When Fifa awarded this year's World Cup to Russia, its then general secretary, Sepp Blatter, said it had wanted to take the sport into new lands and to extend football’s horizons. The real reason Fifa decided to favour Vladimir Putin’s bid remains disputed, as we shall see, but Blatter was right about one thing: the World Cup 2018 will indeed be something unprecedented. English fans will have a chance to witness that during their team’s first match on 18 June, against Tunisia, at a brand-new stadium in Stalingrad, site of the bloodiest battle in history. Only it’s not called Stalingrad any more, of course, it’s called Volgograd and there’s nowhere else on earth quite like it.

Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941, when Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. The Red Army was overwhelmed. It lost millions of men as it was pushed back deep into Soviet territory. Just over a year after first crossing the border, German soldiers reached the Volga River, at a city with a location that made it strategic and a name that made it irresistible.

According to most estimates, in just the first week of German bombing Stalingrad lost 40,000 civilians, almost as many as Britain lost during the whole of the Blitz. The Soviet death toll continued to be horrific as its troops poured across the river to defend their shrinking footprint on the right bank, battling suicidally in what the Germans called Rattenkrieg, the war of the rats. After three grinding months, Soviet tanks counterattacked, smashing the flanks of Germany’s Sixth Army and trapping its soldiers in the city.

In February 1943, the 91,000 Axis troops still alive – including 22 generals – surrendered. Half a million Soviet soldiers had died to secure this defeat, but it turned the course of the Second World War, transforming the battle of Stalingrad into the most heroic chapter in the Russians’ “Great Victory”. Just two tiny pockets of the city’s riverbank never fell to the Germans and the site of Volgograd Arena is one of them. The stadium where England play their first match sits on perhaps the most sacred ground in all of Russia.

© Getty Images

A very fine stadium it is too. Shaped like a fur hat, decorated with intricate stars of interlocking metalwork and capable of seating 45,000 people, it was finished in early 2018. It is best viewed from the vantage point of the Mamayev Kurgan, an old Tatar burial mound that was fought over remorselessly during the battle and which is now topped with “The Motherland Calls”, a gigantic statue of a woman calling those behind her into the fray. Her sword alone is 27 metres long. A plaque asks you to keep off the grass: it covers a mass grave containing 34,505 bodies.

Beneath the statue’s left foot is a domed chamber studded with Soviet emblems, surrounding an eternal flame. A plaque thanks all the soldiers who fought here and is signed by commander-in-chief Joseph Stalin. Beneath her right foot is an Orthodox church, with gold domes glinting against the clear blue sky. Few places better symbolise the uneasy relationship between Russia’s past and present than the Mamayev Kurgan.

Stalingrad became Volgograd in 1961, after Stalin’s successor denounced his purges and repression, but the dictator still looms over the city, rather like he looms over the whole country. You can’t entirely reject Stalin if you don’t reject the victory he won and no one wants to do that. Instead, the victory is celebrated in ever-greater military parades every 9 May – Victory Day – with Putin, as Stalin did, presiding benignly on Red Square.

Volgograd Arena was originally going to be called Victory Arena, although this name appears to have been quietly vetoed by Fifa out of concerns it was too political. That means the stadium is now pretty much the only thing in town not named after the victory: even the trams proclaim the city’s glory as they trundle up Lenin Avenue, a mural of Marx, Engels and Lenin to the left of them and a Burger King to the right.

“Your MI6 is very strong, but not as strong as ours, though that doesn’t stop your people from blaming us for everything. That’s why we need Stalin. To stop the Americans from giving us haemorrhoids,” said Irina Valentinova, a chuckling seventysomething guide at Volgograd’s Stalin Museum, when she heard I was from Britain. I was part of a small group she was showing around the three rooms of documents and maps that culminate in a waxwork of the man himself, which was available for selfies. “Pick up his pipe. Go on. Shake him by the hand,” she urged, as I posed for a photograph. “Putin can’t meet you. He’s busy, but at least you’ve been a guest at Stalin’s.”

Stalin may have won the biggest victory of all time, but it’s Putin who gets to host the biggest party

I wanted to ask the museum’s founder why he had created this grisly memorial to one of history’s greatest monsters and whether visiting football fans might not be more appalled than impressed, but Valentinova told me he was dead. (I later discovered he had been beaten to death while playing tennis, in a 2010 contract hit.) But, never mind, there were plenty of good things in the gift shop. She pointed out plates commemorating Stalin and Putin, a Stalin calendar, adult T-shirts showing Putin riding a bear and child-size versions bearing the slogan “Russians don’t surrender”.

