In November 1945 the Soviet champions came to Britain as guests and left as a riddle. They were charming at Chelsea, devastating in Cardiff, invisible at White Hart Lane and stubborn at Ibrox. British football watched all of it and decided it had been about politics.
The flowers came first. On the afternoon of Tuesday 13 November 1945, eleven men in royal blue walked onto the pitch at Stamford Bridge, each carrying a bunch of red and white carnations. TIME magazine reported that each player “presented to his opposite number on Britain’s Chelsea Club” his bouquet. The Chelsea players, who’d been told little about what to expect, stood holding them. They’d brought gifts too, cigar lighters, but there’s a difference between handing over a lighter and receiving an armful of carnations in front of a full house in Fulham.
The crowd noticed. In the account pieced together by BBC Wales’ Chris Howells, one spectator shouted the line that’s followed the tour ever since: “What’s this then – Chelsea’s funeral?”
It got a laugh. In Soviet football the bouquet was a routine courtesy. At Stamford Bridge it looked faintly absurd: foreign, sentimental, slightly theatrical. The men carrying the flowers had been warming up on the pitch a quarter of an hour before kick-off, running repetitive drills with several balls, and the crowd had found that odd as well. Wasn’t it a waste of energy? The British game had its routines and none of them looked like this.
By the end of the afternoon the jokes had stopped. By the end of the month Britain had been through just about every reaction a football culture can have to something new. It was curious, then delighted, then alarmed, then angry, and finally, as the visitors flew home, it settled on indifference. The flowers are what people remember. What should have been remembered was the football.
A guest nobody had asked for
The war in Europe had ended in May 1945, and in the Pacific in August. The goodwill between Britain and its Soviet ally was real, but it was already wearing thin. Over that year the argument about Europe’s future had soured. The Soviets were occupying most of Eastern Europe and the Americans weren’t sharing atomic secrets. Football was meant to sit outside all of that, and it couldn’t.
No Russian side had ever played in Britain. The invitation started with the English Football Association, but the British government was wary of it. According to the BBC’s account, the Foreign Office felt that “it would take much more than a football match to break down the real barriers which the Soviet government firmly believe in”. Only after pressure from the Moscow embassy did Whitehall give way, and even then it kept its distance by presenting the visitors as guests of the FA rather than of the state.
The Soviet side took it far more seriously. Dynamo Moscow’s own history of the tour says that straight after the 1945 Soviet Cup final, which Dynamo lost to the army club CDKA, head coach Mikhail Yakushin was summoned to the Kremlin. There Kliment Voroshilov, the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers who oversaw Soviet sport, asked him directly whether Dynamo could compete on equal terms with the strongest clubs in Europe. Yakushin, the club says, answered “without hesitation” that his players would not disgrace Soviet football. The historian Douglas Gorman records a further claim, which he flags as an allegation: that the team was taken to see Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD and Dynamo’s patron, and that both made clear how much winning mattered.
That matters for one reason that wasn’t widely known in Britain at the time. Dynamo was not just any club. As the historian Robert Edelman put it in History Today in 1993, “Dynamo, their greatest rival, was the team of the secret police.” Edelman called the trip “the first post-war example of the Soviet regime’s use of sport for diplomatic and political purposes.”
Yakushin had three weeks. Dynamo’s account says the squad went to a training camp at Mytishchi outside Moscow, where an early winter meant the players’ daily exercises included clearing snow off the pitch. The work was gymnastics, running and jumping. The club also strengthened the squad by borrowing from elsewhere. Vsevolod Bobrov, the top scorer in the Soviet championship with 24 goals, came from CDKA. Yevgeny Arkhangelsky and Boris Oreshkin came from Dynamo Leningrad. Edelman again: “In 1945, however, the British did not know, and the Russians were not revealing, one crucial fact. Bobrov was not a Dynamo man.”
Early on 4 November, two small planes left Moscow carrying a party of 38.
Barracks without sheets
The welcome was not a good one. The FA had booked the Dynamo party into Wellington Barracks near St James’s Park and, the BBC’s account notes, had failed to make sure the beds had sheets and pillows. The delegation refused to do anything until the accommodation and food were sorted out. They ended up at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, where the players were said to be enjoying the Turkish baths.
