“Moscow is above all a city of broken dreams and corrupted utopias,” claim Natalia Smirnova and Julia Gouman, editors of the book Moscow Noir. It’s a place of “bleak and mystical despair.”
And so it’s perhaps no surprise that many of Russian football’s most tragically intriguing tales originate from the capital, specifically during the 1950s and 1960s when, for a time, Torpedo Moscow rode high in top-flight football and counted one of Russia’s best ever players amid their ranks.
That player was not Valery Voronin.
As you will learn, the tale of Valery Voronin is a sad one. Especially when told in parallel to the (incredible) story of his more illustrious teammate Eduard Streltsov, known as the “White Pelé” and according to Jonathan Wilson, “arguably Russia’s greatest ever outfield player.”
Voronin is one of history’s shadows. He very much existed but was lost along the way, a faded name among more burnished legends and forgotten among the debris of life.
And all this despite being arguably more influential on the greatest squad Torpedo Moscow has ever had and winning more trophies than the almighty Streltsov.
ON THE CUSP OF THE GOLDEN AGE
Streltsov blitzed onto the scene, debuting for Torpedo in 1954 aged just 16 and became the league’s top scorer the very next season, notching 15 goals in 22 games.
At 19, he was the integral part of the Soviet side that won gold at the 1956 Olympics and was regularly banging in goal after goal for Torpedo.
There was only two years difference between Streltsov and the younger Voronin, but while Streltsov moved straight from his local factory side into Torpedo’s first team, almost instantly becoming the darling of Russian football, Voronin had to wait until he was 19, working his way through the youth set-ups.
The year Voronin did finally debut, 1958, saw Torpedo – who were on the cusp of their golden age – plunged into crisis: Streltsov, still only 21, was convicted on a dubious rape charge (an incredible story but one for another time) and was sentenced to 12 years in the labour camp.
In the absence of Russia’s great footballing icon of the 1950s, Torpedo still had excellent players, including attacking midfielder Maradona, striker Valentin Ivanov and centre-back Santamaria. But they needed someone to bind them.
Valery Voronin
was that player.
From his anchor point in central midfield, Voronin’s incredible sense of positioning allowed him to read the game like few others. A consummate ability to pass the ball meant he could redistribute possession to the right person at the right moment.
“I well remember Voronin,” recalled journalist Leonid Repin, back in 1999:
“In an instant and elusive moment he could spirit the ball away from attackers. Or he could suddenly burst into the penalty area and with defences at full stretch would slide a clever assist to his striker.
“But most of all, he delighted me with his central play where, taking the ball with a graceful, cat-like movement, Voronin would look up from the tamed ball and, locating all the moving pieces on the grass chess board before him with lightening-fast estimation, was always able to dispatch the ball just so – inevitably drawing a sigh of admiration.”
Thus, Voronin kept a precociously talented Torpedo side operating at the highest level despite missing their greatest ever star.
Just two years on from the potentially devastating loss of Streltsov, the Black-Whites clinched their first ever league title and the Cup in a momentous double triumph in 1960.
The following season, Voronin and Torpedo won their initial league (back then the 22 top-flight teams were split into two groups of 11, the top five from each forming a super league) by seven clear points, losing out to Dynamo Kiev in the super league by a margin of only four points.
By 1964 Voronin was flying high. After participating in the 1962 World Cup in Chile, Voronin was named in the Dream Team of Euro ’64, where the USSR were narrowly beaten 2-1 in the final by hosts Spain.
Also that year, Voronin again finished a runner-up in the league with Torpedo but such was his influence in that team that he was listed among the Continent’s top ten players by France Football – the venerable weekly magazine that still decides the Ballon D’Or winner.
By 1965, after serving seven of his 12-year stretch, Streltsov returned to Torpedo. In just his first season back in the black and white, he helped lead Torpedo and Voronin to a second league triumph.
Of course, Streltsov, who’d scored 12 league goals to boot – one for each year of his murky sentence - was the talk of the town, but it was Voronin who was again voted among the top ten by France Football. Streltsov was nowhere.
ONLY VICTORS ARE THE TRUE AUTHORS OF HISTORY
Streltsov was, by all accounts, a genius. But Voronin was also an extremely fine footballer and it was Voronin, not the incarcerated Streltsov that helped catalyse Torpedo’s most celebrated era.
Yet Voronin’s name has not lived nearly as long in the memory as Streltsov’s and it has certainly not shone as brightly over time. Rather, Valery Voronin has faded from memory and the history books.
However, unlike Streltsov, Voronin was not seen to have withstood, and then triumphed over, state oppression – something that cannot be undervalued in the psyche of a people who were subjugated by such a terrible regime.
In doing so, Streltsov, like Starostin, become a titan, a superhuman. Despite his did he/didn’t he conviction, in surviving the system Streltsov was elevated above mere mortals as being seen to able to break the manacles of the Soviet system.
By contrast, Voronin was all too normal, all too human: Streltsov survived his ordeal, Voronin did not.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEMONS
Heading into his early thirties, Streltsov was getting better. In both the 1967 and 1968 seasons he was voted player of the year, the latter season seeing Torpedo again finish in second – meaning Moscow’s then fourth smallest club had finished in the top two five times in eight years.
Conversely Voronin, unbeknownst to anyone, was headed towards oblivion.
Around the time of his thirtieth birthday during the summer of 1969, the age when Streltsov had regained his stride after losing five years of his career, Voronin, tired from a 114km drive back from the city of Kolomna to Moscow, fell asleep at the wheel of his Volga motorcar.
Miraculously, he was not killed. In a twist of fate, it turned out that his driver’s seat was not properly fixed to it’s racking and it shot out through the rear passenger door upon impact.
The midfielder was hospitalised for the rest of the summer but, despite initially having to breathe through a tube and suffering multiple fractures, he recovered remarkably swiftly and returned to the practice pitches.
But it was clear that it was not the same “Valera” that had come back from the dead. Sure, he had regained full physical fitness, but there was just something not quite right about the man himself.
Mentally, Voronin had not been able to get over his terrifying ordeal and he started to turn, increasingly, to drink.
Psychologically, Voronin was still in a dark place and very quickly his football suffered. He withdrew into himself and stopped going to training altogether.
Voronin never played again after 1969. And, with despite the best efforts of various coaches, colleagues and friends, he could not find anything to replace that which he had lost. Nothing could substitute the career that was taken from him that summer – nothing except alcohol.
One of those that tried, an old coach of Voronin’s, Yuri Stepanenko, would occasionally see the faded star at an old training field where Stepanenko supervised youth players. Each time, he said, the onlooking Voronin’s eyes seemed “dormant”.
Years later, on 20 May 1984, Stepanenko bumped into Voronin at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium. According to the old coach, Voronin was in the company of three suspicious men.
“You know them well?” Stepanenko asked his old pupil. Voronin laughed and replied that yes, he did, and they parted. The next morning Valery Voronin was found, bludgeoned to death, in bushes off the Varshovskoye Highway some way out of town. He was 44.
In truth, in the fourteen or so years since he retired from the game, Voronin was already fading away. After his death he has faded only further. Yet his role in that mighty team was so much more than posterity would have us believe.
Though maybe not
the star of Torpedo’s history, all of the stars turned out for his funeral held, fittingly, at the Danilovsky cemetery, not far from the ZiL automobile factory that gave birth to the only club he knew – and the only life he ever wanted: football.
His case has never been solved.