“Maybe education isn’t what it was and hospitals are not good and food prices are high and petrol is going up, but you don’t have the right not to love your homeland,” she said. “That was the time of Stalin and this is the time of Putin.”

Indeed it is. Stalin may have won the biggest victory of all time, but it’s Putin who gets to host the biggest party.

In some ways, Russia’s World Cup is a time capsule from another age, thanks to the eight-year lag between the bid and the tournament. In 2010, when Russia saw off its rivals to secure the championship, Putin was taking a break from being president – he was prime minister – because he wanted to demonstrate how much he honoured the legal ban on serving three consecutive terms in the Kremlin. This was in keeping with what was then his key policy priority: showing Russia to be a predictable and law-abiding member of the family of nations. He joined the World Trade Organization, convened a meeting of the G8 in his home city of Saint Petersburg and worked hard to boost the prestige of the United Nations. Hosting the Winter Olympics and the World Cup were just more ways of showing everyone that Russia was a fun friend and a nice neighbour.

Times have changed, however. Since returning as president in 2012, Putin has been more interested in breaking things than building them. Having secured the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia cheated on an industrial scale, allegedly employing state security to help its athletes dope. Just a few weeks after the end of the games, Putin annexed Crimea and sent troops into Eastern Ukraine. He has since been accused of using hackers to troll the United States during the 2016 election, successfully undermining presidential candidate Hillary Clinton – whom he blamed for supporting protesters against him in 2011-12 – and helping secure the election of Donald Trump. In his first term, Putin argued vociferously against the US’s unilateral military action in the Middle East. Now it is he who is ignoring world opinion and bombing Arab cities.

My trip to Volgograd in March took place the week after the Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury, a nadir in relations between Moscow and the West, even lower than when Russia invaded Ukraine. Defence secretary Gavin Williamson told Russia it should “go away and shut up” and a Russian spokesman responded by calling him a “fishwife”. Although my reception was kinder than this, I was still lectured for much of the evening by fellow passengers when I took the night train from Volgograd to Moscow and many of my interviewees cancelled.

Football ultras and criminals have long been hired by the Kremlin as allies

It may be in anticipation of such unpleasantness that English fans have failed to apply for tickets in anything like the numbers they did for the World Cups in Brazil and South Africa. After all, Russia now looks more like the neighbour from hell than a fun friend to share a drink with. Fans may also have been put off by the spectator violence that marred England’s game against Russia in Marseilles in 2016, which left 31 England fans injured and three Russians in jail, and the fact that Putin appeared to find it funny.

The Russian president did try to make the right noises of condemnation, but he couldn’t quite resist showing off about how easily Russia’s hooligans had beaten their rivals. “This is absolutely outrageous,” Putin told an economic forum shortly after the unlovely 1-1 draw that sparked the clashes, before unleashing his trademark smirk. “Granted, I do not know how 200 Russian fans were able to pummel several thousand Britons.” A ripple of laughter spread through the hall.

That comment was not surprising to anyone who has followed the history of Russian hooliganism. Football ultras have long been enlisted by the Kremlin as allies against potential protestations to the staggering wealth of Putin’s friends (as have biker gangs, organised criminals and demobbed Chechen rebels). In 2007, Russia’s Football Union endorsed an association of fans known as VOB to oversee the allocation of tickets for away matches and handed control of it to some of the country’s most notorious “firms”, with whom Putin liked to be photographed sharing a beer.

English and Russian fans clash at the Euros in Marseille, 11 June 2016 © Getty Images

“The growing professionalisation of hooligan groups who conduct regular combat training and battles with each other has been well documented,” wrote Football Against Racism In Europe (Fare), a Fifa-backed body that campaigns for equality in the game, in its report of 2015-7. “Our concern is the type of far-right ideology that these groups follow and the number of links they have within football structures, often as official representatives within professional clubs... Officials seem to appoint leaders of hooligan firms to work with fans in order to control the most troublesome ones. This approach does not work.”

The implicit trade-off that Fare was alluding to was that the firms could do what they wanted as long as they were prepared to mobilise in support of Putin if required. VOB was headed by Alexander Shprygin, a man once photographed giving a Nazi salute and who has lamented the presence of nonwhite players in the Russian league. After the battles in Marseilles, the French authorities deported Shprygin. He returned immediately, only to be deported again. “English fans are cool. They invented hooliganism and when you fight them and beat them, that’s cool too,” he told me when I spoke to him for this article. “It’s always cool to beat England on the pitch. In the same way, it’s cool to defeat the fans.”

