November 21, 1945: Dynamo Moscow Kicks Off Sports' Cold War

Yes, the fog was that thick.

November 21, 1945: The most-hyped game of the 1st visit of a Soviet soccer team to England, the sport's traditional birthplace, takes place. In hindsight, it can be called the event that kicked of the sports division of the Cold War.

In Communist countries, sports clubs, and the teams they fielded, were sponsored by state-owned industries. The countries' armies sponsored teams named "Central Club of the Army," or "CSKA" in Slavic languages. The national railroads sponsored teams named "Lokomotiv." The auto industry sponsored teams named "Torpedo." The teams most hated by the citizens, but with the most funding from the government and the most favorable decisions from government-appointed officials, were named "Dynamo."

Football Club Dynamo Moscow won the Soviet Top League in 1936, 1937, 1940 and 1945; and were regarded, along with Spartak Moscow, as the best team in the Soviet Union. So when World War II came to an end, Dynamo wanted to test themselves against what was seen as the best competition in the world: The British.

This was the age of radio. Television existed, but it hadn't yet done much to cover sports. Most of what people knew about sports was what they read in newspapers. So there was very little information on Dynamo for the British teams they would be facing, and their fans -- and vice versa: Dynamo knew very little about their opponents.

Interviewed for a 2001 documentary, Dynamo forward Konstantin Beskov said, "Until those games, we only knew that England was the motherland of football, that English football was the best in the world." One of Britain's national newspapers, The Evening Standard, wrote, "Don't expect much from Dynamo. They are only beginners, blue-collars, amateurs." They would regret that dismissive derision.

On Tuesday, November 13, Dynamo visited Chelsea Football Club, at Chelsea's West London stadium, Stamford Bridge. Officially, the crowd was 75,000 people. It was probably much more than that, given English "footie" fans' propensity to jam themselves into those vast "standing terraces." It's a wonder there weren't more disasters like Ibrox in 1971 and Hillsborough in 1989.

Chelsea, prior to the 1960s rarely even a good team, much less a challenge for Dynamo, took a 2-0 lead. Just before the half, Dynamo were awarded a penalty. Leonid Solovyov hit the post with his shot, and the Soviet side went into the locker room embarrassed. Whatever was said to them in the locker room, it worked: They came back to tie the game, 2-2, fell behind 3-2, and then tied it again near the end of the game, to end it 3-3.

Tommy Lawton, the former star of Liverpool team Everton FC who had recently been signed by Chelsea, said, "Dynamo were one of the fastest teams I have ever seen in my life. They flash the ball from man to man in bewildering fashion, often while standing still." Chelsea Captain John Harris said, "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." The Soviet goalie was known as Tiger Khomich from then on.

On Saturday, November 17, Dynamo visited Cardiff City Football Club. England's Football Association, of which City were then 1 of 3 Welsh members, refused to rearrange their schedule to accommodate Dynamo, so City were the only team available, and they were in Division Three, equivalent to Class AA in modern baseball.

Wales, full of coal mines, steel mills and dockworkers, was openly sympathetic to socialism, and welcomed the Soviet team with open arms. But City were completely overwhelmed, as Dynamo beat them, 10-1.

The team with which Dynamo were most familiar, and the team they truly wanted to test themselves against, was Arsenal Football Club, winners of the Football League in 1931, '33, '34, '35 and '38. Dynamo badly wanted to play Arsenal at their North London home, the Arsenal Stadium, nicknamed Highbury for its neighborhood.

Having made trips to the Continent, including an annual home-and-home series on Armistice Day, November 11, with Racing Club de France in London and Paris, Arsenal were happy to make themselves available for this soccer "summit." But they could not do the same for Highbury: It had been commandeered by the British government at the outset of World War II, as an Air Raid Precaution Centre, and had not yet been returned to the club's control. Since 1939, Arsenal had been playing home games at White Hart Lane, the home of their arch-rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, a.k.a. Spurs, 4.7 miles to the north.

A dirty little secret had gotten out: Dynamo had "drafted" 4 star players from other Soviet teams, including Spartak Moscow and CSKA Moscow. So the FA made arrangements for teams to "loan" some players to Arsenal, including Stanley Matthews of Staffordshire team Stoke City, a winger known as "The Wizard of Dribble," and possibly England's best player at the time. Another loanee was Stan Mortensen of Lancashire team Blackpool. With massive hypocrisy, the Soviets complained.