The Soviets had arrived with conditions as well. A charter of 14 points set out how the tour would run: all matches against professional clubs, one of them against Arsenal, no shirt numbers for the Dynamo players, and at least one substitute allowed. Yakushin explained the Arsenal demand in a line Gorman preserves: “To come to London and not play Arsenal would be like visiting Cairo without seeing the pyramids.” After long negotiations the two sides agreed a three-match programme, with a possible fourth to be discussed later.
They’d also done their homework. Gorman reports that before the tour, a telephone call to the Chelsea manager Billy Birrell to gather information “had lasted 23 minutes and cost £92”. Chelsea’s own club history adds that Moscow radio broadcast a long interview with Birrell about the club and its team. The Dynamo party also watched Chelsea play a league game before meeting them.
The British press did very little of the same. The Evening Standard, quoted by the BBC, gave its readers the consensus view: “Don’t expect much from Dynamo. They are only beginners, blue-collars, amateurs.”
In Moscow the assumption ran the other way. Years later, in the 2001 documentary More Than Just Football, the forward Konstantin Beskov recalled: “Until those games, we only knew that England was the motherland of football, that English football was the best in the world.” His team-mate Leonid Solovyov remembered being told something more vivid: “They told us that Englishmen are awesome, that they can carry the ball across the fields on their heads.”
So one side expected beginners and the other expected supermen. Neither got what it expected.
Before the first game Yakushin got his team used to English grass. “We held several training sessions at London stadiums,” he recalled in Dynamo’s account. “The grass surface and the general condition of the pitches at any stadium in England turned out to be excellent. Here I staged two-goal ‘matches’ between my teammates. These training games were very useful for us. Now I knew we were ready.”
Stamford Bridge
The streets of Fulham were full by early afternoon on 13 November. Howells’ account describes front gardens rented out for bicycle storage, sellers of toffee apples, oranges and programmes on the street corners, and touts getting £4 for tickets with a face value of ten shillings. Servicemen in uniform walked alongside shift workers. Some people talked their way into neighbouring houses for a view. Others walked along the railway lines to slip in unseen. Steeplejacks and men with military training climbed the backs of the stands and sat on the roofs, a hundred feet up.
Nobody agrees on how many got in. Gorman gives the official figure as 74,496 and notes an estimate of around 100,000 actually inside. TIME said 85,000, “a British record”. Dynamo’s own history says 90,000. Chelsea’s history puts it at around 20,000 over capacity. The safest description is the one everybody shared: the ground was overflowing, and people were watching from places that weren’t meant to be stands at all.
At 2.25pm Dynamo came out of the tunnel. The players had no numbers on their backs. Their shorts had a white band around the thigh. They warmed up, presented the flowers and lined up: Khomich in goal; Radikorsky, Semichastny and Stankevich; Leonid Solovyov and Blinkov; and up front Arkhangelsky, Kartsev, Beskov, Bobrov and Sergei Solovyov. Chelsea fielded Tommy Lawton, the England centre-forward, who had signed from Everton only five days earlier, on 8 November, and had played one league game before facing the Russians. Chelsea also had Joe Bacuzzi of Fulham, who was guesting at full-back in place of the injured Alex White. That detail would matter later.
For 20 minutes Chelsea were overrun. The BBC’s account says Dynamo had four shots saved and hit the post twice in that spell, with the passing and moving pulling the home defence apart. TIME‘s correspondent saw it slightly differently: the visitors “set up three ripe scoring plays but overeagerly shot too high or too wide.” Either way the chances were there and they weren’t going in.
Then Chelsea scored, against the run of play. According to the match details gathered by Gorman and by Dynamo’s history, Len Goulden scored after a pass from Lawton. Shortly afterwards Jimmy Williams added a second when, in the Dynamo account, a shot from Stankevich hit his foot and went in. Just before half-time Dynamo got a penalty. Leonid Solovyov had missed only one penalty in his career. He hit this one cleanly and it came back off the post. “None of my team-mates said a word about it,” he remembered.
Something changed at half-time. The radio commentator travelling with the party, Vadim Sinyavsky according to Gorman’s list of the touring party, had been cautious in the first half. When Vasily Kartsev took a pass from Arkhangelsky, went past two defenders and drove a shot in from the edge of the area, Sinyavsky let go. TIME printed what Moscow heard: “Steady, steady, comrades, steady, take a glass of water—yes, yes, he’s through, he has scored. Yes, comrades, you can kiss him.”
