what was the russian press opinion of the team that played against the dynamo's?
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When the Argentina vs Iceland match at World Cup 2018 kicks off at the Otkritie stadium in Moscow on June 16, viewers should look out for a group of four statues rather oddly placed at the edge of the field just below the north stands.
These are the statues of the four Starostin brothers who founded the Spartak football club, which will finally get a permanent home in the newly built stadium (it will be called the Spartak Stadium during the World Cup).
Most of the other famous Moscow football clubs — Dynamo, CSKA, Lokomotiv — had their own home stadium, but Spartak didn’t and the reason for that is linked to the Starostins. Their story sheds interesting light on the wider position that football has in Russia, and on what it takes to survive in this most complex of countries.
The statues of the four Starostin brothers who founded the Spartak football club
Any major sporting event like the World Cup is, when conducted by an authoritarian state, an exercise in the bread-and-circuses approach to government. This was the policy formulated by the Roman empire: a restive populace could be kept in check by doling out basic food (panem, bread) to fill their stomachs and entertainment (circenses, pubic spectacles) to distract their minds.
This has never been quite true. Really free people tend to resent having to eat and enjoy as enjoined. But autocrats like the policy because it extends their power into intimate aspects of their subjects’ lives. And, if they have reached the point where they start believing their own propaganda, it enables them to see themselves as benevolent patrons of their people, meeting their needs and hence justifying their rule.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is too smart, or cynical, to have reached the second stage, so his control is pure power play. His justification for the autocracy via democracy he practises, and propagates to increasingly receptive politicians around the world is based primarily on a fear of chaos — in Russia’s case, the instability that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and historical memories of periods of revolution and repression. Putin’s Russia may be stale and stifling, but at least it’s not that.