It was because of his habit of saying things such as that, plus the fact that the Russian Football Union was fined £130,000 after the Marseilles violence and given a suspended disqualification from the tournament, that the Russian government belatedly decided its alliance with the hooligans was more trouble than it was worth. In 2016, VOB was excluded from the Russian Football Union; Shprygin was investigated for involvement in a mass brawl between Spartak and CSKA fans; and his car was torched. Russia has now brought in special ID cards for football fans, without which they cannot get into the stadiums.

The World Cup is a military parade, but more fun. Putin wanted it and Putin got it, whatever it cost

On previous trips to Russia, I’ve had no trouble finding hooligans happy to talk to me, but this time was different. The pressure on them from the Federal Security Service (FSB) was just too great. Eventually, one ultra agreed to meet at a bar in Volgograd, providing I didn’t identify him in any way. He is part of a firm called (in English) “The Dangers”, which posts online videos of its mass brawls, but he was pretty depressed about the chance of a scrap when the World Cup begins in May. “There won’t be anything unofficial this year. Everything has got really tough now,” he said, shrugging. “I won’t even be at the games. They refused me.”

He had bought tickets to the Confederations Cup, the World Cup warm-up event that took place in 2017, but when he got there discovered his fan ID had been cancelled. “It’s difficult now, because of the FSB, the police. They won’t let us do anything.”

Even if many English fans do stay at home, England’s players will still, of course, be delighted to be at the World Cup finals. Nonetheless, when they kick off against the Tunisians in Volgograd, it will be a bittersweet moment. England had, after all, been hoping to host the tournament themselves and Volgograd’s stadium, though nice, is not Wembley.

David Cameron, David Beckham and Prince William – the press dubbed them “the Three Lions” – headed the final lobbying push at Fifa’s meeting in 2010. Their mission was overshadowed by both the Sunday Times and Panorama accusing Fifa committee members of corruption, but they were confident they had a strong chance, particularly when Putin said he would not be coming in person. “If he does not show in Zurich then the Russia camp, which looked downbeat yesterday, know they will not win,” the Daily Mail crowed in a report headlined “Roaring Back”.

That assertion proved premature. Not only did Russia win, but the FA’s humiliation was more complete than anything the national side has ever managed on the pitch. England’s bid was rejected in the first round of voting. Out of 22 members on Fifa’s council, the FA won the support of just two and one of those worked for the FA. Two years of campaigning and £21 million spent to persuade one person. “We sent the Three Lions,” reported a chastened Daily Mail the day after the vote. “We may as well have sent the Three Stooges.”

Putin turned up after the vote to shake hands, smile for the cameras and deny any corruption had taken place. He can be forgiven his smirk – it must have been a sweet moment – but in some ways his enthusiasm for the World Cup was peculiar, since he has never shown any sign of liking football. In general, he prefers sports such as judo, skiing, swimming, scuba diving for antiquities, shooting, topless horse-riding, even ice hockey – anything that makes him personally look good on television – over watching the beautiful game. But for Putin the tournament was not really about sport, it was about something bigger: telling the world that Russia is back. The World Cup is a military parade, but more fun and with a bigger audience. Putin wanted it and Putin got it, whatever it cost. Cameron is still not over his humiliation.

‘The Sochi Olympics was a pigs’ trough of corruption. The World Cup is five times as big’

“We had the best plan, the best stadium, the most enthusiastic supporters,” the former prime minister insisted in a 2017 speech. “Putin actually boycotted the whole thing because he said it was riddled with corruption. He was right. It was. And, let me put it like this, I am sure he wasn’t completely surprised when Russia actually won the bid.” Ten of the 22 Fifa committee members at the time of the vote have since been indicted or punished for corruption, including its ex-president Sepp Blatter, who in 2016 was banned from any role in Fifa for six years.

Russian officials dismiss any suggestion that their nation’s representatives cheated as the carping of bad losers. “England didn’t just lose to Russia, but to all the bidders,” Igor Lebedev, a deputy speaker of parliament and a member of the Russian Football Union’s executive committee, reminded me. “There are various ways of reacting to groundless accusations. At first I reacted with humour. Then, I must admit, they started to annoy me. Now we just ignore them. There are just a few weeks left until the start of the World Cup and we’re eagerly anticipating this wonderful event.”

