Yuri Brokhin

Yuri Brokhin was a Soviet mining engineer and filmmaker who immigrated to the United States in 1972. In this selection from his first book, he describes how the first secretary of the Voroshilovgrad region increased industrial output during the 1960s by building a championship soccer team. His story shows the importance of soccer, the Soviet Union's most popular spectator sport, to workers who had little else to cheer about. It also gives some indication as to how the Communist Party promoted and demoted its leaders, and the important role of bribery in making communism work.

In 1972, for the first time in the history of Soviet sports, the Voroshilovgrad soccer team, Sunrise, became the national champs. The sensational victory of the provincial Ukrainian soccer team, which literally smashed its famous Russian opponents, made Soviet sports history.

For long afterward, in newspapers...