If you were growing up in Kirovograd in the 1980s, you would be trained for employment in the big factories. The Red Star, where my mother worked, produced tractors and combine harvesters.

Another built radios while a third manufactured parts for guided missiles and would always have officials walking around with Geiger counters to check radiation levels.

Chernobyl lay three hours’ drive north of Kirovograd and in April 1986, when I was seventeen, the Geiger counters began going off the scale. Fortunately for my family, the radioactive cloud from the explosion that ripped the roof off the nuclear power station drifted northwards.

For about ten days nobody was told what had happened. Some officials in the local Communist Party were tipped off but they either chose not to say anything or they slipped away to Moscow.

Then gradually, by word of mouth, ordinary people like my family discovered what was happening at Chernobyl. There had been a call for builders to fly in and do ‘construction work’, but in reality they were dealing with the fires and its aftermath.

Even those who were trying to contain the explosion were not told what the dangers were. As the years went by, you heard of people dying early from strange causes.

By the time of Chernobyl, I had left Kirovograd to be part of a football academy in Kharkov, 230 miles to the east. Football was not my first love. My dream was to become an ice-hockey star. My hero was Valery Kharlamov.

He was small and dark – his mother was Spanish – and he scored brilliant goals for CSKA Moscow. They offered him a lot of money to go to Canada and play in the National Hockey League but Kharlamov was too much of a patriot to leave.

He led the Soviet team to two gold medals in successive Winter Olympics. He was also part of the Soviet side that lost to a United States college team in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, that in America they called ‘The Miracle on Ice’.

The following year, his car, driven by his wife, hit a truck. The collision killed them both. CSKA retired Kharlamov’s number 17 jersey until his orphaned son, Alexander, was old enough to wear it. When I joined Everton, I was told I could choose my squad number. Naturally, I picked 17, and when I was transferred to Fiorentina, I wore 17 for the same reason.

At school, the sport I specialised in was gymnastics, especially the rings and the bar, until one day a teacher suggested I should take up football. I fell in love with Diego Maradona.

Andrei Kanchelskis celebrates after scoring against Everton for Manchester United. Photograph: Croft Malcolm Croft/PA

I was seventeen when he took Argentina to the 1986 World Cup. I was already a professional footballer when Argentina met the Soviet Union in the 1990 World Cup in Naples, the city where Maradona played, where he was worshipped.

It was the second group game and, since both teams had lost their opening match, whoever lost would be in trouble. The game was goalless when Maradona handled the ball on the line. The referee gave nothing. Argentina won 2–0, the Soviet Union was eliminated in the group stage and Argentina went on to reach the final.

World Cups and major international tournaments were very big in the Soviet Union because there was usually very little football on television. If there was a televised sport that was on all the time, it was ice hockey.

The screening of football matches in the Soviet Union was very basic. There would be absolutely no build-up and no full-time analysis. The broadcast would begin when the referee blew his whistle to start the match and it finished when he blew for full time. Until the end of the 1980s, you watched in black-and-white.

More than a hundred others had made the same journey and waiting for us was a regime of sprints, ball-work and five-a-sides. Over three weeks in the summer of 1983, the hundred were whittled down to twenty.

Nobody even considered whether there might be coverage of foreign football. When I was growing up, Liverpool were the dominant team in Europe. Between 1977 and 1985 they were involved in five European Cup finals but I didn’t see any of them and when I went to play in England I knew very little about Liverpool and even less about the other teams.

If you wanted to follow football, you tended to have to buy a newspaper and mine was Gazeta Futbol-Khokkei, half of which was devoted to football and half to ice hockey. They were the paper’s only subjects. To me, it seemed a perfect combination. The coverage of sport in the main Soviet press was very formal. The back page of Pravda would have short, factual reports on the main football, hockey or athletics results without any comment.

Between them, my parents earned 250 roubles a month. In today’s exchange rate, our monthly household income would be £3.50. However, in the Soviet Union, 250 roubles went a long way.

I grew up in a three-bedroom flat and we seldom went short of anything.

Your household necessities – rent, telephone, gas, central heating – would probably be only thirty roubles. A suit cost sixty roubles, a Raketa watch, the kind supplied to the Red Army, cost 22. Food prices were controlled centrally by the government. Food was cheap; the trouble was that so much food was often unavailable.

We played outside, always. The Soviet Union had four television channels and none of them gave you much of an incentive to turn them on.

Kirovograd did have three cinemas, one of them named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. The cinemas were open from nine in the morning to eleven at night and it cost ten kopecks (there are a hundred kopecks in a rouble) to get in.

People were fitter then. Facebook, mobile phones, PlayStations; they were yet to come.

Andrei Kanchelskis, back row third left, pictured with the Soviet national team in 1991. Photograph: Tass/Igor Utkin/TASS

In the Soviet Union, schools had numbers not names, a tradition that is still true of Russia today. I went to School 32. There were too many pupils and not enough schools, so you studied in shifts.

The first shift was from eight in the morning until one o’clock and the second shift from one until five. One week you did the morning shift and in the next week you would go in the afternoons.

I did study English, although I made absolutely no effort. I did not see the point and could envisage no circumstances in which I would need to speak it.

I was told I had to improve my jumping so in the evenings, when nobody was looking, I would sneak out into a forest and practise jumping up and down on one leg, an exercise they called Blokha or ‘the Flea’

We had to learn the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov off by heart and recite it to the class. I liked the stories of Nikolai Gogol, like The Overcoat about an impoverished clerk who saves up to buy a coat. When he puts it on, his personality changes.

The only subjects I really enjoyed though were PE and what was called Trud. It means ‘work’ in Russian and involved learning carpentry or going around the school, cleaning, polishing or picking up litter.

