The Death Match (, ) is a name given in postwar Soviet historiography to the football match played in Kyiv in Reichskommissariat Ukraine (abbreviated RKU) under occupation by Nazi Germany. The Kyiv city team Start (Cyrillic: Старт), which represented the city's Bread Factory No.1, played several football games in World War II. The team was composed mostly of former professional footballers of Dynamo Kyiv and Lokomotyv Kyiv, all of whom were forced to work at the factory under the Nazi occupation authority and were made to produce bread for German soldiers.
On August 6, 1942, FC Start played the German team Flakelf. There were an estimated 2,000 spectators in attendance, each paying five karbovanets.
Background
A Kyiv native Georgiy Kuzmin points out in his book Facts and fiction of our football (Были и небыли нашего футбола) that the first squads of Dynamo Kyiv included a number of regular Cheka members, among whom was Kostiantyn Fomin. Kostiantyn Fomin is known to have participated in repressions against Kharkiv sportsmen of Polish descent during 1935–1936. Prior to World War II, Fomin also played for Lokomotyv.
Because players were not getting paid regularly, the football team of Dynamo for some time had a shortage of playing staff (only eight players). The team's captain Konstantin Shchegotsky even tried to escape to Dnipropetrovsk, where he played for FC Dynamo Dnipropetrovsk, but was forced to come back. During the Holodomor in 1932–33, half of the team escaped to Ivanovo near Moscow. Two of Dynamo's players, Pionkovsky and Sviridovsky, were arrested by NKVD agents during an attempt to exchange several cuts of cloth for products and therefore had to work "for the good of the country" for two years in a penal colony. During the Great Purge in 1938, Piontkovsky, and one of the Dynamo's team creators, Barminsky were targeted, and eventually shot in 1941. The season was never completed, as Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Several Dynamo Kyiv players joined the military and went off to fight. The initial success of the Wehrmacht allowed it to capture the city from the Red Army. Several of the Dynamo Kyiv players who had survived the onslaught found themselves in prisoner-of-war camps.
In taking Kyiv, the Germans captured over 600,000 Soviet soldiers. The city was under a strict occupation regime; a curfew on civilians was enforced, and universities and schools were shut down. Ukrainian youth over 15 years and adults under 60 years old were submitted to labour obligations. Thousands of inhabitants were deported to Germany for forced labour. The Germans controlled the Ukrainian police, who took part in the hunt for Bolsheviks and Jews.
Myth
Creation
In autumn of 1943 after the withdrawal of the German troops from the city of Kyiv and the re-establishment of Soviet administration, writer Lev Kassil was the first to report about the death of Dynamo players murdered by the Germans. But his report in the newspaper Izvestiya did not mention the football match. The expression "Death Match" first appeared after the war, in the newspaper Stalinskoye plemya ("Stalin's tribe") on August 24, 1946 (#164, page 3) where a film script of Aleksandr Borshchagovsky was published. In 1958, he published his novel Alerting Clouds (Trevozhnye oblaka) about the match. Also in 1958, Piotr Severov and Naum Khalemsky published their novel The Last Duel (Posledni poyedinok).
These two novels provided the inspiration for Yevgeny Karelov's black and white film Third Time (Тreti time). According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, about 32 million spectators in total saw it in the Soviet cinemas. The "Death Match" also became a very popular subject of the Soviet press. None of these publications mentioned survivors of the match.
The Start players who survived the Nazi occupation did not appear in public. In the years immediately following the end of World War II, they were initially suspected as having collaborated with the Nazis, and were interrogated and then kept under surveillance by the secret police (NKVD) for several years.