The Luzhniki disaster was a deadly crowd crush that took place at the Grand Sports Arena of the Central Lenin Stadium (Russian: Большая спортивная арена Центрального стадиона им.
According to the official enquiry, 66 FC Spartak Moscow fans,[1][2][3] mostly adolescents,[4] died in the crush, which made it Russia's worst sporting disaster.
[9] Minutes before the end of the game, several hundred fans began to leave the stadium in an attempt to get to the Metro station ahead of the crowds.
The next day Yuri Andropov (who replaced Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the country, less than a month after this disaster) visited the institute and met several doctors and relatives of the injured.
[13] A thorough investigation of the Luzhniki disaster corresponded with the new policies of Yuri Andropov, a former KGB head, who became the leader of the country a month after the tragedy.
[14] On 17 December 1982, two months after the crush, he even went as far as firing the interior minister Nikolai Shchelokov, the Soviet Union's top police officer, after learning of the corruption allegations against him.
[1] However, Kokryshev (as a person previously decorated by the state) was eligible for a recent amnesty (on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the creation of the USSR)[7] and was released.
[1][7] The other two officials, Deputy Director Lyzhin and police chief Major Koryagin, did not stand trial in February for medical reasons.
[9] On 20 October 2007, on the 25th anniversary, a memorial match was played at Luzhniki between the former players of FC Spartak Moscow and HFC Haarlem.
The only information about the tragedy in the Soviet media immediately after the disaster was a short note in a local daily, Vechernyaya Moskva, the next day.
It said: On 20 October 1982, after the football match at the Grand Sports Arena of the Central Lenin Stadium, as spectators were on their way out, an accident took place due to disturbances in the movement of people.
[20] On the next day, 23 October, Italian,[22] Spanish[23] and other Western newspapers stated that there were 3 people killed and 60 injured in this disaster, citing the Dutch journalists who were present at the match.
[23] Three days later, on 26 October The New York Times wrote that "more than 20 persons were killed and dozens were injured in a panic at Lenin Stadium".
[24] Ten days later, in the article published on 5 November 1982, La Stampa stated that "it seems that 72" people were killed and "at least 150" were injured in the Luzhiniki disaster, citing the unnamed "unofficial sources".
Three months later, on 8 July 1989, Sovetsky Sport published another article, "Luzhniki's Dark Secret",[30][31] which received even more publicity in the West.
Two weeks later, on 20 July 1989, the Soviet newspaper of record Izvestia published an interview with a Detective Aleksandr Shpeyer, who was in charge of the 1982 investigation of the Luzhniki disaster.
In this article, named "The Tragedy at Luzhniki: Facts and Fabrication",[1][2] Detective Shpeyer provided various factual details of the disaster and revealed the real number of fatalities (66) and injured (61).
[3] The next day, Sovetsky Sport in its editorial admitted that its journalists, who wrote the sensational article two weeks earlier, had to use "conjectures" to provide details of this tragedy.
[9][17] Other details from the "dark secret" article in Sovetsky Sport (e.g., that only one stand and one exit were opened for spectators, or that there was a head-on collision of two fans' crowds moving in the opposite directions after the second goal) also sometimes resurface in modern publications.
On 6 June 2018, in the run-up to the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph published an article that suggested that the true scale of the disaster has been covered up by the Russian state and that the death toll was considerably higher than the official figure of 66.
The article suggests that the tragedy was caused by police attempting to arrest Spartak fans who were singing "subversive" songs against the communist regime.