Growing up, you went through various organisations. When you were eight years old you joined the Little Octobrists and at eleven you became a Young Pioneer. The Little Octobrists had a badge with a picture of Lenin; the Young Pioneers wore a red neckerchief.

It was a bit like the cubs and scouts.

In the long holidays you would go to summer camp, often in the Crimea, where you would play tennis and football, go to dances or for walks in the forest. We would stroll through Gagarin Park in Yalta or go on a bus trip through the vineyards and tobacco farms to the Livadia Palace, where in 1945 Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill settled the fate of post-war Europe.

As for family holidays, we went camping or rented an apartment by the sea. Hotels were out because they were invariably full and expensive. A car was out of our reach and out of most people’s reach. If you had one, it marked you out. Having a car – a Lada or a Moskvitch – was something special.

When you were fifteen, you would apply to join the Young Communist League or Komsomol. If you wanted to go into further education, Komsomol membership was essential and you had to take a written test. Typical questions would be: ‘When was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union founded?’ Or: ‘When was Lenin born?’ There were a lot of dates and not everybody passed.

Like every town in the Soviet Union, Kirovograd had an organisation called the Society for the Olympic Reserve. It was dedicated to scouring schools for potential athletes, especially those who could go on to represent the country in the Olympics. When I was eleven, the Olympics were very big indeed. They were being staged in Moscow.

One day, School 32 had a visitor. His name was Valery Karpinus and he was from the Society for the Olympic Reserve. He wanted to watch a PE session and then he divided the group into two teams for a game of football. Afterwards, Karpinus asked three of us to remain behind.

He wanted us to join his football school, combining it with lessons at School 32. Gradually, I spent more time at the football school than the real thing. My sister, Natasha, became very good at writing letters explaining my absences. The emphasis of Karpinus’s training was the importance of passing a football, how a single pass could take out an entire defence. Holding on to the ball too long was a sign of greed that could destroy a team. They were principles that carried me through my football career.

The training sessions were intense. If I was on the morning shift at school, I would go to the afternoon shift at Karpinus’s academy and vice versa.

When I was fourteen, I came across another man who was to propel me on my way to becoming a footballer. He was Nikolai Koltsov. He had been a defender for Dynamo Kiev and he ran a sports’ boarding school in Kharkov. It was 240 miles away. It specialised in athletics, gymnastics, swimming . . . and football.

My mum did not want me to go and neither did Karpinus, who thought I should wait another year and go to Kiev to train as a footballer when I was fifteen, but, eventually, Dad and I won the argument. He would have liked to have driven me there in his lorry, but instead we found ourselves waiting for the bus and the ten-hour journey to Kharkov.

More than a hundred others had made the same journey and waiting for us was a regime of sprints, ball-work and five-a-sides.

Over three weeks in the summer of 1983, the hundred were whittled down to twenty.

Koltsov was a hard taskmaster. He had the kind of job that required you to be tough. He ran an almost military regime that had no concept of free time. We would get up at seven. Then we would train, have breakfast and go to school. In the evening there would be more training and on Saturday we would play a match.

There were classes every day. You studied the usual school subjects: Russian, geography, mathematics. I preferred history because Russia has such a very big history.

Celebrating with the FA Cup in Manchester in 1994. Photograph: John Peters/Man Utd via Getty Images

The history I learned was that of the Soviet Union: Lenin, the Revolution, the fall of the Romanovs and the storming of the Winter Palace. Mikhail Gorbachev had not yet taken power in Moscow; it was the last years of the old guard, Andropov and Chernenko.

There was as yet no glasnost. It was all very traditional.

Your final grades were marked out of five. At most schools I would have got a five for sport but Koltsov gave me a four and a lecture about ‘more work to be done’. There were academic lessons mixed in and, if you did badly in those, Koltsov had a remedy – a thirty-metre sprint repeated thirty times.

For Nikolai Koltsov there was always more work to be done. He was never satisfied but he did instil in me a burning desire to play for Dynamo Kiev. There is a Russian phrase that you ‘become sick from wanting something’ and I was becoming sick from wanting to play for Dynamo Kiev.

Then, one day in late January or early February, three of us were told to travel down to Sochi, 700 miles away on the Black Sea coast, where the local team, Metalist Kharkov, were undergoing the long pre-season training that in Russia they call sbori. When we arrived, the trainer studied me up and down and said, ‘No use to me. Too small.’

I was the shortest in the academy and was playing as a number 10, modelling myself on the great Brazilian, Jairzinho. I told the trainer that if he stuck with me, I could be his Jairzinho. ‘No chance,’ came the reply. ‘You are not tall enough for a start and I doubt you have the speed or the stamina.’ Metalist said they would phone if they needed me. They never did.

Suddenly, I became very keen to become tall. I would stretch myself by hanging from a crossbar with someone holding my legs.

I was told that carrots could increase your height, so naturally I stuffed myself with carrots and vitamins – anything to help me grow.

Not only was I one of the smallest at the academy, I was also the slowest. That might come as a surprise to anyone who watched me on the wing at Old Trafford but I had never done athletics.

I was told I had to improve my jumping so in the evenings, when nobody was looking, I would sneak out into a forest by the training pitches and practise jumping up and down on one leg, bringing my knee up to my chest. It was an exercise they called in Russian Blokha or ‘the Flea’.

I would do it a hundred times and then I would swap legs and do it a hundred more. I would do it every evening for three years. I had dreams, like every teenage boy, and I could not imagine my life without football. I told myself that, if I had to train like this every day to become a professional footballer, that is what I would have to do. That was the price.

Extracted from Russian Winters: The Story of Andrei Kancheslskis, published by deCoubertin Books. Out now. Order a copy here