The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

* One of Lev’s most important friendships within the party was with Andrei Starostin, one of the four famous Starostin brothers, all footballing stars with Spartak Moscow. Lev had known Starostin since the 1930s, when his younger brother Igor had played for the youth team of Moscow Dinamo (Igor Netto went on to become a stylish midfielder with Spartak Moscow, and from 1952, when Lev was in the Gulag, the captain of the Soviet national side). Lev was deeply influenced by Starostin’s ideas, which he recorded in a notebook. One idea, which Lev now sees as the ‘guiding principle’ of his whole life, was borrowed from Tolstoy: ‘Do what is necessary, and what you think you should, and whatever will be, will be.’