(In 1953, Blackpool, having acquired Matthews, won the FA Cup Final, with Mortensen scoring the only hat trick in the history of the Final, but Matthews had put on such a show that it's still remembered as "The Matthews Final.")

The game was set for Wednesday, November 21, but, as so often happened in those days before environmental regulations were passed, leading to outsiders nicknaming London "The Smoke," a thick fog settled over White Hart Lane. Still, the place was sold out, 54,000 strong, and the FA didn't want to issue refunds, so the game went on. The Soviet officials insisted on a Soviet referee, Nikolay Latyshev, who had accompanied the team. The FA agreed.

Writer George Orwell, who had recently published Animal Farm (Nineteen Eighty-Four was yet to come), was in attendance, and called the match "War minus the shooting." The Soviet players, knowing Matthews was the best player on either side of the pitch, targeted him for rough treatment.

Both goalies, Khomich and Arsenal's Wyn Griffiths, took more physical assaults than shots with the ball. Griffiths sustained a concussion, and had to be replaced for the 2nd half. Harry Brown, goalkeeper for West London team Queens Park Rangers, was in attendance, and, since the Soviets had negotiated for the right to a substitution, something the FA wouldn't allow in League and cup ties until 1966, they allowed Brown to step in for Griffiths.

Dynamo scored first, but Ronnie Rooke equalized shortly thereafter. Shortly before the half, there were 3 goals within a span of 4 minutes: Mortensen put Arsenal up 2-1, then he took another Matthews feed to make it 3-1, and then Beskov put the ball past Griffiths to make it 3-2.

The 2nd half was a travesty. Solovyov scored to tie it up, but multiple witnesses claimed he was blatantly offside. Latyshev let the goal stand. A little later, Arsenal thought they should have been awarded a penalty, but Latyshev denied it. Shortly after that, he sent Arsenal midfielder George Drury off for throwing a punch. No one else claimed to see the punch.

Vsevolod Bobrov, who became one of the Soviet Union's first great hockey players as well, received a Solovyov pass while offside, and scored. The goal was allowed to stand. Rooke was nearly brought down by a rugby-style tackle by Dynamo Captain Mikhail Semichastniy, opening a cut on his forehead, but elbowed him out of the way, giving him a black eye, and driving a 25-yard shot that beat Khomich. But instead of rightly allowing the goal and sending Semichastniy off, Latyshev waved off the goal and called Rooke for a foul.

So instead of what it should have been, 4-2 to The Arsenal, with Arsenal having 11 players on the pitch and Dynamo having 10 at most, it was 4-3 to Dynamo, with Arsenal down to 10 and Dynamo fielding... no one was sure how many. Dynamo took advantage of the fog to put more players on, with some accounts saying it was now 15 against 10.

The match ended 4-3 to Dynamo. The Daily Mail wrote, "It was one of the most exciting games 54,000 people never saw." Unusually for the paper known in modern times as the Daily Fail, it was the truth.

The controversy threatened to cancel the 4th and final game on the tour. But the FA were making too much money to bow to the wishes of the fans, and the finale went on. On Wednesday, November 28, Dynamo were hosted by Rangers Football Club, Scotland's most successful team, at Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow. Despite Bobrov scoring what The Daily Telegraph called "as perfect a goal as has ever been scored at Ibrox," Rangers held on for a 2-2 draw.

Dynamo had finished the tour with 2 wins, 2 draws, and no losses. But all the goodwill they had generated in their games against Chelsea and Cardiff City was thrown away by their actions against Arsenal. The game with Rangers did them no good in the eyes of the British, or European, sporting public.

Dynamo would win the Soviet Top League again in 1949, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1959, 1963 and 1976. But they never won it again. Nor have they won its replacement, the Russian Premier League. They have long since been surpassed as Moscow's top team by Spartak and CSKA, and St. Petersburg team Zenit have also surpassed them among Russia's teams.

Nikolay Latyshev, the referee for the Arsenal-Dynamo match, went on to officiate at the 1962 World Cup Final, which featured a team from what was then a Communist nation, Czechoslovakia. But none of his calls in the game were considered controversial, and Brazil defeated the Czechs.

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November 21, 1945 was a Wednesday. Actress Goldie Hawn was born on this day.

Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. Only 1 game was played in the NHL: The Boston Bruins beat the Montreal Canadiens, 3-0 at the Boston Garden.

