The life story of Russian football’s greatest talent reads like a post-war history of the Soviet Union. It is a story of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, of drunkenness and state honours, of labour camps and persecution, a story of eternal glory.
At the age of 18, he became top scorer in the Soviet First League and made his debut for the national team with a hat-trick, but his life changed forever when he was sentenced to 12 years of hard labour for a suspected rape. But no one could take his love of football away from him. After his return from prison, he played a few more seasons at the top level, but most of his career was behind him.
Eduard Streltsov was twice voted the best Soviet footballer, won an Olympic gold medal and won the Soviet championship and the Soviet Cup with Torpedo Moscow. He was unstoppable, daring and unstoppable. On and off the field.
Who knows what the Soviet national team would have achieved if its then most efficient scorer had spent his best years in the 16-metre box instead of in camp. In Russia, they say that history knows no condition …
Called the Russian Pele by his fans in the West, he always remained Edik to his friends.
Special features of football in the biggest country in the world
In September 1893, the velodrome in St Petersburg was all set for a spectacle. Despite the proverbially sour St Petersburg autumn, a good number of people turned up. Pole vaulting, tug-of-war and other athletic disciplines were on the programme. But the event of the day was something else. Most of them came to watch the race between the famous French cyclist Charles Terront and the even more famous Russian horse-drawn carriage – the Troika – live.
Everything was in place for the battle between West and East when, after a few preliminary rounds, the French star decided not to take part. It was the sour St Petersburg weather. The soaked and disappointed crowd booed the departure of the Frenchman, who later cycled to Paris as promised. He covered the distance of more than three thousand kilometres in two weeks.
Meanwhile, the disappointment at the velodrome has not subsided and the organisers have decided to introduce the citizens of the capital to something they have never seen before in Russia. A football match was on the line. “The pitch was full of mud. The gentlemen athletes were dressed in white and it often happened that someone fell straight into the mud with his nose, so that he looked like a chimney sweep. The audience was laughing all the time. The match ended with one team winning over the other,” said a local newspaper sarcastically.
The history of Russian football thus symbolically began in the mud, accompanied by laughter from the stands. Many a football fan might add, with a little malice, that mud and laughter still accompany Russian football today.
In those days there were more than 40 cycling clubs in Russia and not a single football club. By comparison, the first national football championship was played in England, the home of football, in 1889.
The All-Russian Football Association was founded in 1912 and football has been growing in popularity ever since. That same year, the national team played in its first major tournament, the Olympiad in Stockholm. The tournament is remembered mainly for Vasily Butusov, who scored the first goal for Russia in an official international match. The 16-0 defeat against Germany was one that everyone tried to forget as soon as possible.
Then the First World War broke out, bringing revolution and later a bloody civil war. Nobody cared about football, people had more serious concerns.
The first national championship in the Soviet Union was not held until 1936. The number of participating teams varied from season to season, the scoring system was not clearly defined and the organisation was lame at every step. The championship was still in its infancy.
The following year, as it turned out later, was a very important one for Soviet football. On 24 June 1937, 90,000 curious people gathered at the Dynamo Stadium in Moscow. The Soviet Union was hosting the Basque national team, which was preparing for a match against Lokomotiva Moscow. The visit was primarily political and humanitarian, football being just a means for the Basques to draw attention to the civil war in Spain and to earn some money for their compatriots who had lost loved ones in it.
Nine games were played in Minsk, Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad and Tbilisi. For people in the Soviet Union, it was their first contact with European football. Stadiums were sold out everywhere. The first match was the most popular, and the organisers received almost a million enquiries from fans who wanted to see the Spanish national team’s masterpieces live and see if the home team could match them. It turns out that Soviet footballers still have a lot of work to do if they want to compete on an equal footing with their European counterparts.
The boy from the neighbourhood
In the same year that Stalin’s purges saw his opponents disappear forever into the cellars of Lubyanka, Eduard Anatolyevich Streltsov was born on 21 July in the eastern Moscow suburb of Perovo. He grew up without his father, who, after fighting at the front, moved to Kiev, where he started a new family. He was brought up by his mother, Sofya Frolovna, who had suffered a heart attack at a young age and suffered from asthma throughout her life. Little Edik wanted to be like his cold-blooded and determined father. He had no respect for his mother and unjustly blamed her for the break-up of his marriage, but he later realised that she had done her best to give him a normal upbringing.
They lived modestly, like the vast majority of people in the post-war Soviet Union. The devastating effects of the war were felt at every turn. The economy was in tatters and it took a lot of effort to get the world’s new superpower back on its feet.
