Spartak Moscow

Edelman homes in on the most popular Soviet sport—soccer—and the sport's most popular team—Spartak Moscow. The author traces Spartak's story from its working-class origins in prerevolutionary Moscow to the post-Soviet 1990s, but this is more than the history of a soccer team; it shows the many ways in which soccer and politics were 'joined at the hip' and how the team's transformations mirrored and even influenced a constantly changing society. The book succeeds as a history of Spartak, written in accessible prose, for which sports-minded general readers and soccer fans worldwide should be grateful. Beyond team history, serious students of Soviet social and cultural history will benefit from Edelman's prodigious research.

* Library Journal *

Fans of Spartak Moscow would have you believe that their club almost single-handedly defied the state machine.... Edelman's book is a heroic attempt to sift through the legend and arrive at... the truth.... With fascinating... descriptions of attending matches in 1930s Moscow... this is great work of research on a great club.

* When Saturday Comes *

In Spartak Moscow, his new book about Russia's most illustrious soccer team, Robert Edelman tells some pretty funny stories about the ways in which Nikolai Starostin, long the man who ran Spartak, slipped and slid around the obstacles and dangers inherent in the country’s oppressive machinery by virtue of what he had to offer as a soccer coach.... Spartak’s colorful past provides Robert Edelman with plenty of tales of the team, the mere survival of which was testimony to the creativity of the man who ran it.

* Only a Game *

Once in a while, a study appears that justifies including the history of sport among those topics that warrant serious scholarly attention. Robert Edelman has written such a work. This history of Spartak football club offers a superb blend of social, institutional, and cultural history alongside a thoroughly fascinating account of the development of what Edelman justly describes as Russia's most popular team.... It is a splendid piece of investigative research that could only have been compiled by someone thoroughly enthralled with his subject over many years. Combining archival study with personal interviews and reviews of journalistic accounts, Edelman has produced a book of scholarly substance that is readable and, at times, highly entertaining.

-- Robert F. Baumann * Europe-Asia Studies *

Robert Edelman's densely informative Spartak Moscow is inevitably as much as the story of Nikolai Starostin as a history of the club whose legend he initiated and eventually epitomized.... Edelman earnestly addresses some perennial problems. How much genuine freedom of expression did the Soviet (male) citizen have, particularly under Stalin? Was supporting Spartak, with its inspirational, improvisatory style of play, a token of opposition-mindedness' Sensibly, Edelman gives qualified answers to this and many other big questions.... Edelman's account...finishes with an exemplary set of conclusions. To the end, Spartak Moscow manages to ride high, its legend as 'the people's club,' like the legacy of Starostin, faded but not forgotten.

* Times Literary Supplement *

Spartak was not merely the most popular team in the USSR, but perhaps the most popular semiautonomous institution in the state: the 'people's team,' as Robert Edelman calls it in this revealing and often funny microhistory.

-- Simon Kuper * London Review of Boo