June 8, 1949: George Orwell Publishes "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

June 8, 1949: Nineteen Eighty-Four is published by Secker & Warburg in London. It is the last novel written by Eric Arthur Blair to be published in his lifetime. It has become synonymous with his pen name: George Orwell.

The year was not chosen at random: It was simply the year in which the book was written, 1948, with the last 2 digits reversed, suggesting a "near future" to which the reader might be able to relate, even if Orwell himself might not live to see it.

He was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari in British-occupied India, where his father was a civil servant for the British government. The following year, the family moved back to the home island, and Eric Blair grew up in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, outside Reading, about 40 miles west of London. But by the time his earlier well-remembered novel, Animal Farm, was published in 1945, his death was a foregone conclusion: He had been suffering from tuberculosis as early as 1938, when he was a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War. He died on January 21, 1950.

Within the world of the novel -- which begins with the words, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen," and the date turns out to be April 4, 1984 -- Britain, now known as Airstrip One, as well as America and the entire Western Hemisphere, and also the original Oceania, meaning Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, are part of a totalitarian superstate, named Oceania.

This superstate is apparently led by Big Brother, who is pushed by the Party, the political organization that actually runs Oceania. Orwell leaves it vague as to whether Big Brother is a man who actually exists, or ever did, or is merely a convenient symbol for the Party to use.

The government tells the people, "Big Brother is watching you." As a result, they don't want to disappoint him by doing anything against the Party, and therefore against the nation. "Who controls the present controls the past" is a Party plank, and so there is a Ministry of Truth, which rewrites history to suit the Party's needs.

The reader learns that "Oceania had always been at war with with Eastasia," which includes Japan, China, and the Himalayas. The reader also learns that "Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia," which includes what had been the Soviet Union and the rest of continental Europe. Both statements of perpetual war had been true, and neither had been true, and could flip, depending on what the Party thought it needed at the time: "Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England, or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London."

"He" is the novel's protagonist, a Ministry of Truth worker named Winston Smith. Through his work of changing the truth, he has seen the truth, and begins to rebel. One thing leads to another, and his contact in a resistance group turns out to be a mole placed by the Party, and Winston is captured and tortured, and his loyalty is restored. The last line of the novel is, "He loved Big Brother."

In real life, the year 1984 turned out to be very little like the world of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, although a movie based on the book, starring William Hurt as Winston, was released that year. And yet, in the years to come, Britain, and, to a lesser extent, America, would become loaded with closed-circuit TV cameras used by law-enforcement agencies. This growth of government watching led to a British TV "reality show," exported to America, titled Big Brother.

In short, just as "Machiavellian" has come to represent the kind of tactics that Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was mocking in his book The Prince, "Orwellian" has come to mean the kind of governmental approach -- in total, or even in part, as with CCTV cameras -- that Orwell himself, a democratic socialist -- opposed.

In 1982, Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta premiered, showing a fascist, surveillance-obsessed Britain of 1997, led by a Big Brother-type figure, who was basically insecure and needed the love of the people. A film version was released in 2006, set in 2038, and it took a lot of liberties with the original story, including making the Chancellor a much meaner figure, valuing fear more than love. He was played by William Hurt, who had come full circle from playing Winston Smith 22 years earlier.

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June 8, 1949 was a Wednesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 3-2 at Briggs Stadium (now Tiger Stadium) in Detroit. Virgil Trucks and Tommy Byrne both went the distance, before Vic Wertz singled home the winning run off Byrne in the bottom of the 11th inning. Joe DiMaggio did not play, as he was recovering from a heel injury.

* The New York Giants lost the St. Louis Cardinals, 2-0 at the Polo Grounds. Stan Musial went 1-for-4, and Gerry Staley pitched a 3-hit shutout.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Chicago Cubs, 3-1 at Ebbets Field. It was said of Rex Barney that he would be the greatest pitcher in the world if home plate were high and outside. In this game, he went the distance, allowing just 1 run on 2 hits, but also walked 4 batters. Jackie Robinson went 2-for-3 with 2 RBIs.

* The Boston Braves beat the Cincinnati Reds, 8-7 at Braves Field in Boston. Jim Russell won the game with an RBI single in the bottom of the 15th inning.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Robin Roberts pitched a 6-hit shutout.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Washington Senators, 8-3 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Bob Lemon not only went the distance for the win, but hit a home run.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox, 5-2 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

* And the St. Louis Browns beat the Boston Red Sox, 5-2 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Ted Williams went 2-for-3 with a walk.