Football first came to Russia, not to the Soviet Union, and it came piece-meal, carried initially by working men to the mills of Moscow and St. Petersburg, there in part and as in Spain, Brazil, Italy and elsewhere from the Paisley thread-makers, Coats, but also as folk, as families from Fife and Dundee looking east for their livelihoods. One of the latter in this first wave was Henry Small and particularly, as a playing pioneer of the game in the Russian Imperial capital, his son, Victor.
But once there it needed someone to organise it, to establish it and he was a fourth generation Russian, a family originally from Perth, who would die literally as the Soviet Union was formed, just one of the many victims of the process. It was 1917. And nor was his death the only tragedy in the family in those brutal years. A year earlier the man's son had drowned fighting for the country of their origins, Britain, indeed for the lands of their ancestors, Scotland. The son had travelled to Inverness to enlist in the Black Watch as had his brother who was to survive. And their name was MacPherson.
