thumb|right|Nikolai Starostin
Nikolai Petrovich Starostin (Cyrillic: Никола́й Петро́вич Ста́ростин; 26 February 1902 – February 17, 1996) was a Soviet footballer and ice hockey player, and founder of Spartak Moscow.
Early life and Spartak Moscow
The eldest of four brothers, Starostin was born in Presnensky District, Moscow where he enjoyed a comfortable upbringing courtesy of his father's reasonably well paid job as a hunting guide for the Imperial Hunting Society. Nikolai studied at a commercial academy where he first began playing football. Football was a minor concern in Russia in this period, but it was growing. A Moscow league had been founded in 1910 but this died away in the years following the revolution of 1917. Starostin is said to have welcomed the revolution, though he played no active role in it.
In 1921 the Moscow Sport Circle (later Krasnaia Presnia) was formed by Ivan Artemev and involved Starostin, especially in its football team. When details from the actual court sentence were published in 2003, it turned out Starostins were not convicted for political crimes, but rather for stealing sporting goods from the stores they were supposed to oversee and selling those goods. Nikolai Starostin profited for 28,000 rubles, Aleksandr for 12,000, Andrei and Pyotr for 6,000 each.у Also, Nikolai Starostin was convicted of bribing the military commisar of the Bauman district of Moscow, Kutarzhevskiy. Kutarzhevskiy, using his power arranged so that several people who were supposed to have been conscripted to serve in the Army during World War II were not sent to the front and stayed in Moscow instead. Those people included food distributors and food store managers, who in turn provided Starostin with unlimited food supply during the war time, when food shortages were common (according to the sentence, food store manager Zvyozdkin gave Starostin 60 kilograms of butter and 50 kilograms of meat products).
During his time in the gulags, Starostin's skills were highly sought after and he served as coach at various camps. He was treated benevolently by commanders who looked kindly on football and gave him extensive privileges. Unlike other notable inmates, Starostin was never mistreated and was well liked among both guards and prisoners, who would gather to listen to his football stories.
- Three Orders of Lenin (1937, 1987, 1990)
- Order of Friendship of Peoples (1982)
- Honoured Master of Sports