[1] Two of Dynamo's players, Piontkovsky and Sviridovsky, were arrested by NKVD agents during an attempt to exchange several cuts of cloth for products and therefore had to work "for the good of the country" for two years in a penal colony.

Former Generallieutenant of Justice Volodymyr Pristaiko, having been vice chief of the Ukrainian Security Service SBU, summoned his analysis of the papers documenting the arrest and death of the Dynamo players: "There was definitively no context to the match.

[14] Articles published in the daily Nove ukrainske Slovo (New Ukrainian Word), controlled by the Germans, the reports of the witnesses and the NKVD documentation allow a reconstruction of FC Start's history.

[citation needed] Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules; some limited exceptions apply.

[15] In January 1942, football trainer and sport reporter Georgi Dmitrievich Shvetsov founded the club Rukh (Movement).

The German director Joseph Kordik, an engineer from Moravia, encouraged them to form a football team: FC Start.

The names of the German players are given in cyrillic letters on the poster: Harer, Danz, Schneider, Biskur, Scharf, Kaplan, Breuer, Arnold, Jannasch, Wunderlich, Hofmann.

But it named 14 Start players, amongst them Lev Gundarev, Georgi Timofeyev and Olexander Tkachenko, who were Ukrainian policemen under German command.

[citation needed] According to the archives, some of the Start players said during the NKVD interrogation that they had been denounced to the Gestapo by Rukh trainer Georgi Shvetsov.

[8] Ukrainian historians are convinced that this version was the real reason for the arrest; also because the three former Lokomotive players in FC Start were not prosecuted by the Gestapo.

[citation needed] The Kyiv archives document the cases of Olexander Tkachenko and Mikola Korotkykh as both not having played on Dynamo's first team before the war.

Both cases do not show any context of the "Death Match": After three weeks in the Gestapo prison, eight of the former Dynamo players were deported to the Syrets concentration camp next to the valley of Babi Yar in the outskirts of Kyiv.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the match, Honcharenko said on Kyiv radio: "They died like many other Soviet people because the two totalitarian systems were fighting each other and they were destined to become victims of that grand-scale massacre.

[43][44] The expression "Death Match" first appeared after the war, in the newspaper Stalinskoye plemya ("Stalin's tribe") on August 24, 1946 (#164, page 3) where a film script of Aleksandr Borshchagovsky was published.

Also in 1958, Piotr Severov and Naum Khalemsky published their novel The Last Duel (Russian: Последний поединок, romanized: Posledni poyedinok).

Gundarev, according to NKVD documents a "German agent", was condemned to death, but later his punishment was changed to ten years in the Gulag.

During the presidency of Leonid Brezhnev, the propaganda of the Communist Party emphasised the heroism of the Soviet population during World War II.

[8][52] Despite a KGB dossier expressing concern about the possible "glorification" of the surviving players with known collaborators amongst them,[53] two monuments to their honour were erected in Kyiv in 1971.

[54] After the publication of a report in a German newspaper repeating the Soviet version,[55] a case about the "Death Match" was opened by the prosecution office of Hamburg in July 1974.

[citation needed] Soviet Russian director Yevgeny Karelov's 1962 black-and-white film The Third Half was inspired by two 1958 novels: Aleksandr Borshchagovsky's Alerting Clouds (Trevozhnye oblaka) and Piotr Severov and Naum Khalemsky's The Last Duel (Posledni poyedinok).

[60] The Longest Yard is a 1974 American sports comedy film directed by Robert Aldrich, written by Tracy Keenan Wynn and based on a story by producer Albert S. Ruddy.

[citation needed] In 1981, Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone starred in the film Escape to Victory, directed by John Huston, which told the story of a group of Allied POWs who are challenged to a match against the prison's guards.

While the film's POWs are not Ukrainian but rather predominately Westerners, the story parallels are clear: they are threatened with death if they win, the playing ground is surrounded with Nazi guards and attack dogs, the referee ignores vicious and brutal fouls committed by the German team, yet the Allied prisoner team ignore the threat and draw the match, thus risking forfeiting their lives.

(Huston's film has a deus ex machina ending which conflicts with the original Soviet story when the spectators storm the field at the match's end and the POWs escape in the resultant confusion, but as no event similar to this actually occurred in the West during World War II, it is generally assumed that this film was inspired by the legendary/propaganda version of the Death Match.

)[citation needed] In the Anglo-American media, the publication of a book Dynamo: Defending the Honour of Kyiv by the Scottish journalist Andy Dougan [61] inspired many articles.

[62] Dougan specialises in publications about Hollywood and has written books about George Clooney, Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

"[citation needed] Without giving any concrete sources Dougan's docufiction which invented dialogues repeats the Soviet version of an SS-officer threatening the Start players (p. 178).

He describes many details which Ukrainian historians revealed as false before the publication of his book: e.g. the red jerseys as symbol of the players‘ communist spirit (p. 137), the SS officer demanding the Nazi salutation from the Start players (p. 164), the heavy armed German soldiers surrounding the playground with German shepherds(p. 177-178), Trusevich praising the Soviet regime before his execution (p. 210).

[63] In 2008 Willie Gannon a senior Bleacher Report writer wrote an article about the Dynamo's "Death Match" that starts with the following "This is a true story that I was told by my father..."[64] Mr.Gannon claims that Germans entered Kyiv "with little or no resistance" and Major General Ebenhardt was rushing to stage a game between a German team and no other else but Dynamo Kyiv.

[64] The film Match (2012) by the Russian director Andrey Malyukov, also ignores the reports of Ukrainian witnesses and scholars, and repeats the Soviet propaganda version.