In Perovo, everything was about the word “milling cutter”, as the Russian word for a milling machine is. It was the name of a railway station, a neighbourhood, a factory, a football school and much more. Even the school Edik attended was simply called a frezer. He was not considered a particularly diligent pupil, but he excelled at gymnastics. As was the custom in Russia, he played football in the summer and, like other children, swapped his football boots for ice-skates and played hockey in the winter.
At the age of 15, he took a job as a locksmith in a local factory, started playing for the local team and came into contact with alcohol for the first time. Although he was one of the younger players, he would often sit in the changing room after games and drink with his teammates, who were also his colleagues. His mother used to get angry with him when he came home drunk, but Edik didn’t think it was a big deal. A shot of vodka made victories sweeter and defeats less painful. As was the custom in Russia.
On Sundays, he would go to Moscow to watch football matches, sometimes waiting in line for four hours for the cheapest, student ticket. As he later told me, he always rooted for Spartak, which is still the most popular club among Russians today and is considered “the people’s club”. Dynamo, for example, which won the first Soviet championship, was under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior. Probably the most famous fan of the club that gave the world the best goalkeeper of the 20th century, Lev Yashin, was the great Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich. CSKA, for which Leonid Brezhnev is also said to have crossed his fingers, was a military club.
Streltsov was not destined to wear the red and white of Spartak. When he was still a youngster playing for his Frezer team, his name was in the notebook of one of Torpedo’s coaches. As chance would have it, the Moscow Black and Whites were also a factory club. It was founded by ZiL, the Lihachov Motor Vehicle Factory. The club did not belong to the Soviet football elite and often struggled to stay in the league.
He was offered a professional contract and an apartment in Moscow. Without thinking twice, he accepted the offer and joined the new team. He was 16 years old. In his first season among the pros, he was just getting used to his new surroundings and came into the game mainly from the bench. He spent his free time in Perovo, going to the cinema with his friends and living as if he was still a member of Frezer. He also wore the jerseys of his great-grandmother. Torpedo finished the season in ninth place and avoided relegation, while Edik scored four goals in his rookie season.
The “Russian tank” is demolishing everything in front of it
In his second season, everyone has heard of the Boy Wonder from Torpedo. With 15 goals, he became the top scorer of the championship and established himself as one of the best strikers in the Soviet Union. With the goals came a call-up to the national team, for which he made his debut in style – with a hat-trick in the first half. In Sweden, who lost 6-0, he was dubbed “the Russian tank”. He scored seven goals in his first four appearances for the national team.
His career was on a steep upward climb. Just two years ago he was dribbling welders and scoring goals for mechanics, now he’s playing against the biggest stars at home and abroad. In 1956, he was the youngest member of the national team that competed in the Melbourne Olympics. In the final, the “zbornaja komandam” defeated Yugoslavia with the young Dragoslav Šekularac and won the gold medal. It was a historic first title for the Soviet Union. Streltsov scored two goals in four games and was one of the main contributors to the final victory, but the gold medal was not hung around his neck.
Only the players who played in the final were awarded medals. Streltsov sat out the last game for tactical reasons. Instead, Nikita Simonyan, the top scorer in Spartak’s history, a living legend of Soviet football and the current Vice-President of the Russian Football Federation, played.
After the 11 gold medals were awarded, the winning team went to the changing rooms, where an unusual scene took place. Simonjan wanted to give his medal to Streltsov because he felt the young man deserved it more. Edik, who had great respect for his comrade, thanked him and mentioned that he was thirty years old, but he was only nineteen and would win his medal one day. He could not have been more wrong.
The unbearable burden of fame
After arriving from Australia, Streltsov married Alla Demenko, a classmate from Perovo. They met on the dance floor, where Allochka fell in love with the gentle and sweet Edik. He became famous early on, people thought he was a football genius and Alločka was proud of him. He gave her gloves, clothes and bags that were out of reach of ordinary people. They lived a carefree and happy life. Alločka was aware from the beginning that Edik had many female fans and that he liked to spend the night with his friends, but in her infatuation she forgave him everything.
After the Olympics, he became probably the most popular football player in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Order of the Symbol of Honour and the title of Merited Master of Sport. He was renowned for his exceptional talent, his animal strength and his unique character. He was a star in today’s sense of the word.
He was besieged by female fans at every turn, police officers often looked through their fingers when they caught him drunk driving and fans packed the stadiums where his Torpedo team played. But the simple boy from Perovo could not bear the weight of fame. His comrade in the Torpedo strike-forward line, Valentin Ivanov, said of him: “Edik is the strongest personality among all of us. On the pitch. In life, there is no one weaker than him”.
