The Soviet Union came away from the 1952 Olympic Games, held in Helsinki, Finland, having won 71 medals. This was an impressive haul, especially given that it marked the state's first appearance at an Olympics, and it left them in second place in the overall medal table. Above them, however, sat the United States, who won only six more medals at the Olympics, but whose 40 Golds dwarfed the 22 won by the Soviets. The Soviet Union wanted more from their athletes, and considered that the best way to achieve this would be to build a state-of-the-art sports stadium, complete with training facilities, in Moscow, their capital.
 
Plans began to be made. A site in Luzhniki, across the Moskva River from the Lenin Hills (renamed the Sparrow Hills in 1999), near the centre of Moscow and well connected to the rest of the city via the Moscow Metro, was chosen for the new stadium’s location. On the 23rd December1954 these initial positional plans for what was to be called the ‘Central Lenin Stadium’ were made public. The stadium was designed in 90 days by the group of architects who had decided upon its location and construction began in the spring of 1955. Employing volunteers from all over the Soviet Union; utilising materials from Leningrad, to Irkutsk in Sibera, to Podolsk in the Moscow Oblast itself; from the Ukraine and Armenia, from Riga in Latvia, Kaunas in Lithuania, and Minsk in Belarus – the stadium was built in just 450 days. The grand opening took place on 31st July, 1956.

 
The stadium was instantly put to use, hosting the first Soviet Spartakiad – a sort of Olympics for the peoples of the Soviet Union, held every four years, and, at its peak, welcoming ninety million professional and amateur athletes to compete in a greater range of events than the Olympics themselves played host to. The stadium also became the home of the Spartak Moscow football team.
 
In the late 70s, Moscow won the right to host the 1980 Olympic Games proper, and the Central Lenin Stadium was the focal point around which an Olympic complex was built. Alas, the 1980 Olympic Games were marred by a boycott led by the United States. Tensions between the US and the Soviets had eased from the late 60s through to the mid 70s, but 1979 saw the beginning of what has been referred to as the ‘Second Cold War’. In December, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan – upon which, the US immediately withdrew from the Games of the following summer. So it was that, with athletics and football finals taking place in a stadium which could, at this point, host up to 103,000 people; with boxing, gymnastics and swimming competitions taking place in buildings nearby; the Soviets won 195 Olympic medals, including 80 Olympic Golds.
 
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It was following a football match in October 1982 that what has become known as the Luzhniki Stadium Disaster occurred (the stadium was renamed, from the ‘Central Lenin Stadium’ to the ‘Luzhniki Stadium’, in 1992). The October of 1982 was not an especially cold October by Moscow’s standards; but it was in the middle of a cold spell, on the 20th of the month, with the temperature having fallen below zero, that Spartak Moscow faced Dutch club HFC Haarlem in the season’s UEFA Cup.
 
Haarlem were competing in Europe for the first (and, to this point, only) time in their history. After winning promotion in 1981 from the Eerste Divisie, the second flight of Dutch football (with a young Ruud Gullit their star player), Haarlem finished fourth in the Eredivisie in the 1981/82 season, thereby securing European qualification. Gullit left for Feyenoord that summer, and Haarlem’s remaining players came up against a Spartak side featuring the talents of famed playmaker Yuri Gavrilov, midfielder Sergei Shavlo, and defender Sergei Shvetsov. A place in the last sixteen of the competition was up for grabs.
 
In addition to and aggravating the cold temperature, the evening of the 20th October saw much snow, and only 15,000 fans turned up to the Luzhniki stadium to support Spartak – they were joined by roughly a hundred Haarlem supporters. With such an expansive stadium set to hold so few fans, for simplicity and security’s sake and to keep out those without tickets, only the East Stand was opened up for the game; and only one exit from the East Stand was left open for the Spartak supporters. A goal in the 17th minute from the attacker Edgar Gess saw Spartak leading the match as it moved into its final minutes. Supporters began to leave the stadium.
 
The game moved into injury time; Sergei Shvetsov scored Spartak’s second goal of the game; and as some fans attempted to return to the crowd, a bottleneck formed by the stand’s open exit. Militia guards, rather than opening up more exits, focused on preventing supporters from returning into the stadium, and in the stampede which followed, exacerbated by the ice and snow which covered steps and walkways, people were trampled and killed. The number who died is unclear to this day – the incident was covered up by the secretive Soviet authorities; bodies were removed and only returned to the families of the deceased after thirteen days. Only a few lines appeared in the next day in one local paper, the Vechernyaya Moscow, which noted the disaster, stating merely that after the match ‘an incident occurred...some spectators were injured’.
 
The official death toll suggests that 66 Spartak supporters died that evening, but other estimates put the toll closer to 340 dead. This would make the Luzhniki Stadium Disaster the most destructive in football history. The few Haarlem fans who did attend the match were allowed to leave the East Stand via another exit, and they, and their team’s players, knew little about what happened after the game until an article in the 8th July, 1989 issue of the Soviet daily, Sovetsky Sport, finally revealed all. In the meantime, several months after the disaster, Yuri Panchikhin, the stadium’s deputy manager for just three months at the time of the incident, was quietly tried and sentenced to eighteen months of hard labour after ‘confessing’ to bearing feelings of guilt.
 
In the October days and in the weeks following the disaster, the authorities prevented the placing of tributes outside Luzhniki Stadium. In 1992, a monument, paid for by Spartak fans, was finally unveiled outside the stadium’s East Stand. In October 2008, a memorial match took place to commemorate the disaster twenty-five years on. It was organised by Spartak supporters and by, amongst others, Dick Advocaat and Guus Hiddink, the Dutch managers of Zenit St. Petersburg and the Russian national team respectively. Featuring players who had played for Spartak and Haarlem twenty-five years previously, money raised from the occasion was given to the families of the disaster’s victims.