ABSTRACT
Just six months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, Moscow Dynamo soccer club began a four-match tour of Britain. Conceived in an atmosphere of war-time unity, in which the anti-communist Winston Churchill praised Stalin, and communist parties opposed strikes, the tour’s organisers hoped that it would help sustain the alliance into the post-war peace. Dynamo arrived in November 1945 and played Chelsea, Cardiff City, Arsenal and Glasgow Rangers. They drew two matches and won two (one a 10-1 mauling of Cardiff City), attracting enormous crowds and generating controversy that would last for decades. The era of Cold War games had begun – and sport in the western capitalist world would seek to reassert its old moral authority while being forced to change in unexpected ways.2
