lot of investment from Abramovich in various junior sports schools. He seems to have invested in about 150 schools in a project called ‘Operation Excellence’.
There must also be a patriotic urge beyond the oligarchs’ self-aggrandizement when it comes to Russian football.
Russia felt humiliated by 1991 because the buffer states had broken away and 14 of the 15 states of the old Soviet Union had left too. Russia had been enfeebled militarily and it felt it had completely lost its place as a world power, so there is a lot of desire to bring glory back. To that end, football is looked upon as a medium for doing that because it is so much in the public eye.
Three or four years ago Spartak’s team was all made up of foreigners, second-rate Brazilians and Africans and so forth. But now they have passed a regulation saying the majority of players on the field must be Russian. When Zenit played Rangers in the UEFA Cup Final, there were six Russians in the side. They are very keen to send Russian players abroad in order to get experience of top football and also to help any future bid for a World Cup.
Will the World Cup be in Russia soon then?
I think it is almost certain that they will bid. FIFA will be looking to make some money after South Africa and Brazil where they won’t make much, and in the money stakes, Russia will win hands down. Politics will come into it of course but they certainly have the bribes and the money to win a few people over.
Those vast Russian amphitheatres of football are unmistakable.
During the thirties there was a concentration on building Russia into an industrialized nation as millions of peasants from the countryside poured into the towns. There was a feeling that you needed bread and circuses and cults of personality. There was a spirit of gigantism. I hesitate to make comparisons with Franco and Mussolini and the way they used football, partly because it is thanks to the Russians we defeated fascism, but there is a lot of similarity with the giant stadia they built in Russia and what was going on in places like Italy and Germany at that time.
Russia did build the Stalin stadium in 1936 (now the Dinamo Stadium) and then began to build 100,000-seater stadia in various other parts of the country. Kiev had the Khrushchev stadium and Leningrad had one of the most beautiful stadia I have been to. They also started to build a 350,000-seat stadium in Moscow but it was never completed.
At the same time they pulled down the old cathedral in Moscow and began to build the Palace of Sovietism which would have been bigger than the Empire State Building but it fell down after two stories had gone up. That was then turned into this enormous outdoor swimming pool, which the current Mayor of Moscow, another mafia boss called Yuri Luzhkov, has taken down and replaced with a new cathedral.
I can still see Netto in the dressing room giving a sort of political motivating talk to the players and I recall my shirt not being long enough, [but] I am still the only Englishman to have played for a Soviet football team!
What sticks in your mind from the day you got that phone call in Moscow?It was forty years ago but I can still see Netto in the dressing room giving a sort of political motivating talk to the players and I recall my shirt not being long enough. The second game I was up against a very beefy centre-forward who was boss-eyed and a dirty bugger! He would nudge me in the back when we went up for a high ball.
I remember the crowd whistling. We didn’t have whistling in British football. I wasn’t sure if it was for me or against me. That was the end of my Spartak career though I did play a few times for the reserves.
I am still the only Englishman to have played for a Soviet football team!
This interview was was originally published on Soccerphile.
