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[size=1.0625]A Twisted Legend [size=1.0625]That has hardly kept fact from becoming embroidered with legend. By late 1943 and early 1944, once Kiev was liberated by the Soviets, newspaper articles began appearing, describing details that would fit into a jigsaw myth known as the Death Match. Photo
“Not one document can prove any of these things,” said Kirill Boyko, manager of the Dynamo fan club. “We believe in legend.” [size=0.6875]CreditJoseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times[size=1.0625]Initially, Soviet authorities were hesitant to promote the legend, concerned that the players might have been Nazi collaborators for participating in that series of games in 1942, according to Tetiana Bykova, a historian at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences who has studied the so-called Death Match. [size=1.0625]But articles had been published and “the genie was out of the bottle,” Bykova said. “If you can’t silence the story, then you have to tell it so that it’s going to get maximum political advantage.” [size=1.0625]The Soviet solution was to pretend the other matches had not taken place and to embellish the idea of a death match, Bykova said. Beginning in the late 1950s, with publication of a Kiev newspaper article and book called “The Final Duel,” and subsequent movies released in the Soviet Union and Hungary, the match came to serve both as a source of Ukrainian pride and useful Soviet propaganda. [size=1.0625]“It’s like in ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’ ” Dougan said. “When the legend is better than the truth, print the legend.” [size=1.0625]Initially, the Start players had been reluctant to discuss the match. A key reason was fear, Dougan and others said. Fear of being seen as Nazi collaborators. Fear of being resented for living under less harsh circumstances than others and for shirking their war duty. Fear of contradicting a tale of Soviet heroism amid Nazi atrocities. [size=1.0625]This helps explain why Goncharenko gave conflicting versions through the years. And why, in his 1985 account, Goncharenko said that before Trusevich, the goalkeeper, was shot to death six and a half months after the match, his final words were, “Long live Stalin, long live Soviet sport.” [size=1.0625]According to Dougan, Goncharenko “had been very scared.” [size=1.0625]As the Soviet Union collapsed, more prosaic accounts of the match were given. Georgi Kuzmin, a Ukrainian journalist who has covered soccer for more than 40 years, said that Goncharenko told him in 1991 that no one asked the Start players to throw the match and that Goncharenko did not believe the players were deliberately killed for winning. Goncharenko gave a similar account of an ordinary match to a Ukrainian newspaper in 1996. He has since died. Photo
A poster on display at a museum in Ukraine advertising a rematch between the Start team and a Nazi team.[size=0.6875]CreditJoseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times[size=1.0625]When the former Start players were awarded medals some two decades after the match, one of them, Mikhail Putistin, declined his, saying later he could not participate in a lie, Kuzmin said. [size=1.0625]Bykova, the historian, said evidence indicates the Germans played fairly and did not injure the Start goalkeeper, at least not on purpose. It was the Ukrainian players who became the more aggressive team as the match progressed, she said. She also believes a straightforward recounting of the game might have become even more powerful than the myth. [size=1.0625]“It takes more perseverance and courage to survive on a daily basis, to come home and see the hungry eyes of your children, than to pull yourself together for two hours for a game,” Bykova said. [size=1.0625]Today, Start Stadium hosts summer matches by amateur and semiprofessional teams, whose players do not always wait until the final whistle to fortify their fitness with beer and cigarettes. Children ride bikes and roller-blade on an asphalt track around the well-kept field. And the statue behind the crumbling grandstand helps perpetuate the legend of the Death Match. [size=1.0625]“It was propaganda,” said Kuzmin, whose history of Ukrainian soccer, “What Did and Didn’t Happen,” was published in 2010. “The Soviets could show that people would go to their death for the sake of Soviet ideology. And the people of Kiev like the story. It’s a good fairy tale. But everyone should know the truth.” [size=1.0625]For some, truth is beside the point. [size=1.0625]At the Dynamo stadium in Kiev, there is a monument honoring the four Start players who died in the weeks and months after that 1942 match. The players are shirtless, holding hands, boldly resistant. Tours of the stadium and the monument are not burdened by debate. They are celebrations, not investigations. [size=1.0625]“Not one document can prove any of these things,” said Kirill Boyko, the manager of the Dynamo fan club. “We are patriots for our country and our team. We believe in legend.”
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狗仔卡
发表于 2016年11月30日 11:36
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