Fifa did look into whether the process of awarding the World Cup to Russia had been crooked, but its investigator didn’t get anywhere, largely because the Russians made “only a limited number of documents available”. Regrettably, the computers the Russian bid team used had been destroyed. Equally sadly, their email accounts were no longer accessible and the report by the government’s audit chamber could not be provided either. To be certain, Russia barred Michael Garcia, the American heading Fifa’s investigation, from entering the country. It’ll take a lot more than Fifa to catch Putin with his hand in the till.

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent turned private investigator, who famously wrote a report accusing Donald Trump of links to the Kremlin, helped the Sunday Times look into the scandal and the paper later gave evidence to parliament on why England’s bid had been such a disaster. “Don’t expect me or anyone else to produce a document with Putin’s signature saying please X bribe Y with this amount in this way,” the Sunday Times quoted Steele as saying. “Putin is an ex-intelligence officer. Everything he does has to be deniable. [The Winter Olympics at] Sochi was a complete pigs’ trough in terms of corruption and the World Cup is five times as big.”

Putin joins Shpygrin to lay flowers on the grave of slain Spartak Moscow supporter Yegor Sviridov © Getty Images

Putin may desire these giant sporting spectacles so he can show off, but his friends use them to get rich. According to the politician and anti-corruption campaigner Boris Nemtsov, insiders embezzled perhaps as much as $30 billion (£21bn) from the budget for Russia’s 2014 Sochi Olympics (Nemtsov was shot dead within sight of the Kremlin a year later, in 2015). Those accusations proved extremely embarrassing for Putin and, if the World Cup was going to be even more crooked, the embarrassment could be extreme. So the authorities took steps to avoid it.

One of the people who caused that embarrassment is a resident of Sochi, Semyon Simonov, who has long campaigned for the rights of migrant labourers. He helped workers to meet journalists and briefed the press about how hundreds of them had died creating the infrastructure for the 2014 Sochi Games. His revelations launched hundreds of headlines.

Together with Human Rights Watch (HRW), Simonov decided to do the same thing for the World Cup, by touring the country and collecting information on working conditions at the building sites. In April 2017, he arrived in Volgograd, walked to the stadium and began looking for sources to talk to. He didn’t get far, however, since he was already expected. “Some of the workers were just sitting there, having lunch, talking. When I tried to go up to them, three men in camouflage appeared in front of me and one man in civilian clothes,” Simonov told me by telephone from Sochi. “The one in normal clothes asked, ‘Are you Semyon?’ I said yes and they suggested I go with them to the police station.” That was the end of his investigations in Volgograd.

“That basically stopped us from doing this research, because we couldn’t. It just was not worth the risk for that to happen again or to get worse... We worked for about five years in the run-up to Sochi and we never faced anything this deliberate or premeditated,” Jane Buchanan, associate director of HRW’s Europe and Central Asia division, told me. “Russia is ever more restrictive in terms of the media and human rights activists doing work on these issues. The human rights community is basically fighting to survive.”

Corruption investigators haven’t found their lives easy either. Transparency International’s (TI) 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index rates Russia as the most institutionally dishonest country in Europe, below places such as Liberia and Iran, and two years ago TI’s Russian chapter appealed for all World Cup spending to be transparent and accountable to prevent any repeat of the massive corruption that marred the Sochi Games. One of the authors of that appeal was Andrey Jvirblis, deputy director of TI Russia, and he told me he had been sadly disappointed in the government’s response to his suggestion, or rather its lack of one.

Almost everything about the World Cup is questionable: the host cities, contractors, bidding process, budget and more

Almost everything about the World Cup was questionable, he said, including the choice of the host cities (“Saransk is a shithole in the middle of nowhere and it’s a host city of the Fifa World Cup? Nobody knows why”), the choice of contractors, the bidding process, the budget and more. “My first idea was to look at the general papers, then I found there is no unified source of information where I could look at all the things as a whole,” he told me in his Moscow office. “Fifa doesn’t require that, so nobody asks, nobody wants. There is no requirement, so nobody will do it.”

Russia’s small and fragmented civil society organisations simply do not have the resources to piece together every funding document from every branch of national, regional and local government involved in the World Cup, meaning there is total public ignorance about how the tournament is being paid for. TI Russia did manage to analyse the construction of roads for the event and concluded almost half the money spent had gone on questionable contracts. That alone, TI concluded, will have inflated the sum paid by the government by more than $43m (£30m), but that is a rounding error compared to the amount of money available. A government decree increased the official World Cup budget by $600m (£428m) to $11.8bn (£8.4bn) in October and no one said why.

