Football in Two Camps

Nikolai Starostin has written in detail about the role of football [soccer – tr.] in camp life. He famously described the game as a “means of survival” in the GULAG. Former professional footballers such as Starostin and his brothers, or even a close relative of a famous player, such as Lev Netto, were able to survive in the camps by participating in the game, which remained very popular on the other side of the barbed wire. The Starostins’ camp football is only one part of a larger picture, however.

Alongside football for the chosen (participants in major league football who ended up in camps with boss-supporters, stood out noticeably from the general mass of prisoners), there was also another sort of camp football.

In stories about the “European Championship” in Ozerlag and the football tournament in VorkutaRoland Bude und Wladislaw Hedeler. Geschichte einer weggeworfenen Fotografie Fussballspiele im GULag // Überall ist der Ball rund – Nachspielzeit. Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart des Fußballs in Ost- und Südosteuropa. Essen. 2011. Ss. 157-163. in 1954-55, regardless of the activity’s unusual setting, our attention is drawn to the juxtaposition of the banality and ordinariness of these events with international contacts of a sort that were nearly impossible for a country behind the “Iron Curtain.”

In order to hold games in the camps, the very camp system had to undergo some changes. There was no space to conduct football matches in the Shalamov camp, inmates could not play at football while felling trees, dying from back-breaking labor, and living in impossible conditions. Yet as soon as the camp regime was eased for certain categories of prisoners (in the two examples at hand, we have “foreigners” in the camp, receiving, for example, packages from international organizations, along with other support from outside), football once more took up its place in the “organization of leisure” and in “educational work.” The prisoner-players were allowed to create a playing field for themselves, and were helped to obtain (or at least not prevented from obtaining) equipment: the Red Cross sent balls for the Ozerlag championship. “National” teams – Hungarian, Polish, German, and “Russian” (Russian Harbinians) – played against each other.

All the more surprising is the story of the Vorkuta championship, which took place in Sukhobezvodnoe. Before his imprisonment, Albert Ghraib, a football fan interned at this site, had known two German players, Horst Eckel and Werner Liebrich. A few months writing these footballers a letter about the camp tournament, he received a large package containing complete sets of football uniforms for two teams (including football boots) and several balls. This is how the “national German” team from Sukhobezvodnoe was outfitted.

1954-1955 was the time of two legendary matches or Germany and the USSR: the German victory in the “Miracle of Bern” – the victory of the national team in the 1954 FIFA World Cup Final, in a match against the Hungarians, the strongest team of that time – and the Soviet win in the USSR-Germany game in Moscow, ten years after the end of the Second World War. The fact of the Soviet Union’s forceful victory on the football pitch and the very possibility of the German team’s appearance in the USSR, stood out as some of the most powerful cultural events of the first years after Stalin's death. Confined in the Vorkuta camp, Roland Bude recalled how he and other German inmates were even allowed to rise and remove their caps to the sound of the German national anthem. Events in Ozerlag and Vorkuta paralleling the two “international” football championships make this picture even more three-dimensional.

In camp decrees on conducting football tournaments “for the consequent improvement of labor productivity,” German researcher Wladislaw Hedeler has found repetition of the official propaganda formula for sport outside the camps. Among other things, it singles out the “optimization of camp labor,” “ideological mobilization,” “the stabilization of everyday camp life” (in many locations, along with sport, theater also appeared), and even “the improvement of the quality of life.”

In the post-Stalin era, political prisoners spoke about the “little camp” and the “big camp”: the GULAG and the Soviet UnionOn M. Heller, see http://www.bg.ru/stories/11191/ [in Russian, or see 1988 review in English — trans.].. This explanatory model – if it is this way in one camp, then it’s the same in the other – operated in both directions. A more extensive examination of the camp football system and its ideological motivation may, in fact, lead us to a better understand the role of the game in everyday life in the “big” Soviet Union.

Sources and literature:

• В. Миронова, А. Миронов. Длинная скамейка – у немцев и русских // «Новая Газета», рубрика «Правда ГУЛАГа» от 13.06.12
• Roland Bude und Wladislaw Hedeler. Geschichte einer weggeworfenen Fotografie Fussballspiele im GULAG // Überall ist der Ball rund – Nachspielzeit. Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart des Fußballs in Ost- und Südosteuropa. Essen. 2011.
• M. Heller. Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man. London. 1987.

By Sergei Bondarenko

Translation: Adrianne Jacobs