The World Cup begins:

The World Revolution’s First XI take to the pitch!

“Soviet United” on the pitch: in this 1923 cartoon from Red Pepper, Marx has the ball, and the line-up is made up of the star players of the Bolshevik movement. Stalin, of course, is nowhere to be seen in the First XI - for at the time, the bureaucratic counter-revolution had not yet prevailed. (See: Who were the true leaders of the October Revolution?)

As the World Cup kicks off, here is something from the archives: the most theoretically accomplished, politically advanced and technically gifted First XI of all time!

This 1923 cartoon was published in the Soviet satirical magazine Red Pepper (Krasnyi Perets). Red Pepper was an illustrated political humour magazine published in Moscow between 1923 and 1926. It satirised shoddy and inadequate practices, the distortions of the NEP period, the remnants of the old way of life, and international politics. In its early period, it was issued as a supplement to the newspaper Rabochaya Moskva; from 1925 onwards, it became a standalone publication.

The cartoon introduces readers to the football team “Soviet United”. In the front row are Radek, Sosnovsky, Trotsky, Riazanov and Bukharin; in the back row are Zinoviev, Lenin, Marx, Kamenev, Lozovsky and Chicherin. The ball - or rather, the globe - is in the hands of the team captain, Marx. As for the side’s style of play, it is, as one might expect, as follows: a coherent strategy grounded in revolutionary Marxist theory; highly creative tactics that leave the opposition bewildered; pressing all over the pitch; a solid defence; uninterrupted agitation; and attacking football on a world scale.

One of the most striking aspects of the drawing, viewed from today’s vantage point, is that Stalin is absent from this First XI. Leaving Marx and Lenin aside, the great majority of the line-up would, in the years that followed, fall victim to the purges and political murders carried out on his orders: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Riazanov, Sosnovsky and Lozovsky were executed; Radek died in prison; and Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by a Stalinist agent.

The World Cup will last for 39 days - by no means a short stretch of time. The stars of the World Revolution, however, will continue to play on the pitches of class struggle for many years to come, refusing to make the slightest concession to today’s increasingly commercialised footballing order, which loses more of its beauty with every passing year.

And there is one crucial difference that sets this team apart from every other team: it is not a national side! As Captain Marx reminds the whole squad in the dressing room before every match: “The workers have no country!”

Source: David King, Trotsky: A Photographic Biography, Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986, p. 124.