The Death Match

The Death Match

The official poster about the match printed by the German administration
Start Flakelf 5 3
Date	9 August 1942
Venue	Zenit stadium, Kiev, Reichskommissariat Ukraine
← Start – Flakelf (6 Aug 1942) Start – Rukh (16 Aug 1942) →

The Death Match (Russian: Матч смерти) is a name given in postwar historiography to the football match played in Kiev in Reichskommissariat Ukraine (abbreviated RKU) under occupation by Nazi Germany. The Kiev city team Start (Cyrillic: Старт) which represented the city Bread Factory No.1 played several football games in World War II. The team was composed mostly of former professional footballers of Dynamo Kyiv and Lokomotyv Kyiv who worked at the factory under the occupation authority.

On August 6, 1942, FC Start played the German team Flakelf. There was an estimated 2,000 spectators in attendance, with each spectator paying a total of five rubles to attend.

A Kiev native points out in his book Facts and fiction of our football (Были и небыли нашего футбола) that the first squads of Dynamo Kyiv included a number of regular Cheka members among whom was . Konstantin Fomin is known to have participated in repressions against Kharkiv sportsmen of Polish descent during 1935–1936. Right before World War II, Fomin also played in Lokomotyv.

Because players were not getting paid regularly, the football team of Dynamo for some time had a shortage (only eight players). The team's captain Konstantin Shchegotsky even tried to escape to Dnipropetrovsk, where he played for FC Dynamo Dnipropetrovsk, but was forced to come back. During the Holodomor in 1932–33, half of the team escaped to Ivanovo near Moscow. Two of Dynamo's players, Pionkovsky and Sviridovsky, were arrested by the NKVD agents during an attempt to exchange several cuts of cloth for products and therefore had to work "for the good of the country" for two years in a penal colony. During the Great Purge in 1938, Piontkovsky, and one of the Dynamo's team creators, Barminsky were targeted, and eventually shot in 1941. The season was never completed, as Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Several Dynamo Kyiv players joined the military and went off to fight. The initial success of the Wehrmacht allowed it to capture the city from the Red Army. Several of the Dynamo Kyiv players who had survived the onslaught found themselves in prisoner-of-war camps.