Introduction and popularization The league was established on the initiative of head of
Spartak sport society,
Nikolai Starostin. Starostin proposed to create eight professional club teams in six Soviet cities and hold two championship tournaments per calendar year. Numerous mass events took place to promote the newly established competition, among which there was an introduction of football exhibition game as part of the Moscow Physical Culture Day parade, and the invitation to the
Basque Country national football team which was on
the side supported by
Soviet Union in the
Spanish Civil War and others. In 1936, the first secretary of Komsomol, Kosarev, came up with the idea of playing an actual football game at the
Red Square as part of the Physical Culture Day parade. Stalin never attended any sports events, but the Physical Culture Day was an exclusion to the rule. The 1936 Physical Culture Day parade was directed by Russian theatre director
Valentin Pluchek. For the football game, a giant green felt carpet was sewn by Spartak athletes and laid down on the Red Square's cobblestones. A night before the parade, the rug was stitched together in sections, rolled up and then stored in a vestibule of the
GUM department store located at the square. Following the 1936 Red Square game, it became a tradition before the
World War II and part of the Physical Culture Day parade event. In the late 1930s Spartak was giving out thousands of tickets per game to members of the
Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Among serious football fans was
Lavrentiy Beria who proposed to have one team from each of
union republics in the league. In July 1937 a conflict erupted following a successful tour to the Soviet Union of the Basque national team during which the main governing body of sports in the country, the
All-Union Council of Physical Culture, was accused by the party and Komsomol for failing the sports policy. Spartak's leadership and Starostin in particular were accused of corruption and implementing "bourgeoisie methods" in Soviet sport. The most prominent clubs of the league were
FC Dynamo Kyiv,
FC Spartak Moscow, and
FC Dynamo Moscow. The most popular clubs besides the above-mentioned were
PFC CSKA Moscow,
FC Ararat Yerevan, and
FC Dinamo Tbilisi. Dinamo Tbilisi became famous for finishing third but never winning the title. They won their first title in 1964.
Development Until the 1960s the main title contenders in the league were the Moscow clubs of
Spartak and
Dynamo whose dominance was disrupted for only a brief period after
World War II by
CSKA Moscow, nicknamed 'The team of lieutenants'. The first team that won 10 championships was Dynamo Moscow in 1963, followed by Spartak in 1979. Eleven clubs spent over 30 seasons in the league, with five of them from Moscow. Dynamo Moscow and Dynamo Kyiv were the only clubs that participated in all seasons of the league. Among other prominent Russian clubs were
SKA Rostov/Donu (Army team),
Zenit Leningrad (Zenith), and
Krylia Sovietov Kuibyshev (Wings of the Soviets). Over the years, the league changed; however, from the 1970s its competition structure solidified with 16 participants, except from 1979 through 1985 when the number of participants was extended to 18. One uniquely Soviet innovation around this time was the "draw limit", whereby a team would receive zero points for any draws above a fixed number, first 8, then 10. This rule had consequences for both the title race and relegation while it was in place. A 1973 experiment to resolve drawn games by
penalty shoot-out lasted only one season. Dynamo Kyiv's success as a Ukrainian club was supplemented in the 1980s with the appearance of
Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk led by its striker
Oleh Protasov, who set a new record for goals scored in a season. In 1984,
Zenit Leningrad became Soviet champions for the first time. With the unravelling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the structure of the league also became unstable as more and more clubs lost interest in continuing to participate in the league, prompting several rounds of reorganisation. The main effect of these was to boost the number of Ukrainian clubs to be on par with the Russians. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been suggested that the competition be re-established along the lines of the
Commonwealth of Independent States Cup, but due to a lack of interest on various levels, the venture has never been implemented.
Participants The uneven population of the Soviet Union meant that the participants in a typical Top League season fell into three blocs. This was particularly apparent at the lower tiers of the Soviet Football Championship, such as the third tier (Vtoraya Liga), but sustained with less transparency up to the top/first tier. •
Russian clubs. Russian football was dominated by the "four-wheeled cart" of
Moscow clubs:
Spartak (Komsomol),
Dynamo (police),
CSKA (army) and
Torpedo (auto workers). These four were often joined in the Top League by
Lokomotiv (railroad workers),
Zenit Leningrad (defense industry workers), or assorted clubs from smaller cities. Please note that although officially the
Lokomotiv sports society represented "railroad workers", the Soviet Union also had an oversized number of
railway troops, unlike any other country in the world. Also, "the Russian clubs' bloc" was deeply fragmented into three separate conditional sub-blocs, per se, such as Muscovite clubs, Leningrad clubs, and the RSFSR clubs (or other clubs). At the
Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR, the Russian SFSR was always represented by three teams with Muscovite and Leningrad teams participating along with the "main" team, although the main (or first) team was always the Muscovite. •
Ukrainian clubs. Ukraine's capital
Kyiv, by contrast, was the exclusive province (or "realm") of
Dynamo Kyiv, who became an unofficial feeder for the Soviet national team beginning in the 1960s, replacing Dynamo Moscow. Several clubs vied to be Ukraine's "second" team over the years including
Shakhtar Donetsk (coal miners),
Metalist Kharkiv (defense industry workers - Dzerzhinets (armor)),
Chernomorets Odesa (merchant fleet workers),
Zorya Voroshilovgrad (now Zorya Luhansk, defense industry workers - Dzerzhinets (armor)) and
Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk (defense industry workers - Zenit (air defense)), the last two managing to win three titles combined. Many Ukrainian clubs were also associated with the Soviet Dynamo sports society. The Soviet football authorities tried to curb or even out the Ukrainian clubs with the other clubs from the "
union republics", yet there consistently existed a "separate" (or unique) competition among the Ukrainian clubs among "teams of masters" (a Soviet euphemism for professional teams). •
Other republics clubs. Lavrentiy Beria's vision of one representative club per republic was partly realised from the 1950s onwards, as in every republic except for Russia and Ukraine, fan interest and government support became concentrated into a single club based in the republic's capital city, which became "the republic's team". Most of those clubs were created as Spartak or Dynamo, supported either by the local party committee (Spartak) or the local KGB office (Dynamo). Thus
Lithuania became represented by
Zalgiris Vilnius,
Latvia by
Daugava Riga,
Estonia by
Kalev Tallinn,
Byelorussia by
Dinamo Minsk,
Moldavia by
Nistru Kishinev,
Armenia by
Ararat Yerevan,
Azerbaijan by
Neftchi Baku,
Georgia by
Dinamo Tbilisi,
Kazakhstan by
Kairat Alma-Ata,
Uzbekistan by
Pakhtakor Tashkent and
Tajikistan by
Pamir Dushanbe. A typical Top League season would feature 4-6 of these eleven, and Yerevan, Minsk and Tbilisi all managed to win the title at least once. Only Georgia, with
Torpedo Kutaisi and later
Guria Lanchkhuti, and Azerbaijan, with
Dinamo Kirovabad, was ever able to have a second representative survive in the Top League in addition to their capital city club. (
Turkmenistan and
Kirghizia were represented in the Soviet football pyramid by
Köpetdag Aşgabat and
Alga Frunze respectively, but neither reached the top level.)
Documentation Documentation about the league is scarce. Among well-known researchers are
Aksel Vartanyan for
Sport Express, Andrei Moroz and Georgiy Ibragimov for KLISF Club, Alexandru G.Paloşanu, Eugene Berkovich, Mike Dryomin, Almantas Lauzadis, and Hans Schöggl for RSSSF Archives. Another extensive databases are composed at helmsoccer.narod.ru and FC Dynamo Moscow website. ==Names==