Alloche watched with sadness as Edik inexorably drifted away from her. How he was giving himself away to everyone and anyone but her. He would get into fights, come home drunk and later repent and beg Allochka to take him back. After one of his exploits, he wrote her eight emotional letters, which charmed her to the point that she married him.
“Wine in the streams, rejoicing… I knew he had no intention of changing after the wedding,” recalled Alla, who still loved him in spite of everything.
One foot in the World Cup
His lifestyle didn’t affect the impact he had on the pitch, so it never occurred to him that he should stop drinking. On the greens, he was still unstoppable. He shook the net relentlessly for both Torpedo and the national team. He scored 12 goals in 15 matches in the championship and finished second with the Black and Whites, the best result in the club’s history. In 1957, he even finished seventh in the selection for the Ballon d’Or, the most prestigious individual award in world football.
In November of the same year, the Soviet Union played Poland on a neutral ground in Leipzig in an additional World Cup qualifier. The match of the year and the chance for the “Chornaya Kommando” to qualify for the World Cup for the first time in its history. Lev Yashin, the world’s best goalkeeper in those days, was the goalkeeper and Streltsov was the one the fans were pinning their hopes on in attack.
The national team travelled by train from Moscow. Streltsov, in his own style, missed it and had no choice but to try to catch up with his teammates by car. After a hundred kilometres, he succeeded and, with his head down, he pulled out in front. All the way, all he could think about was how he would make it up to his comrades if he failed to smash the field net. On top of that, he was injured …
He was patched up by the physiotherapists before the game and was ready to take on the Polish defenders. The match was won 2-1 by the Soviet Union, with Streltsov scoring the first and passing for the second! “I’ve never seen you play as well with two healthy legs as you did today with just one,” Gavril Kachalin, the national coach, told him at the end of the match. Edik breathed a sigh of relief. The “Zbornaja komandam” is going to the World Championships.
On 26 May 1958, two weeks before the start of the World Cup, a police car drove into the representative base near Moscow. A few minutes later, Eduard Streltsov, Mikhail Ogonykov and Boris Tatushin came through the gates, escorted by the police. They were dishevelled, sleep-deprived and utterly confused. Their team-mates could only watch in amazement as they were shoved into a car, which sped off towards the city. The arrest warrant said rape.
The night no one remembers and everyone would like to forget
Rape? What rape?! The events that followed turned the life of young Edik and everyone involved upside down. The scandal reverberated beyond the football pitches and reached the very top of the Soviet Union.
It all started the day before, when Tatushin invited his representative colleagues to a picnic. Promises of alcohol, girls and the beach sounded very appealing. The history of Soviet football would certainly have been different if Edik had not sat in his comrade’s Moskvich that Sunday, who took the merry band to an artificial lake near the capital. Edik was no stranger to multi-day overnight stays, but he did not know then that the next time he would cross the threshold of home would be five years later.
The picnic was uneventful – volleyball, drinks, swimming and a relaxed atmosphere. There was no indication that in a few hours one of the girls who had been carelessly loitering and drinking with the footballers would accuse Eduard Streltsov of rape.
In the court record, which is still a subject of interest for Russian and foreign journalists, we can read that several people were present at the picnic. In addition to the football players and the four girls, there were Tatushin’s friend Karakhanov, his parents and some neighbours. Everyone was having fun and enjoying the warm May weather. They also played a friendly match on the beach between Spartak (Tatushin and Ogonykov) and Torpedo (Streltsov in goal, the girls on the field), which the Red-Whites won 1-0. When the drinks ran out, they went to the shop and continued the picnic. Towards the evening the bottles were empty again and Karakhanov invited everyone to his place for a dacha.
At 9pm they sat down to dinner and there was no end in sight to the drinking. The champagne had run out, but the vodka and cognac were flowing in torrents. Edik and one of the girls, 20-year-old Marina, hugged and kissed all the time. It was she who later accused Streltsov of rape, although at the time no one thought such a thing could happen. Probably because they were all quite drunk at the time. What happened that night is still not entirely clear. It was a short and tragic night, filled with alcohol fumes and adolescent hormones.
Marina and Edik went to the room where Karahanova’s mother had prepared a bed for them. In the same room, Karakhanova and one of the girls, Irina, were sleeping on the floor.Irina later testified that she caught Edik and Marina having sex, but did not observe any violence. She immediately went to the terrace, while Karakhanov was asleep and did not let her disturb him.
Irina also stated that “Marina had fun with Edik all day, walking on the beach in his jacket and sitting on his lap. I got the feeling she liked him, she told me he was a good guy.”
