One of the symbols of the resilience of Leningrad, which survived a long blockade during World War II, was football matches, which continued to take place in the city besieged by enemies. Since the spring of 1942, friendly matches were held at the Dynamo stadium and the name of Lenin (now Petrovsky) to raise the morale of the inhabitants and the soldiers who defended them.

The most famous of them was the game on May 31, 1942. Newspaper reports were dedicated to her, and a memorial plaque with the date of the match and the names of its participants still hangs on the Dynamo wall. He made a great impression on Leningraders, since before it was impossible to imagine that football could still exist in a city fighting for life.

But that meeting between the Leningrad Dynamo and the team of the N-factory (the Leningrad Metal Plant, from the workers of which the current Zenit was formed) was preceded by another, which became widely known only after publication in Soviet publications in the 1960s years. According to them, the first match in besieged Leningrad took place on May 6, and it is from him that you need to report a series of games that clearly demonstrate that the city is not broken.

Unfortunately, there is too little information about the historical match, and besides, they have no documentary evidence. Sometimes football historians generally doubt that the match was taking place, citing not only the lack of reliable information about him, but also the fact that on May 6 in Leningrad there was still winter weather, in which the game was extremely difficult to play the game. But still, there is evidence of both eyewitnesses and the participants in the match themselves, who say that football life in the city was revived on May 6th.

The organizer of the first siege match is considered to be the NKVD captain Viktor Bychkov, who long before the war himself played football and carefully kept his old uniform with boots at home. In his diary, Bychkov wrote that in the early morning of May 6 he was called in by the head of the NKVD Directorate for Leningrad and the Leningrad Region Pyotr Kubatkin. The general ordered that a football match be held on the same day as a response to German propaganda, which claimed that the city was supposedly already dead and could be completely conquered.

The order had to be fulfilled, and Bychkov managed to quickly gather old friends from the Leningrad Dynamo: some worked in the police, others served at the front and they had to be urgently called. Many famous football players arrived at the match. Among them were goalkeeper Viktor Nabutov, who later became a commentator, future head coach of Zenit Arkady Alov, members of the list of “55 best” 1938 Konstantin Sazonov, Boris Oreshkin and Alexander Fedorov. Sometimes Peter Sychev is indicated among the participants by mistake, although he died in 1941 from shelling. The famous referee Nikolai Usov was invited to judge the match.

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The first reports on the May 6 match, which were already released in the 1960s, did not indicate the names of Dynamo rivals - they only mentioned that they were employees of the Leningrad garrison. A few years later, sports journalist Alexander Kiknadze on the pages of "Soviet Sport" and in his book "That Long Time" told the details of the meeting. The Dynamo team was opposed by the team of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet under the command of Major Andrei Lobanov. It included Antonin Sochnev, at that time the senior sailor on the battleship Marat, and in the future, the famous striker of the Moscow Torpedo.

Fragmented and sometimes conflicting information has reached our days about how the match itself went. It is known that it ended with a score of 7: 3 in favor of Dynamo, and the first goal was scored by a player of the naval team named Kodua, who served as a ship chef. The players spent two halves on the field, either 45 minutes, or 30. There were assumptions that the players did without a break, since a pause could only harm the course of the meeting.

Finally, there is no consensus on the spectators of the match. The earliest sources reported two thousand fans who were specially brought to the Dynamo stadium. The players themselves recalled that the audience was not so large. The daughter of Dynamo Alexander Fedorov, Larisa, said that her father saw only a few anti-aircraft gunners in the stands, who, like in peacetime, called players “muffs” after misses.

On May 31, Dynamo had already met with the LMZ team, and this match was widely covered by the press, and messages about it were broadcast on the radio both in Russian and in German. It is he who is usually remembered when it comes to the football of besieged Leningrad. The game on May 6 left very little information about itself, but still has the right to be called first.