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and Italian lines to the north, the Soviets encir-
cled close to 300,000 German troops. Ordered by
Hitler neither to surrender nor to attempt to
break out to the rear, von Paulus waited for
promised reinforcements and an airlift that never
came. By January, the Sixth Army's situation was
desperate; its soldiers were hungry and its
ammunition was running low. On February 2,
1943, von Paulus, together with 24 generals and
90,000 soldiers, surrendered to the Soviets. The
city of Stalingrad, almost completely destroyed in
the fighting, was reconstructed after the war.
appeared old-fashioned and bourgeois. The
emergence of socialist realism in the 1930s sig-
naled a more favorable climate for Stanislavsky,
but in the context of official dogmas, the life
had been drained out of his system as was the
case for most other art forms. Whereas Stani-
slavsky's genuine ideas have greatly influenced
modern acting, both in Russia and abroad, the
use made of his system during the last period
of
STALIN
's rule severely harmed the Russian
theater.
Starostin brothers
athletes
The Starostin brothers—Nikolai Petrovich (1898-
1996), Aleksandr Petrovich (1903-81), Andrei
Petrovich (1906-1987), and Petr Petrovich (1909-
1993)—played a seminal role in the develop-
ment of Soviet football (soccer) as players,
coaches, and administrators. The Starostins
made their career in Moscow, beginning in the
1920s in a Komsomol-sponsored team named
Krasnaia Presnia, which after several transforma-
tions became known in 1935 as Spartak, to this
day the most popular team in Moscow football.
During the 1930s they were all football stars and
led Spartak to several Soviet club championships.
Nikolai played for the USSR national team in the
1920s and 1930s. In 1934 he was awarded the
title of honorary master of sport. From 1955 to
1975, he managed his old team, Spartak. In 1967
he published
Zvezdy bolshogo futbola
(Stars of
Great Football), a memoir about prominent
Soviet football players, and a second volume in
1989,
Futbol skvoz gody
(Football through the
Years). He served as Spartak team president well
into his nineties. Aleksandr captained the Soviet
national team in the 1930s, first wrote his mem-
oirs,
The Captain's Story,
in 1935, and served as
deputy chairman and chairman of the RSFSR
football federation. Andrei also played for the
Soviet national team in the 1930s, and was
named master of sport in 1940. In 1959 he was
appointed deputy chairman of the USSR football
federation. He is the author of two books,
Bolshoi
futbol
(Great Football) (1957) and
Povest o futbole
Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeevich
(1863-1938)
actor and theater director
One of the most influential directors of the Rus-
sian theater, Stanislavsky (born Alekseev) was the
son of a wealthy Moscow merchant. From 1877
to 1887, he directed an amateur group known
as the “Alekseev circle.” For the next decade
he worked for the Society of Art and Literature
until 1898, when he joined V. I.
NEMIROVICH
-
DANCHENKO
in founding the Moscow Art Theater
(MkhAT), which would be at the center of Rus-
sian theater over the next century. With a team
of outstanding actors and with plays by
GORKY
and
CHEKHOV
as the foundation of its repertoire,
Stanislavsky was able to develop his famous
Stanislavsky method of acting. A not entirely
new idea that drew from the realistic traditions
of the Russian theater, the Stanislavsky system
appeared as something new and even revolu-
tionary in comparison with the standards of the
time. He developed a special technique called
“reliving” that used the actors' emotional
involvement to produce a realistic result. It was
this tendency to identify the theater with life
that prompted the most gifted of Stanislavsky's
pupils,
MEYERHOLD
and Vakhtangov, to return to
the idea of a “theatrical” or “representational”
theater. Stanislavsky himself was not immune to
the influence of symbolism that swept over Rus-
sian artistic life between the revolutions of 1905
and 1917. Under the experimentalism of the first
decade of Soviet rule, Stanislavsky's theater
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