Ogonykov testified that suddenly a woman’s scream came from that very room, but he did not intervene because “it was none of my business”. The other people involved did not hear the scream, not even Karakhanov, who was sleeping dead drunk in the same room.
At 5am, Marina left the house and dragged herself home. Two hours later, visibly shaken, she reported the rape to the local police. Shortly afterwards, a police car drove towards the representative base.
Marina told the police that Streltsov forced her into a room and raped her. Edik claimed that he had not raped anyone and that it was a misunderstanding. The trial was based on the testimony of those involved, all of whom were drunk and had vague and personal recollections of the event. Their statements did not help the prosecutors to fully clarify all the ambiguities surrounding what happened in Karakhan’s dacha on that fateful night.
The way the investigation was conducted suggested that the “Shooting Case” would soon take on larger dimensions. As the representative striker sat in custody, he was advised to sign a confession of guilt, saying “who will put you behind bars, Edik. Sign it and go home, you have the World Cup coming up soon.” Naive Edik signed because he wanted more than anything to play in the Mundial and compete with Pele, Garrincha and the other aces, but they wouldn’t let him go home and handed the case over to the Chief Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow.
Marina formally dropped the case four days after the incident, but the prosecution did not drop the case. Ogonykova and Tatushin were brought to the police station in handcuffs, although officially they were only witnesses. One of the girls also accused Ogonjkova of rape, but changed her mind the next day.
Did Irina see the rape or was it really consensual sex? Did Marina follow Streltsov into the room willingly or was she forced to? Before his death, Streltsov told his mother, “I was not the one who should have gone to prison.” Was he referring to Karakhanov, who had the same blood type as him but was never interrogated? Was Karakhanov really just sleeping in that room? Was Edik really a “good guy”? Why did five prosecutors change during the investigation?
It has been 60 years since those unfortunate events and many people still doubt that Edik really raped Marina.
From Khrushchev to the camp
On 24 July 1958, Streltsov was sentenced to 12 years in prison for rape. He was stripped of both his state decorations. He was banned from football for life by the Football Association. While his comrades were returning from the World Cup in Sweden, Edik was on his way to the camp.
A boy from a working-class family, a Soviet football star and the darling of the masses became an outcast overnight. Not so long ago he seemed untouchable, forgiven for many things, but the sins of the past have caught up with him. Some believe that his fate was sealed two years before.
At a reception for Soviet football gold medallists after the Melbourne Olympics, he incurred the wrath of the most powerful woman in Soviet politics for his long tongue. Ekaterina Furtseva was then First Lady of the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU and a close ally of Khrushchev. Her daughter Svetlana was in love with the tall and handsome Streltsov, like many other girls in the Soviet Union. Above her bed hung posters of a smiling Edik in his black and white jersey with the letter T on his chest.
At the reception, Furceva asked him if he would meet her daughter, but the besotted Edik undiplomatically waved his hand and replied that he wouldn’t swap his Alloche for anyone. Furceva felt ashamed and never forgot the incident. It was outrageous for a locksmith to reject a representative of the “Soviet aristocracy”. It is possible that when the opportunity for revenge arose, Furtseva used her influence to put Edik in his place. There was no room for stars in the proletarian Soviet Union.
On his deathbed, Kachalin, coach of the golden Soviet team, said that Khrushchev himself had decided Streltsov’s fate. Last but not least, the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, Rudenko, who was Khrushchev’s man, interfered in an investigation that should have been the responsibility of the city prosecutor’s office. When the “Streltsov case” was presented to him, the head of the Soviet Union is said to have said, “To prison with the scoundrel, and for a long time.”
Meanwhile, other versions have emerged as to why Streltsov had to go behind bars. Both Dinamo and CSKA wanted the country’s best forward, but Streltsov remained loyal to Torpedo throughout his career. Could he have been the victim of a behind-the-scenes struggle between the army and the police? Did he end up in a camp because he refused to play for a police club? Such pressures on athletes were not uncommon in the Soviet Union.
Was the Soviet government afraid that Streltsov would end up like his Hungarian colleague Ferenc Puskas? One of the best footballers of all time had fled to the West after the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. When Edik returned from Sweden, where he made his debut for the national team, he remarked to one of his teammates that he was “always sad when he comes home”. Did he have to go behind bars because he wanted to escape from the “socialist paradise”?
From the camp to Brezhnev
An endless and impassable taiga as far as the eye can see. Streltsov served his sentence in the Kirov region, more than a thousand kilometres east of Moscow, in one of the largest labour camps in the Gulag system, where prisoners were tasked with logging and timber processing. It was a remote place, a small island in the middle of a sea of forests.