The crowd went with it. TIME reported that “Sporting Britons cheered each Russian goal, cried ‘Up the Soviets!'” Arkhangelsky made it 2-2 with a cross-shot that took a deflection. Lawton restored Chelsea’s lead late on with a towering header, the sort of goal the English game was built to produce. Then Radikorsky won the ball and fed Arkhangelsky, whose cross bounced off a Chelsea player to Bobrov. The BBC’s account notes that Bobrov “would otherwise have been offside”. He scored, and the goal stood. The sources disagree about the minutes. Gorman’s match details and Dynamo’s account put the goals in the 23rd, 30th, 65th, 71st, 77th and 83rd minutes, while the BBC’s narrative has Lawton’s header on 81. They all agree on the score: 3-3.
When the final whistle went, people ran onto the pitch and carried some of the Russian players to the tunnel on their shoulders. Over the airwaves the commentator signed off for listeners in the Soviet Union: “Listen, comrades in Moscow, Leningrad, Tiflis and Berlin—we have passed our first exam with honor.”
The English players weren’t talking about honour. They were talking about how Dynamo played. “Dynamo were one of the fastest teams I have ever seen in my life,” Lawton said, in the words preserved by the BBC. “They flash the ball from man to man in bewildering fashion, often while standing still.” John Harris, the Chelsea captain, talked about the goalkeeper: “At least two of Lawton’s kicks were of such a type that no goalkeeper would catch, but Khomich jumped like a tiger and caught them.” Alexei Khomich was “Tiger” from then on.
The Times, Dynamo’s account notes, ran a report the next day under the headline “Dynamo’s Footballers Are First-Class Players”. The Soviet press, as expected, liked the comeback more than the draw. “While the first half was lost 0-2, the second was won 3-1,” wrote Krasny Sport‘s correspondent Mikhail Tovarovsky from London. Kartsev himself was more honest about how it had felt. “I am deeply convinced that if we had scored the first goal ten minutes earlier, the outcome of the match would have been different,” he said. “After all, we had to fight not only with the opponent, but also with ourselves, and I don’t know which was more difficult.”
Yakushin’s judgement was technical: “Technically, the English played excellently, but Dynamo managed to surpass them with tactical coherence, a fast pace, and greater stamina.”
That last phrase was a diagnosis, and British football would spend the next eight years not hearing it.
Ninian Park
The FA would not move Saturday fixtures for any of its leading clubs, so the second match went to a club that could spare the date. That was Cardiff City of the Third Division South.
Cardiff made more of a welcome than London had. The city had had a royal visit three days earlier, and the station was still covered in bunting when the Moscow party arrived. In the coalfields, steelworks and docks of south Wales, sympathy for socialism ran deep. The BBC’s account records that once the royals had gone, the hammer and sickle was raised over City Hall. There was a civic reception. On 17 November, before kick-off at Ninian Park, a band in uniform played hymns and the crowd sang along. The BBC puts the crowd at 40,000 and Gorman at 45,000.
The gifts went the other way this time. TIME noted that the Russians’ pre-match offering was “a single bunch of roses”. From the Welsh side, the Dynamo players received “eleven miniature silver miners’ lamps”. One of those lamps is still in the Dynamo museum in Moscow. The Krasny Sport correspondent connected the gift to an earlier one: “I remembered the original gift that Welsh footballers sent to Moscow athletes two years ago, at the height of the war – a football bearing around 700 signatures from Welsh players.”
Then Dynamo took Cardiff apart. Bobrov scored in the sixth minute and Beskov in the tenth, according to Dynamo’s account, and Arkhangelsky made it three after 25 minutes. At half-time, with his team three up and in full control, Yakushin turned on Bobrov in the dressing room and told him to play for the team rather than for himself. Dynamo scored seven more in the second half, five of them in eight minutes. The final score was 10-1. By Dynamo’s count, Beskov scored four, Bobrov three and Arkhangelsky three.
The BBC’s account calls it “by far the heaviest loss any British side had suffered at the hands of foreign opposition”. The Daily Mail tried to make it Cardiff’s problem: “No English club could have beaten Cardiff by such a score.” It was a strange kind of comfort, since it conceded that a Soviet club had just done exactly that.
The Soviet correspondent was more generous to the losers than the British paper was. “It’s by no means true that Cardiff played poorly,” Krasny Sport reported. “On the contrary, at times it seemed to me that the Cardiff team outperformed Chelsea in terms of pace and attacking intensity. But Dynamo, playing with greater enthusiasm and confidence, proved stronger.”
