So, to follow up on my promise from the Football section, I'll be posting my reviews on the various football books I've recently acquired. But anyone else currently reading footy lit is encouraged to contribute their own offerings.

First up, by popular demand, Comrade Jim.



The subtitle of this book is The Spy who Played for Spartak. It's a lovely short book if you can get past two things: he was never really a spy and he barely played for Spartak.

As a tall, gangly child growing up in Portsmouth, he often played centre-half for his school teams. He was never of a calibre to play professionally, but he enjoyed it and continued playing into his army days when he was drafted into the national service. He had been a bright lad, and had managed to secure a place in a grammar school and stuck it out through his A-levels, to the disapproval of his working-class mum's friends who thought that all that studying would make him "one of them, not one of us".

In the army, he was considered bright enough to be sent for Russian lessons - 8 months of intensive language study which would enable him to monitor Soviet radio broadcasts. Subsequently sent to Berlin, he listened in on communications traffic at airbases in eastern germany. This, it turns out, was the sum total of his "spying".

Indeed, far from a career in spying against the communists, he became one himself. The actual circumstances in which this occurred in 1959 seem somewhat hazy. He had a love of Russia instilled in him by his admittedly non-ideological teachers in the army. His Soviet studies teachers at Birmingham University seem to have been predominantly of the view that Bolshevism was bad for Russia. And he implies that he was quite aware of Kruschev's Secret Speech and the invasion of Hungary in 1956. And yet, there he is, applying for a Party card in 1959 and littel more than two years later being sent by the CPGB to attend an 18-month course of training at the Higher Party School in Moscow, where he lived with (among others) the future hero of the Prague Spring, Alexander Dubcek.

He was no pasing communist, either. Despite meetings in Moscow with many emigres who had spent years in gulags after false accusations, despite himself having been tossed out of Russia in disgrace following false allegations, despite having quite a clear view of the double standards of the nomenklatura, this is a man who held on to his party card until the CPGB itself finally collapsed in 1991 and who claims that the first time he rued having been a communist was in 2005, at the sight of the altar on which Isaac Babel was tortured to death during the Great Terror. Why it was Babel's death that made him rue this and not any of Stalin's victims - some of the 1,000 executions a day at the height of the terror in 1937-38, perhaps, or any of the seven million who died in the Ukranian forced famies - is not entirely clear.

During his time in Moscow, he played regular kickabouts with a number of people from various team's diplomatic corps. As he was gathering information for a planned PhD dissertation on Soviet sport and culture, he was often in contact with senior Moscow sports officials and football players, some of whom happened to see him at these kickabouts. Strangely under the impression that he could play at a top level (while in National Service he had played a few times with the British Army on the Rhine selects and the Russians appeared to believe that this was the equivalent to playing for the CSKA Red Amry squad), they asked him to come along to training with them whilst they were in the midst of an injury crisis. To his shock, they asked him to play two games in their colours at the massive Lenin stadium under the name Yakov Eeordahnov (foreigners still being highly suspect in 1962 Moscow). This was the extent of his Spartak career.

Doesn't sound like much of a book? Well, it has some padding, too. In one chapter he manages to toss off the entire Passovotchka story for no reason other than that he was in England at the time and later became a communist. In another he retells the Nikolai Starotsin story (although Jonathan Wilson more or less beat him to the punch on this two years ago in his book Football Behind the Iron Curtain.

But mostly, it's just the curious tale of how one working class boy from Portsmouth managed to spend five years in Moscow rubbing shoulders with composers, gulag survivors, and ex-spies amidst the obvious insanities of post-Stalinist Russia. It's no less enjoyable and informative for the fact that the author seems not to question the rightness of supporting such a monstrous regime. And it has some nice little football stories thrown in - his excitement at the arrival of Alexei Smertin arriving in Pompey from Spartak is quite charming.

If you're ever wondering about the power of football to sell books, though, it's amazing to think how 180 minutes spent 45 years ago on a pitch 1500 miles from the UK can turn an old communist's memories from being unwanted and unprintable to being a reasonable publishing success. Amazing.

Great review. I've none of my own to add, but have been meaning to add football-related stuff to my reading list, so your initiative is greatly appreciated. If the Wilson one is out yet, can I make a request for that to come soon, if not next?

Thanks Toro. I'm already 45 pages in on Wilson. Expect a review on Tuesday.

I would add my own review of Comrade Jim but readers of a certain monthly football magazine will get first dibs.

I'd dispute AG's claim that Riordan didn't question the nature of the Soviet regime - he does. He keeps getting his Daily Worker reports censored and is generally regarded as an unreliable loose cannon.

We could argue about the definition of "question", E10. Remember, they thought *he* was unreliable...not the other way around.

He obviously wasn't comfortable with certain aspects of the regime, (nomenklatura privileges, mostly) and a lot of his questioning seems to have been around that. He doesn't, however, seem to have done much questioning around the Big Question, to wit: why the fuck should anyone support a movement so obviously based on tyranny, mass extra-judicial murder and genocide?

Not blaming him for not questioning this while in the Soviet Union, of course - that's simple self-preservation. But keeping hold of your party card for another 30 years and "not ruing" your participation in such a movement for 45 is another matter.

So he was not without doubt, it's true. But how much doubt, exactly?

People had other reasons for being communists, AG. Remember he was a member of the British communist party, not the USSR one, which for all its apologias for Moscow did other things too, and maintained a reasonable, though not exactly massive, membership level up until the 80s.

Lots of people seem to be able to see past those apologias, E10. I just can't. We don't, for instance, tend to accept anyone who makes apologias for Pol Pot. Why should we in this case?

Though this is perhaps a discussion for a different thread.

It probably is, and I haven't greatly riffed these themes in my actual review, save for the fact that I quite welcomed the fact that Riordan's disillusion with communism turn him into a tiresome hectoring rightwing bore, as many of his generation of ex-leftists did.

I guess I'm more familiar with the sensation of being in a political party whose leaders do grotesque things than some others are.

In my current obsession with all things Brazilian, I've just read 'God is Brazilian - Charles Miller, The Man Who Brought Football to Brazil' by Josh Lacey.

It's a beautifully written and surprisingly moving biography of Miller who, though born in Brazil, spent his formative years in a Southampton public school and on his return, clutching a rule book, a pair of boots, a ball and a pump, introduced Brazilians to football.

As you'd imagine there's lots of stuff about how the Brazilian game evolved, the development of professionalism and the clash of culture with late Victorian 'muscular Christianity'. It also gives a vivid picture of the phenomenal growth of Sao Paulo as a city - there's a wonderful chapter about the construction of the first railway between SP and Santos - and for both Corinthians and Southampton fans there's a great insight into their origins.

Still waiting for that Wilson review, AG...

It's on his blog.

Never mind.

I actually haven't reviewed Wilson yet - what's on my blog is just a meditation on one little theme in the book. It's a tough review to do because the book is pretty sprawling - I still haven't digested everything. probably this weekend. meanwhile, I've finished the new WSC book on Africa and made a start on Football Dynamo, which I'll also try to review shortly.

That Wilson book is seriously anal. I thought I was bad!

Are you talking about 'Inverting The Pyramid?'

I really like the look of that.

We're all bloody anal on here.