The young Komsomol leader to whom Stalin clinked glasses whispering 'I'll kill you'
At a 1938 Kremlin banquet, Stalin suddenly clinked glasses with Kosarev, embraced and kissed him. Amid applause, Stalin whispered in his ear: "If you betray me, I'll kill you." Kosarev's wife Maria watched her husband's face turn deathly pale.
The face of revolutionary youth, Komsomol First Secretary at 25. He founded Spartak and the Soviet football league, purged 141,000 members during the Great Terror, then lost Stalin's trust and was arrested and shot at 35.
Career Timeline
- 1918–19Joined Komsomol at its founding; joined Bolshevik Party
- 1922–26First Secretary of Bauman district (Moscow) and Penza provincial Komsomol
- 1926Dispatched to Leningrad to purge Zinoviev supporters from Komsomol
- 1929–38First Secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee — youngest leader at 25
- 1934Full member of the Central Committee and Orgburo — youngest member
- 1936–38Great Purge in Komsomol: 141,337 expelled
- 1938–39Arrested personally by Beria; refused to confess under Rodos's torture; shot
Related historical events
Father of Spartak and Soviet Sport
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.