Yakushin noticed the change in the coverage straight away. “This made a strong impression on British sporting circles,” he said. “The newspapers unanimously changed their tune and have already praised us as first-class footballers.”
The beginners had become first-class players within four days. What had changed was the story Britain was telling about them. The BBC’s account captures the mood well: the Soviet Union was supposed to be a ravaged country struggling to rebuild, and the quality of its football “tore right into the heart of British post-war confidence”. The next fixture was Arsenal. Arsenal were the club Dynamo had specifically asked for, and they would be the place to put things right.
The Arsenal problem
Arsenal in November 1945 weren’t the Arsenal of the 1930s. Highbury was still being used by the authorities, having served as an Air Raid Precautions centre, so the match was moved to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane. More importantly, Arsenal didn’t have a team. Gorman records that 44 of the club’s 46 professionals were still in the forces.
The manager, George Allison, did what clubs had been doing throughout the war: he brought in guests. Six of them came in, including Stanley Matthews of Stoke and Stan Mortensen of Blackpool. Joe Bacuzzi came too, the same Fulham full-back who’d played for Chelsea a week earlier, this time replacing Eddie Hapgood, who was fog-bound somewhere on the Continent. Allison was open about the pressure he was under. According to Gorman, he said that “higher authorities had made a special request [for Matthews to play] as a compliment to the Russians”. He went further. “The Russians still regard Arsenal as the greatest English club and we must do our best to field a side worthy of upholding our position in the football world,” he said. “I cannot, in fairness to them, put out a team of inexperienced boys against such masters of the game.”
Ten days earlier the press had called them beginners. Now the Arsenal manager was calling them masters of the game.
Dynamo saw the Arsenal team sheet for what it was. The captain, Mikhail Semichastny, issued a statement: “The composition of the English team published in the British newspapers differs considerably from the Arsenal team which was previously made known to the Dynamo representatives. Taking into consideration the composition of the English football team, we consider that the Dynamo team will meet one of the representative English teams.” The BBC’s account calls the complaint “arguably a bit rich”, given that Dynamo had borrowed players from other Soviet clubs themselves. Not all of the British press backed Allison either. The Times, quoted by Edelman, put it in one sentence: “The Russians also have been at war, but their football is not bad in consequence.”
Dynamo didn’t trust the arrangements, so it insisted that the match be refereed by its own official, Nikolai Latyshev. Then the weather made everything worse.
The match nobody saw
Wednesday 21 November 1945 brought a London pea-souper. Dynamo’s account gives the temperature as about 4°C and visibility of 40 metres. Dynamo wanted a postponement. The FA, with tens of thousands of tickets sold, wanted the game played. The crowd made the decision for them. According to the BBC’s account, queues had started at midnight, police had the gates opened at 10.30am, and by the time Latyshev inspected the pitch at midday an estimated 40,000 were already in. Gorman gives the final attendance as 54,620.
Latyshev made one practical adjustment: both linesmen ran the same side of the pitch. After that, the match largely happened out of sight.
Dynamo scored in the first minute, Bobrov finishing from Sergei Solovyov’s pass, before Arsenal had touched the ball. Most of the crowd didn’t see it. Arsenal equalised. Matthews was going past defenders as he liked and taking a fair amount of punishment for it. Khomich took plenty of crude charges, and at the other end the Arsenal goalkeeper, Wyn Griffiths, took two blows to the head. Mortensen put Arsenal ahead with a right-foot drive and, 30 seconds later, scored again after another Matthews dribble and cross. Beskov drifted through and pulled one back before the break. It was 3-2 to Arsenal at half-time. Griffiths was so badly concussed that, the BBC’s account records, he didn’t know the score. He was replaced by Harry Brown of Queens Park Rangers.
During the interval, Dynamo’s account says, an Arsenal representative came to the visitors’ dressing room and suggested stopping the game because of the fog. Dynamo said no.
Soon after the restart Dynamo equalised. The goal is credited to Sergei Solovyov in the BBC’s and Dynamo’s accounts and to Leonid Solovyov in Gorman’s match details. The BBC’s account calls it “blatantly offside”. Arsenal had a penalty appeal turned down. Latyshev then sent off George Drury for throwing a punch. Drury claimed he didn’t understand and, in the BBC’s phrase, “slinked away into the fog”. With visibility now under 30 yards, Solovyov collected the ball in an offside position and passed to Bobrov, who scored to make it 4-3.
