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Books On Football - Comrade Jim

Sean O'Conor

'Comrade Jim' is an odd conception. Neither purely a football book nor a political history, it is rather an entertaining autobiography of a largely unknown, but remarkable life, with an astonishing anecdote at its heart.

Jim Riordan was not a footballer. He was a translator and communist activist who moved to Moscow in search of social utopia. When not studying Marx, translating Lenin, touring the Soviet Empire, socializing with party apparatchiks at Moscow functions or working on his doctoral dissertation, this Portsmouth lad enjoyed the odd kickabout with other red expats.

Following one Sunday stroll in 1963, against a team led by a bare-footed Kenyan, Riordan was invited to train with the great Moscow Spartak team, as a gesture of goodwill, he assumed, from his friend, Spartak full-back Gennady Logofet. The Englishman's previous footballing experience had gone no further than the British Army of the Rhine's eleven on national service.

Despite being admittedly out of his depth, Riordan did not know what to make of a brief phone call a week later asking him to come to the stadium later that day, with his boots.

As usual, he went off to play for the British expats in the morning, before hotfooting it to the Lenin stadium as requested. To his utter shock, the 27-year-old English academic then found himself in the starting line-up for Spartak in front of 50,000 fans that afternoon, having already played 90 minutes that day.

Yakov Eeordahnov, as he was called, turned out once more at centre-half for the Russian giants, before his improbable footballing career ended and his life returned to red reality.

In itself, that is one of soccer's greatest tales, but the book is worth reading rather for its absorbing chronicle of the idealism of the post-war generation, many of whom saw Moscow as the beacon for the planet's future.

When it all went pear-shaped, too many, the author included, found it hard to accept and were guilty of defending the indefensible and betraying their beliefs. Riordan himself eventually severed his Moscow ties after an argument over a controversial article he had written, but less fortunate colleagues found themselves in Siberia or in a coffin.

What a colourful life he led in Moscow, quaffing vodka with Nikita Khruschev, sharing jokes with Yuri Gagarin or Lev Yashin, or asking spy Donald MacLean's wife to bring him some toilet roll, as the shops had all run out.

Unlike Riordan, a principled boy from the wrong end of the class system, the more famous Cambridge spies, of whom he was a contemporary, come across as upper-class buffoons, for years betraying their country for one they knew nothing about, and which they never accepted after they had foolishly marooned themselves there.

With the Soviet dream over, Riordan returns, but finds his precious memories painfully assaulted by the Russians' desperate desire to forget their troubled past.

In penning his story, 'Comrade Jim' relays a strand in a key moment of 20th century history, a life which otherwise might have been forgotten. He paints a vivid picture of the once commonplace optimism that seems vanquished in 2008, and records a quite extraordinary day when a Sunday-league Englishman suddenly found himself playing for the mighty Spartak.

Sean O'Conor

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