Soviet authorities pledged he could still play if he admitted his guilt, after which he confessed, but was instead prosecuted and sentenced to twelve years of forced labour under the Gulag system (abolished in 1960 and replaced by prisons).

Anatoly did not return to the family following the Second World War, instead choosing to settle alone in Kiev; Sofia therefore raised her son on her own, working at the Fraser Cutting Instruments Factory to support Eduard and herself.

Streltsov continued to score regularly for Torpedo, managing 12 league goals during the 1956 season, but appeared in two successive defeats for the Soviets before they travelled in November 1956 to the Olympic Games in Melbourne.

[7] The match finished 0–0 after 90 minutes,[1][7] and with defender Nikolai Tishchenko and Streltsov's fellow Torpedo forward Valentin Ivanov both injured, the Soviet team had only nine fit players when Bulgaria scored early in extra time.

[5] At the end of that season, Streltsov came seventh in the 1957 Ballon d'Or, gaining 12 votes;[10] by the start of the World Cup year, 1958, his international record stood at 18 goals in 20 games.

[1][2] As a key player for his club and for the Soviet national side, these traits combined to create an impression in government circles that, in Wilson's words, "Streltsov was becoming rather too much of a celebrity".

With the young Svetlana besotted by the 19-year-old Torpedo forward, her mother first met him at a Kremlin ball held early in 1957 to celebrate the Olympic victory of 1956.

[1][2] Streltsov became secretly engaged to Alla Demenko before leaving for the Olympics,[11] and the couple married on 25 February 1957,[11] halfway through preparations for the Soviet season.

His file in the party archives included the comment: "[a]ccording to a verified source, Streltsov said to his friends in 1957 that he was always sorry to return to the USSR after trips abroad.

[1] A week after appearing against England in a warm-up match in Moscow for the 1958 World Cup, Streltsov was invited to a party by a Soviet military officer, Eduard Karakhanov, to be held on 25 May.

[1] However, in the same interview Simonyan revealed incriminating photographs of both Lebedeva and Streltsov from the time of the trial, including one in which the Torpedo player's face "was streaked from nose to cheekbone with three parallel scratches".

[1] "[T]here is the possibility that the photographs were doctored or the injuries inflicted at a later date", Wilson comments, "but Soviet justice rarely required such damning evidence.

[1] This did not happen, however; far from remaining in the national side, Streltsov was sentenced to twelve years in the forced labour camps of the Gulag, and barred from ever returning to professional football of any kind.

[17] In the camp where he was incarcerated, Streltsov was initially victimised by a young criminal who inflicted so much physical harm on him that he spent four months in the prison hospital, suffering from injuries caused by blows from either an "iron bar or a shoe heel".

The world's press claimed that two of the competing teams were severely weakened: England by the Munich air disaster, and the Soviets by the loss of Streltsov.

[5][19] Streltsov was released on 4 February 1963,[20] five years into his twelve-year sentence, and owing to the ban from professional play began to split his time between work at the ZiL factory and the study of automotive engineering at the attached technical college.

[22] In October 1964, Khrushchev was replaced as the Communist Party's First Secretary by Leonid Brezhnev, who shortly after taking office received a letter signed by tens of thousands of people, including heroes of Socialist Labour and national and regional Supreme Soviet members, requesting the reversal of Streltsov's professional ban.

[23] Although he had lost some of his strength and agility, his footballing intelligence was still intact; his presence helped Torpedo to win the 1965 Soviet championship, with Streltsov scoring 12 goals from 26 league matches.

[25] He was recalled to the Soviet national team on 16 October 1966 in a 2–0 home defeat against Turkey,[26] and scored the first international goal of his comeback a week later in a 2–2 draw with East Germany.

[4] Streltsov successfully re-established himself in the Soviet team over the following year, as he appeared in eight consecutive USSR matches, starting with a 2–0 friendly victory over Scotland in Glasgow in May 1967.

He scored two goals during this run in the national side: one each in a 4–2 win against France in Paris on 3 June 1967 and a 4–3 European Championship qualifying home victory over Austria eight days later.

After featuring in a home friendly win over Belgium in April, he made his final appearance for the USSR in the 2–0 1968 European Championship quarter-final first leg loss to Hungary on 4 May 1968.

[4] Following a footballing career spent exclusively with Torpedo, Streltsov, a supporter of Spartak Moscow, repeatedly complained about his failure to play for his favourite team.

[3][15] He also took part in matches contested by former players before dying in 1990 from throat cancer,[3] which his first wife Alla later claimed had been brought about by irradiated food served to him in the camps.

In his later years, with his physical attributes reduced, he emphasised his skill and on-field intelligence to become more of a playmaker, playing further back and setting up attacking moves for team-mates rather than leading them himself.

Despite the eight-year gap between his two spells as a member of the Soviet national team, Streltsov, nicknamed "The Russian Pelé",[2] was the fourth highest international goalscorer in the country's history.

The coin was one of three minted as part of the "Outstanding Sportsmen of Russia" series; the other two pieces bore the faces of footballers Lev Yashin and Konstantin Beskov, respectively.