Then came the incident Arsenal never forgave. Ronnie Rooke picked the ball up 40 yards out and ran at the defence. The BBC’s account describes Semichastny “practically rugby tackling” him and cutting his head open. Rooke threw the Dynamo captain off with an elbow, leaving him with a black eye, and drove a shot past Khomich from 25 yards. Latyshev disallowed the goal and gave Dynamo a free-kick for the original foul. Allison, by the BBC’s account, went to the Soviet Embassy’s First Secretary and offered to concede the match to stop the farce. The offer was refused, and Dynamo held on to win.
Khomich spent the afternoon trying to follow a game he couldn’t see. “The fog was so thick that I had no idea what was going on at the other goal,” he said in Dynamo’s account. “Only the applause and the roar of the crowd told me which way the ball was going.” For a goalkeeper he was unusually frank: “The English newspapers praised my performance, but I’m dissatisfied with it. Apart from the ‘foggy match,’ where anything was possible, at least half of the goals I scored in the other games could have been saved.”
Most of the crowd learned the score from the next morning’s papers. The Daily Mail‘s verdict, quoted in the BBC’s account, has lasted longer than any match report: “It was one of the most exciting games 54,000 people never saw.”
Each side came away with its own version. Arsenal blamed the fog and the referee and listed three decisions they said he’d got badly wrong. In Moscow, Komsomolskaya Pravda treated the match as a victory over a national side: “English football teams are the strongest in the world. It’s all the more gratifying to realize that the Moscow Dynamo team managed to play successfully not only against the strengthened club teams of Chelsea and Cardiff, but also to win a crucial match against the English national team, which played under the flag of Arsenal Football Club.”
Then there was the story that may or may not have happened. Gorman records “12 Dynamo players on the pitch at one point” among the match’s controversies. The Scottish Football Museum’s account of the tour is more careful and refers only to “allegations” that Dynamo had used the tactic in the fog. Nobody in the crowd could have counted. The allegation followed Dynamo to Glasgow anyway.
The Caskie affair
The fallout nearly ended the tour. But the matches had made a great deal of money, and Britain badly wanted to beat the Russians, so a fourth game was arranged. Gorman notes that it wasn’t confirmed until 19 November, when the tour was already under way. Aston Villa had printed 70,000 tickets for a match at Villa Park, and Belfast, Manchester and Dundee had all asked to host one. The fixture went to Ibrox. Rangers were given the job, in the Scottish Football Museum’s phrase, of “saving the reputation of British football”.
The party arrived at Glasgow Central on the overnight train at 6.45am on Monday 26 November, half an hour late. Gorman’s detailed reconstruction has them taken to the Beresford Hotel on Sauchiehall Street, “Glasgow’s first skyscraper”, for a breakfast of porridge and herring. That afternoon 18 Dynamo players trained at Ibrox while the Rangers players watched. Their tracksuits carried a large letter “D” on the chest. Observers noted that they liked to take the ball on the run, keep it low and shoot early from every angle.
Then came the row. After Arsenal, Dynamo were determined there would be no more guest players. Rangers had handed over a list of 18 players. On the Monday, the club completed the signing from Everton of the outside-left Jimmy Caskie, who had spent the war playing for Hibernian. Caskie wasn’t on the list. Dynamo’s response, quoted by Gorman: “We have come to play the Rangers, and by that we mean the players who helped them regularly. A list of 18 players was handed to us on behalf of the Rangers some days ago and we were surprised when we could not find Caskie’s name on it. This is why we objected.” They would refuse to play if he was picked.
Gorman’s analysis is useful because it doesn’t take sides. Caskie’s transfer was correct under British rules. But Lawton had joined Chelsea from Everton just days before playing Dynamo, Bacuzzi had turned out for two different clubs in eight days, and Arsenal’s team had looked to the visitors like a national side. To the Russians, a new signing arriving from Everton just in time looked like the same trick again. Rangers gave in. The chairman, James Bowie, had already given an assurance at the civic dinner that no guest players would be used. Charlie Johnston played at outside-left. Caskie made his Rangers debut the following Saturday.