The camp administrator’s eyes lit up when he learned that the greatest talent in Soviet football was coming to them. The other inmates did not share his enthusiasm, and shortly after his arrival, Streltsov was involved in a fight that nearly killed him. He spent four months in a camp hospital, his thoughts drifting back to his home and the greens where he had once reigned supreme. Looking out of the window, he was reminded of how far away Perovo was. Behind the hospital was a huge cemetery where hundreds of prisoners lay, for whom the “Vyat re-education and labour camp” was the last home.
“Mum, it’s not your fault. You told me a thousand times that all these “friends”, vodka and “girls” would cost me dearly, but I didn’t listen to you and now here I am… I thought it was my duty as a son to help you financially, but I realised that wasn’t the case. You have to love your mother with all your heart. As soon as I return, everything will be different,” he wrote from the camp.
His two-month-old daughter Mila and his wife Alla, who divorced Edik shortly after the verdict, also remained in Moscow. His life fell apart, but he did not give in to despair. He believed that sooner or later they would find out in Moscow that he had been wrongly convicted and that he would soon return home. When he left the hospital, he started to run and to get fit.
The administrator of the Vyatka camp was a great sports enthusiast who organised an annual football tournament between the teams of the different camps in the region. Twenty teams took part in this unusual competition, and there was no shortage of camps. Only camp staff could play for the team, but with a little administrative trickery, Streltsov was included. The matches in which the Olympic gold medallist played attracted a lot of attention and Edik kept fit by outplaying the guards and administrators.
After five years of forced labour in mines, forests and factories in various parts of the Soviet Union, Streltsov was released early in February 1963. Outside the camp, he was greeted by smiling friends from Torpedo, a bottle of cognac in their hands, and a distraught mother who could not get a word out. Before they set off for Moscow in a black volga, Edik took off his prisoner’s clothes with the Streltsov E.A. No. 1311 patch and threw them into the bushes. He left the camp, the cold and the hard labour behind and set off for a new and different life.
He did not like to talk about these five years. He came out at the age of 26, but his youth and carefree spirit remained in the camp. He behaved as if he had never left, but he was never the same. Gone was the always smiling boy with the luxuriant hairstyle, once chased by adoring female fans.
What hurt him the most was not being allowed to play for his Torpedo team. He could only play for ZiL, the amateur team where he was recruited. Meanwhile, the Kremlin had a change of personnel. The period of Khrushchev’s “thaw” was over, and the next two decades were marked by the “Brezhnev stagnation”.
Brezhnev received more and more letters from different parts of the country, asking him to allow Streltsov to return to professional football. When the General Secretary of the Party received ZiL representatives at a meeting, the decision was taken that Edik could return. “I don’t understand something. A locksmith after serving his sentence can work as a locksmith, but a footballer after serving his sentence cannot play football. Is that fair?” wondered Brezhnev. An hour later, Streltsov was already on Torpedo’s list of players.
After seven years, Edik was finally able to do what he loved most. Football has always come first in his life. The pitch was his natural environment, the only place where he was relaxed and carefree. His teammates and fans welcomed him with incredible enthusiasm. The stadiums where Torpedo played host were packed and in the very first season after Edik’s return, the Black and Whites won the domestic title. His 12 goals were proof that the camp had not taken away his immense talent.
After seven years in the Gulag, he was still the best striker in the country, but he waited in vain for a call-up to the national team preparing for the World Cup in England. Despite his immense popularity, or perhaps because of it, the then Minister of Culture decided that a man of questionable moral character like Streltsov could not represent the colours of the Soviet Union in international tournaments.
In 1967 and 1968 he was voted the best football player of the Soviet Union and returned to the national team, much to the delight of the fans, scoring 7 goals in his second football life, one for every year he spent away from the pitch. When the Soviet Union qualified for the 1968 European Championship, he stayed at home again. Officially because of his age. In his career, he scored 99 goals in 222 games for Torpedo and 25 in 38 appearances for the national team. He died of lung cancer on 22 July 1990 in Moscow.
He was born to play football. He always knew how to make the right decision on the pitch, but he didn’t know how to make it in life. With the ball between his feet he was a genius, but when he took off the black and white jersey he turned into a simple boy from Perovo, unable to grow up. He never lived up to his potential. There was a joke circulating among Torpedo fans that Pele would have died if he had drunk as much coffee as Edik drank vodka in his lifetime. In 1967, he was reinstated as Master of Sport Emeritus and posthumously won his first and last Olympic gold medal.
In November 1945, Dinamo Moscow visited Great Britain and football fans in the West saw a Soviet team for the first time. The photo shows Stamford Bridge, where the match with Chelsea ended 3-3.
