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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Stark and black, a statue of Lenin strides along Artema, the main street of Donetsk. Stand in front of him, beside the fountains in the square, and it is as though nothing has changed since the city – noticing about eight years too late the way the wind was blowing – abandoned the name Stalino in 1961.
possible question
So rooted was it in industry that, until Stalin had it renamed in 1924, the city was known as Yuzovka, after John Hughes, the Welshman who established the first ironworks in the area in the late nineteenth century. When a football team was established in the city in 1936, it was called Ugolshchiki – or ‘Coal-workers’ – but
Dynamo, like all clubs with the name, were the team of the secret police, and so were run by the Ministry of the Interior.
Usually, the SDPU would stand in opposition to the so-called Donetsk Clan, which is headed by Akhmetov, but, having no viable candidate of their own, the Surkis brothers, desperate to prevent the reformist Viktor Yushchenko becoming president, were forced to back Viktor Yanukovych, the Donetsk candidate.
Admiral Miklós Horthy was appointed (his experience leading the navy of a land-locked country apparently fitting him for the equally paradoxical role of elected king).
So obsessed were Yugoslavs by the belief that they were the representatives of free-flowing samba football in the old world that Red Star Belgrade’s ground is known as the Marakana,
Red Star’s support split into two major groups – the Ultras, who were concerned mainly with choreographing displays of flags, and the Red Devils, who ‘adopted Serbian habits mixed with English habits’, as the website puts it: ‘drinking to death, beating rivals and consuming marijuana’.
Partizan, these days, is a club in search of a role. Named after the guerrillas with whom Tito battled Nazi occupation, in Communist times they were the team of the army, and so represented everything hard-line Serb nationalists opposed.
was half Croat, half Slovene, born in Kumrovec, Croatia, and his Partizans, as well as battling German forces in the Second World War, also clashed with the Chetniks – right-wing Serb guerrillas.
His use of the šahovnica, the red-and-white chequer-board emblem that had been a symbol of the Ustaše, the Croatian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs during the Second World War, seemed deliberately provocative.
But they put up with me because I was a Janez [the stereotypical Slovenian name is often used to denote a Slovenian], so they’d just say “fuck it, he hasn’t a clue anyway”.
In Sarajevo, the point of triangulation is the scene of another assassination, the spot outside the City Museum at which ul Zelenih Beretki meets the river, where, on 28 June 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia were shot dead by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, precipitating the First World War. A plaque bearing Princip’s footsteps used to be set in the pavement there, but it was ripped out by Muslims during the war.
pavements marked with ‘Sarajevo roses’, the small craters left by mortars, many of them now filled with red rubber as a memorial to the siege.
Their association with a revolutionary hero can’t have helped their standing (a favourite chant proclaimed: ‘Levski means freedom’) and, in 1950, they were renamed Dinamo Sofia. Eight years later they returned to their original name, but a forced merger with Spartak Sofia, the police club, in 1969 spawned Levski-Spartak, the team of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
That same day, an accident in space killed three Soviet cosmonauts, and Asparuhov’s death did not even make the front page of the sports newspapers. Over 500,000 mourners, though, turned out for his funeral.
Valentin still lives in Bucharest, where he works as a nuclear physicist. He always seemed a little withdrawn, very much the odd Ceauescu out,
Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Nicolae Ceauescu, who decided the plan was too capitalistic, Steaua would have sold Hagi to Juventus in 1988 in return for funding to establish a Fiat car plant in Bucharest.
very interesting traade
Bucharest at night is roamed by packs of stray dogs, the offspring of pets released when Ceauescu forced families into flats,
but on reaching Târgovite, Ceauescu and his wife were arrested. They were tried on 24 December, and executed by firing squad the following day. Five months later, Dinamo did the double.
undead are pretty much unavoidable in Romania, a land where vampires were an integral part of folklore long before Bram Stoker took the arbitrary decision to set Dracula in Transylvania. (Stoker never visited Romania, his first draft was set in Austria and Dracula’s castle – which the novel places on the Borga pass and the tourist industry equates with the castle at Bran – was based on Cruden Castle in Aberdeenshire. The common association of epe with Dracula is just wrong, based on the coincidence that he was nicknamed ‘Drculea’ – son of Drcul – after his father was awarded the Order of the
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Most of my time in Tbilisi passed in an alcoholic haze, which is probably the best way to experience the Caucasus. Perhaps it is a need to assert their values given the proximity of the Muslim world, perhaps it is simply that there isn’t much else to do, but Georgians have elevated drinking into a way of life, and, while there, I lived their way.
Dinamo Yerevan’s next game was away to Stalinabad (now Dushanbe), a trip that necessitated a flight via Moscow. On arrival in the capital the players were thanked by General Blinov,
In that context it is perhaps not surprising that it was at the Armenian Theological Seminary in Calcutta, the destination of one of the earliest migrations, that, in 1890, the first Armenian football club was established.
The national stadium in Baku is named after Tofik Bakhramov, the linesman who judged that Geoff Hurst’s shot on the turn ten minutes into extra-time in the 1966 World Cup final had bounced down off the bar and over the line, putting England 3–2 up against West Germany. Crassly, English fans have spent four decades being grateful to a ‘Russian’ linesman.