Glasgow had its say anyway. On the Tuesday, half a dozen of the party took a trip down the Clyde on a tug. Gorman records that shipyard workers lined the rails of the ships and shouted “Who’s afraid of Caskie” and “We want Caskie”, which were translated for the guests. Someone had chalked a prediction on a half-finished hull: a 10-1 win for Rangers, the Cardiff result reversed. Komsomolskaya Pravda‘s correspondent saw other chalk messages that predicted “2-0, 3-0, and even 10-0 in favor of the Muscovites”. Red flags were waved for the wartime ally. The Glasgow academics acting as interpreters pointed out that most of the wartime Arctic convoys had sailed from the Clyde. And, as Gorman notes, it is alleged that part of the point of the trip was to make sure the visitors saw HMS Vanguard, the last British battleship, being fitted out. The Scottish Football Museum put it more drily: views of British sea power were afforded “just by chance”.
In the evening the party went to the La Scala cinema to watch Donald Duck and Sonja Henie.
Ibrox
On the morning of Wednesday 28 November the fog was back. It lifted in time. Fans were queueing three hours before the 2.15pm kick-off. Gorman lists ticket prices from 1s 6d on the terracing to £1 1s in the stand. The Scottish Football Museum records that 21-shilling stand tickets were changing hands on the black market for up to £10. The crowd was all-ticket and capped at 90,000, the first big match at Ibrox since wartime capacity limits had been lifted. Later accounts, including the Rangers Archives and a Glasgow reader quoted by the Guardian, put the figure at 95,000.
One of the crowd was nine years old. David Sands was supposed to be at school. His father had two tickets, and his parents decided that seeing “real Russians and all that” counted as an education. He watched from the trackside wall next to the tunnel. Seventy years on, writing for the Scottish Football Museum, he remembered the arguments in the playground beforehand about Dynamo’s white thigh bands. “One of the popular theories being it allowed them to find a teammate with a pass without having to look up at their jersey,” he wrote.
Dynamo did their elaborate warm-up. Rangers came out in thin blue and white hoops, Queen’s Park style, because Dynamo were wearing dark blue. Jock Shaw, the Rangers captain and a famously hard man, was presented with a bouquet, and the crowd sniggered. The sniggering had barely stopped when, after two or three minutes, Kartsev hit a 20-yard free-kick past Jerry Dawson.
Rangers won a penalty almost straight away. Billy Williamson was brought down. He’d only been released from a Royal Navy training course, Gorman notes, thanks to an understanding commanding officer and the alleged promise of ten stand tickets. Willie Waddell took the kick. The accounts differ on the detail. The museum says Khomich saved it onto the crossbar, Dynamo’s account says it hit the post, and the BBC’s says Waddell hit it straight at him. All agree it didn’t go in.
Then Dynamo scored the goal of the tour. Bobrov, on the edge of the area, drew two defenders and passed across to Beskov. Beskov played it back first time between the retreating defenders, and Kartsev, unmarked, struck it low into the far corner. The Daily Telegraph, quoted by the BBC, called it “as perfect a goal as has ever been scored at Ibrox”. Beskov’s own account, in Dynamo’s history, describes it as a set move run at speed: “after a period of ‘wandering,’ we suddenly launched an attack, adhering to the well-established ‘classic’ routine.” He’d also noticed that by the fourth match the British had worked them out: “At the stadium in Glasgow, we continued to play using our tactics, which by the fourth match were already well-known in England. The Scots took this into account.”
For young Sands it was going badly wrong. “For a youngster who saw Rangers as invincible, the game hadn’t followed the script,” he recalled, “with the great Jerry Dawson picking the ball out of the net twice, Waddell missing a penalty and ‘Tiger’ Khomich in the Dynamo goal was performing the acrobatics we had heard about.”
Rangers pulled one back shortly before half-time. A hooked ball dropped about eight yards out, Khomich went up for it and collided with the big centre-forward Jimmy Smith, and the ball went in off Smith. In the second half Rangers went more physical and Dynamo looked less comfortable. Under that tour’s rules, a goalkeeper and two outfield players could be replaced if a doctor certified they couldn’t carry on. Gorman’s match details show Nikolai Dementyev replacing Bobrov after 63 minutes and Jimmy Duncanson replacing Smith after 76.
Sands described what happened next:
“During the second half when Rangers were playing with more aggression, we saw something new, the game stopped and both teams made substitutions. After the Dynamo substitution the crowd were bewildered then amused by Torry Gillick running around counting the Dynamo players and pointing out to the referee that no player had left the park and they had twelve players.”