That means no systematic analysis has been attempted of potential embezzlement of public funds going towards construction of the World Cup stadiums, although some journalists did try to do so in Kaliningrad, a tiny enclave of Russia surrounded by the European Union where England will play Belgium on 28 June, probably to decide who tops the group.

The local government, for reasons of its own, decided to build the Kaliningrad Stadium on a swampy island, which lacked the kind of bedrock needed for sturdy foundations. As a result, about 2,000 50-metre piles were driven down for the stadium to sit on, along with a truly extraordinary quantity of sand.

A group of three local officials have since been arrested and charged for inflating the price of sand in order to profit from the state procurement process, but according to the analysis of Igor Rudnikov, a campaigning journalist for the local paper Novye Kolyosa (“new wheels”), the police investigation could be a cover-up for an even deeper level of corruption. Rudnikov was not available for me to interview, however. He was arrested in November 2017 after a general in the interior ministry’s powerful investigative committee accused him of attempting to extort $50,000 (£35,700) from him. Rudnikov, who survived a frenzied stabbing assault in 2016, had earlier written an article saying the general’s lakeside residence was far too luxurious for him to afford on his state salary.

Putin joins Pelé and Maradona at the State Kremlin Palace to draw the groups for the World Cup Finals, 1 December 2017 © Getty Images

The questionable circumstances of his arrest have led to criticism from most of the world’s press freedom groups and the respected Russian human rights organisation Memorial has declared Rudnikov to be a political prisoner. Fifa has not, however. Its new Human Rights Advisory Board issued its first report on 9 November, eight days after Rudnikov was arrested. It did not mention his arrest or the harassment of Semyon Simonov. “While World Cup-related investigations may or may not have prompted this latest attack on Rudnikov, Fifa should take notice and uphold its pledge to stand up for human rights,” said Buchanan in a statement.

Without powerful allies, it is perhaps not at all surprising that Russia’s beleaguered journalists and activists have struggled to investigate the World Cup as thoroughly as they did the Sochi Olympics. Hundreds of questions remain unanswered. How, for example, did the $285m (£203m) contract to build the Volgograd Arena end up in the hands of Gennady Timchenko, one of Putin’s oldest friends, Russia’s fifth richest man and one of the targets of extensive sanctions imposed by the US State Department? And how did he win the even larger $294m (£210m) contract to build the stadium in Nizhny Novgorod, where England will play Panama on 24 June?

Considering the current state of relations between Russia and the West, it is perhaps fortunate the United States did not qualify for the tournament. After all, it would be extremely awkward for them to play in a stadium built by someone considered so closely connected to the “unlawful effort to undermine Ukraine’s security, stability and sovereignty” that Washington has barred its citizens from dealing with him.

English and Russian supporters fight at Marseille's Stade Vélodrome during Euro 2016 © PA Photos

Igor Lebedev, a member of both Russia’s parliament and its football union’s governing body, declined to meet me when I was in Moscow, perhaps out of concern about being seen with a Brit at a time when our countries were expelling one another’s diplomats. But he was careful to answer my emailed questions in English as well as in Russian to make sure I understood. “The World Cup is a huge opportunity for us to demonstrate the beauty of Russia and the hospitality of Russians,” Lebedev wrote.

He’s right: Russians know how to throw a party and fans who do go to Volgograd for England’s opening game will see not just the football, but also the site of the greatest battle in history. But in another way, he’s wrong: this is not Russia’s championship, it’s Putin’s. It has been his friends who have made money from it, his hooligans who threaten its stability and his foreign policy adventures that are scaring away fans.

Don’t expect him to look interested, however. That’s not Putin’s style. He may turn up to the opening ceremony and a few other games. Perhaps he’ll even visit the Volgograd Arena, which will also host Russia’s domestic cup final on 9 May – Victory Day, when else? – but his focus moved on long ago. Putin plays now on a global scale, from Syria to Salisbury, from Eastern Ukraine to the West Wing, constantly keeping his opponents guessing as to what he will break next. Confining his attention to a rectangle of grass and a 90-minute window must seem absurdly insignificant.

It is a sign of how dramatically Putin has changed course that it is now impossible to imagine Russia again winning the right to host a major sporting tournament while he remains in charge. But he won’t care about that. In a game of football, everyone has to obey the referee. Russia’s president has altogether lost patience with following anyone’s rules but his own.

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