Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kosarev

Kosarev's most enduring legacy lies not in politics but in sport. In 1918, as a fifteen-year-old worker, he read Raffaello Giovagnoli's novel Spartacus and was deeply stirred. Seventeen years later, as Komsomol First Secretary, Kosarev joined football player Nikolai Starostin and Party official Ivan Pavlov to merge the existing Promyslovaya Kooperatsiya sports circles (dating from 1925) into a single voluntary sports society named 'Spartak.' Kosarev himself proposed the name, which honored the Roman gladiator-slave rebellion while symbolizing the fighting spirit of proletarian sport.

That same year, he founded Moscow's first 'Spartak' football club, built from the Blagusha club. The early club was short-lived, but its spirit was inherited by today's FC Spartak Moscow, led by the Starostin brothers. Kosarev also spearheaded the creation of the USSR Supreme Football League in 1936, the first institutionalized national league in Soviet football history, which became the Soviet Top League.

His passion for sport was no mere hobby. Under the slogan 'Work productively, rest culturally!', Kosarev saw organized physical culture and leisure as central to the Komsomol's mission for Soviet youth. The Moscow metro station Baumanskaya was originally slated to be named 'Spartakovskaya,' and nearby Gavrikov Square, Yelokhovskaya Street, and Bolshoy Gavrikov Lane all received their current names as part of the Spartak-inspired renaming push. After Kosarev was executed, Spartak survived to become an icon of Soviet sport, and the seeds he planted still beat at the heart of Russian football culture today.

Wielding the Purge in the Komsomol

The Komsomol purge was kept under Stalin's direct control, and he relied above all on Kosarev to run it. One of Stalin's most loyal Stalinists, Kosarev told the Komsomol Central Committee plenum in 1935 that the enemy could be removed, when needed, "by methods of physical extermination." Under his direction the Komsomol expelled 141,337 people for "hostile activity" in 1936-1938, 72,000 of them in nine months of 1937.

At the February 1937 Central Committee plenum discussing Bukharin and Rykov, Kosarev declared that people who had raised their hands against Stalin could not be comrades and were enemies, and voted to have both arrested and shot. In March 1938 he denounced former Leningrad Komsomol secretary Sergei Utkin in a letter to Yezhov, calling Utkin's retraction of his testimony "enemy slander" and provoking his re-arrest and 16 years in the camps. At the Komsomol's IV plenum (21-28 August 1937), 35 members and candidate members of the Komsomol Central Committee were arrested before it opened, and a Pravda editorial named Kosarev among the leaders whose "idiotic disease of political blindness" the "enemies of the people" had exploited.

Kosarev also tried to save some Komsomol cadres. He went with secretary Valentina Pikina to Central Committee secretary Andreev to free arrested Komsomol leaders, and sent Stalin a note reporting that in Kharkov alone up to 150 appeals complained of wrongful expulsions: "honest people are being driven out of our ranks on the basis of mere rumours."

The Mishakova Affair and Downfall

In September 1937 the Komsomol instructor Olga Mishakova was sent to the Chuvash ASSR, where she denounced almost the entire local Komsomol leadership, and the regional party first secretary, as enemies of the people. Kosarev refused to back her and the Komsomol bureau removed her from her post. In autumn 1938 Mishakova wrote to Stalin complaining that she was being persecuted for fighting enemies of the people; that letter became Stalin's signal that the time had come to settle accounts with the Komsomol leadership.

The extraordinary plenum of the Komsomol Central Committee (19-22 November 1938) was attended by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Andreev, Zhdanov, Malenkov and Shkiryatov; it removed Kosarev and four other secretaries of the Komsomol Central Committee. There Kosarev defended himself: "I do not consider myself an enemy... No one can prove that I am an enemy of the people... I have never betrayed either the party or the Soviet people, and I will not." Of the 93 participants in that plenum, 77 were arrested and 48 shot; overall, 96 of the 128 members and candidate members of the Komsomol Central Committee elected at the 1936 congress were arrested during 1937-1938.

The "Small Cult" and Everyday Modernisation

A "small cult" of Kosarev existed inside the USSR: the Central Aeroclub of Osoaviakhim, a mining-prospecting institute, a new-design tank, and border posts and detachments were named after him.

Kosarev is credited with the slogan "Work productively, rest culturally!" and with pushing Komsomol members into aviation, the navy and the construction of the Moscow metro. He also encouraged a shift away from military-style clothing toward civilian suits and dresses. He is credited too with helping revive the New Year holiday and, in summer 1936, with organizing a Spartak football demonstration match on Red Square before the Mausoleum tribune.

Memory

Streets named after Kosarev exist in Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Saransk, Tomsk, Gomel, Sevastopol and Donetsk, and a children's creativity centre in Moscow, a fishing trawler based in Murmansk, and the Kosarev peninsula in the Kara Sea also bear his name. He appears as a character in the TV series "The Star of an Era" (2005) and "Furtseva" (2011).

His family was repressed as well. His wife Maria Naneishvili (1907-1993), daughter of the Old Bolshevik Viktor Naneishvili, was sentenced to 10 years in a labour camp as a family member of a traitor to the motherland, and their daughter Yelena was arrested in 1947 and exiled to Norilsk; both were rehabilitated in 1954.