There are different versions of this too. A Glasgow reader quoted by the Guardian in 2003 put the twelfth man on at half-time and was in no doubt: Gillick “had to draw referee Tommy Thomson’s attention to the fact that Dynamo had 12 players on the field, having brought on a substitute at half-time without withdrawing anyone!” The museum’s account, written with Sands, suggests that Gillick, whose registration had been held by Everton until two days earlier, “may have been aware of allegations this tactic had been adopted in the dense fog against Arsenal”. Whether it was a trick or a mix-up, the headcount was put right.
Then came the equaliser. Williamson went past the full-back on the left and Rangers appealed for a penalty. The referee waved it away, then spoke to his linesman and gave it. Dynamo’s account calls the decision “baffling”. George Young hit the kick firmly to Khomich’s left and the goalkeeper barely moved. It finished 2-2.
Yakushin blamed tiredness and injuries. “Our attack was below its capabilities this time: fatigue took its toll,” he said in Dynamo’s account. “Furthermore, many of our players suffered serious injuries, and some had to be replaced with substitutes.”
That night Rangers gave a banquet at the St Enoch Hotel. Gorman records that Bowie presented a silver cup to Konstantin Andrianov, the head of the delegation. At 9.30pm the party left from St Enoch station, watched only by railwaymen.
“The Russians have gone”
A fifth match was hurriedly organised: Dynamo against an English select side at Villa Park, a last chance to beat them. It never took place. Just over a month after arriving, the party was recalled to Moscow. Dynamo’s account says they left London on 7 December after waiting for flying weather, and spent the delay walking through London’s parks, where the roses were still in bloom.
Dynamo’s account says British journalists demanded an immediate match between Dynamo and England, and that “the English football authorities refrained from such a proposal”. On 7 December, by the BBC’s account, BBC radio announced simply: “The Russians have gone.” Nobody listening needed to ask which Russians. Aston Villa were left with 70,000 tickets for a game that would never be played.
The final record was played four, won two, drawn two, scored 19 and conceded nine. Bobrov scored six, Beskov five, Arkhangelsky four and Kartsev three. Four penalties were given in four matches. Dynamo’s account counts three against Dynamo, one scored and two saved by Khomich, and one against Chelsea, which hit the post. In 2020 the novelist David Downing, author of Passovotchka, a book about the tour, summed it up for the BBC: “They only won two games, but their style of play left a scent of magic in the air.”
War minus the shooting
The best-known verdict on the tour came a week later, and it had almost nothing to say about the football. On 14 December 1945, George Orwell published “The Sporting Spirit” in Tribune.
“Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end,” it began, “it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.”
Orwell hadn’t seen any of the matches. He said so himself: of the Arsenal match he was “told by someone who was there” that a British and a Russian player had come to blows and the crowd had booed the referee, and “someone else informs me” that the Glasgow match “was simply a free-for-all from the start”. He had noticed the arguments over the Arsenal line-up, “typical of our nationalistic age”, and observed that “everyone answers these questions according to his political predilections”. He pointed out with some pleasure that “the sporting correspondent of the russophile News Chronicle took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was not an all-England team.”
From there he widened the argument to sport in general. “At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare,” he wrote. Nations “work themselves into furies over these absurd contests.” And then came the line that has outlived the essay itself: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
He ended with some advice. “I hope, therefore, that we shan’t follow up the visit of the Dynamos by sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so, then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and cannot be claimed to represent Britain as a whole.”
As polemic it’s brilliant, and as a reading of the tour it misses the point. Orwell’s essay records what the tour felt like politically: the suspicion, the arguments over line-ups and referees, the chilling of the alliance. It says nothing about Lawton’s “bewildering fashion”, the warm-ups, the passing drills, the forwards who swapped positions without numbers to tell anyone who was where. And in that respect it reflected British football’s own response. The arguments were remembered and the lessons were forgotten.
On reciprocal visits, at least, Britain did what Orwell wanted. The BBC’s account records that an invitation for the FA to tour the USSR in 1946 was firmly turned down. With the Cold War setting in, the government couldn’t risk any impression of Soviet superiority, even in a football match.
What the Russians took home
The Soviet state drew its own lesson, and it was the wrong one in the opposite direction. The players came home as heroes. Several were made Masters of Sport. A musical was staged in Moscow in which an English beauty tries to seduce Dynamo’s best player on the night before a match. A book appeared called 19-9, after the goal tally. Edelman’s verdict is blunt: “After Dynamo’s victories in England, Soviet journalists, coaches, and officials laid claim, with little basis, to the global superiority of Soviet soccer.”
The tour had shown that football could be used as a display of national strength, and the state didn’t forget it. Before another Dynamo tour, to Sweden in 1947, the players were again summoned to the Kremlin. The BBC’s account records that they were told to win 5-0, in memory of the Battle of Poltava in 1709. Beskov later remembered the minister having second thoughts: “Then the minister thought for a while and said: ‘Let them score one goal.'” He went on: “We played two matches [against league champions IFK Norrkoping and IFK Gothenburg]. The score in each of them was 5-1, just like he asked.”
In 1946 the USSR joined FIFA. But Edelman notes that no opponents of the calibre Dynamo had faced in Britain were taken on again until after Stalin’s death. The record built up in between was, in his words, “one of well-prepared episodic triumphs against opponents who were often far less motivated than their counterparts”. At the Helsinki Olympics in 1952, Yugoslavia beat the Soviet team in a replay. Beskov played in that team. Afterwards he was stripped of his title of Honoured Master of Sport. The defeat was so shameful in official eyes that, according to Edelman, the Soviet press didn’t report it at all. The flowers-and-roses tour of 1945 had become a pressure that could break players.
Beskov, the man who’d been told the English could carry the ball across the field on their heads, went on to coach. As Dynamo manager he would face Rangers again in the 1972 Cup Winners’ Cup final. What happened to Soviet football after that is a story FBH has told elsewhere.
The football Britain wasn’t ready for
Strip out the politics and the evidence from those 33 days is plain.
A Soviet club side, borrowing players, playing in a strange climate on grass it had first seen a week earlier, went unbeaten against Britain’s professional clubs. It came back from two down at Stamford Bridge. It scored ten at Ninian Park. It beat a heavily reinforced Arsenal team that included Matthews and Mortensen. It went two up in the first half hour at Ibrox. And it played in a recognisably different way. It warmed up before matches. It drilled patterns with several balls. It didn’t wear numbers, because, as Gorman puts it, Dynamo believed “no one player should stand out from another.” Its forwards interchanged constantly, a style that came to be known as Passovotchka. It demanded substitutes as a condition of touring, at a time when English football didn’t allow them. Its coach had a phrase for what beat Chelsea, “tactical coherence, a fast pace, and greater stamina”, and the English centre-forward had seen it from the inside: “They flash the ball from man to man in bewildering fashion, often while standing still.”
British football’s response came in stages, and none of them got to the point. First came condescension: they’re beginners. Then praise: they’re first-class players, said once the score was 10-1. Then excuses: Cardiff are only Third Division, Arsenal’s men are in uniform. Then grievance: the referee, the fog, the twelfth man. And finally politics, with Orwell’s essay as its high point: the whole thing was a mistake and shouldn’t be repeated.
It wasn’t repeated. The invitation to Moscow was declined. The game at Villa Park was cancelled. Domestic football came back to huge post-war crowds and went on as before. Eight years later Hungary came to Wembley and won 6-3, then won 7-1 in Budapest the following spring, and Britain had the same conversation it had already had in 1945, only louder. FBH has told that story too. The BBC’s account makes the point quietly. The tour “might have been heeded as a warning shot,” it observes. “But it wasn’t until 1953 that British football found itself unable to ignore just how far the rest of the world had advanced.”
The lesson was available because the crowds saw it, in the warm-ups, in Kartsev’s run through two defenders at Stamford Bridge, in the Bobrov–Beskov–Kartsev move at Ibrox. The crowds took it in as well. David Sands remembered what happened in the kickabouts afterwards: “Suddenly in kickabouts, every young goalkeeper was rolling about like Tiger Komic, while it was inside forward Bobrov I wanted to play like and Rangers to sign.” The children learned from it. The institutions didn’t.
A football with 700 names
There’s an object at the centre of all this that’s easy to miss. During the war, when Britain and the Soviet Union were fighting the same enemy and nobody was arguing about guest players, footballers in Wales sent a ball to Moscow. Krasny Sport remembered it in 1945: around 700 signatures, a gift from one football culture to another at the moment when they had most in common.
In November 1945 the Moscow players came to Cardiff carrying a single bunch of roses and went home with eleven silver miners’ lamps. A month later they left London in the fog, with the roses still out in the parks and the arguments already starting. In Birmingham, 70,000 tickets for the match that never happened were still printed and unused.
