Let me start from afar.
Some time ago, I read a great book written about one hundred years ago called The American Credo - a half-humouristic collection of facts an “average American” believes in, with a serious preface that is about four times bigger than the actual collection. And in the serious part of the book, there’s a great juxtaposition between “people of honour” and “people of morals”.
A man of honour is one who simply does whatever he says he will do, provided the other party holds to the compact too. One cannot imagine him shifting, trimming and making excuses; it is his peculiar mark that he never makes excuses—that the need of making them would fill him with unbearable humiliation.
Massimo Carrera is a typical man of honour.. He’d always stressed that “he was paid for making decisions”, never sought excuses in referees or transfers, he just did exactly “whatever he said he would do, provided the other party held to the compact too.”
Carrera’s problem is that the world of Spartak and around Spartak is mostly populated with people of morals.
Every single human act, [a man of morals] holds, must be either right or wrong—and the overwhelming majority of them are wrong. He knows exactly what these wrong ones are; he recognizes them instantly and infallibly, by a sort of inspired intuition; and he believes that they should all be punished automatically and with the utmost severity. No one ever heard of a [man of morals] overlooking a fault, or pleading for mercy for the erring. He would regard such an act as the weakness of one ridden by the Devil.
That’s exactly the line of thought for many people, especially, of course, Spartak veterans. Everything “non-Spartak”, according to their inspired intuition, is wrong and should be punished automatically and with the utmost severity. Starting from Alenichev, who lamented about the lack of “overlap, the move that Spartak used to defeat everyone”, and up until today’s statement of Oleg Romantsev that Spartak’s latest league win was the sole achievement of Alenichev, and Carrera just “didn’t break anything”.
You see, you just can’t win anything in Spartak in a non-Spartak way, so, the non-Spartakovets just didn’t get enough time to taint everything built by the righteous and moral Spartakovets
Carrera, a man of honour, was an unbearable evil for the Spartak moral crowd from the start. You remember that - “that’s not it“, “I can’t understand how they play”… And when he dared to win the league and Supercup, he became a sinner unheard of. His win was non-Spartak and immoral.
In particular, [the man of morals subscribes to the theory that it is virtuous to make things hot for the sinner, by which word he designates any person whose conduct violates the ordinances as he himself is aware of them and interprets them.
That’s why after Carrera’s sacking Spartak’s higher management and SMM services are doing everything to create an impression that Carrera never existed (I wouldn’t be surprised if they would move his museum exposition to some dark corner), and Spartak legends - even real legends, such as Gavrilov and Romantsev - spit him in the back from the heights of their Spartak morals.
Carrera, with his non-Spartak honour, answers - “I belong to Spartak’s past, and I think I should not interfere with the new manager’s work.” Have you ever heard anything like that from any ex-Spartak player?
The man of honour inevitably exalts the punctilio above the law of God;
one may trust him, if he has eaten one’s salt, to respect one’s daughter as he would his own, but if he happens to be under no such special obligation it may be hazardous to trust him with even one’s charwoman or one’s mother-in-law. And the man of morals, confronted by a moral situation, is usually wholly without honour. Put him on the stand to testify against a woman, and he will tell all he knows about her, even including what he has learned in the purple privacy of her boudoir. More, he will not tell it reluctantly, shame-facedly, apologetically, but proudly and willingly, in response to his high sense of moral duty. It is simply impossible for such a man to lie like a gentleman. He lies, of course, like all of us, and perhaps more often than most of us on the other side, but he does it, not to protect sinners from the moral law, but to make their punishment under the moral law more certain, swift, facile and spectacular.
Almost the only people of honour left in the Spartak world are the fans. That’s why we had the slogan “Massimo is one of us”, the banners, the “A tutti! Avanti! Massimo Carrera!” chant. Yes, Carrera won his league “punctiliously” rather than in a pretty way, as any Spartakovets is “morally obliged”. But he won that league without any buzzwords about “the spirit” or “the play” - he just set a Spartak points record for the 21st century and an all-time RPL record for 30-game seasons. The Spartak fans have yearned for someone in Spartak who actually acts in accordance with their words so much that they clung to Carrera like that boy Linus from Peanuts.
The fans, as Andrei Petrovich Starostin once said, “lost everything but the honour.” But in the club and around it, alas, everything is lost but the… morals. And, possibly, there lies another thing that the Spartak men of morals will never forgive Carrera for. He didn’t just win the league without being an embodiment of Spartak spirit in the flesh. He showed that even in such almost religious organization as F.C. Spartak Moscow of the post-Romantsev era, you can achieve results without ritual appointments of the “right” managers and ritual incantations about the “spirit”, but just by making everyone in the club do their job. You know, actually work, like it has been under the Starostins or Romantsev, rather than acting out the 234712309th season of Game of Thrones.
What awaits Spartak in the future? Hell if I know. Long-term development plans at Spartak change even more often than managers. Perhaps the stars will align someday, and the Red-Whites will finally win the morally right championship, with a true Spartakovets at the helm, with lots of one-twos and overlaps. We’ve been conditioned into that ever since that infamous interview, “Starkov Is a Dead-End for Spartak”: we don’t have to win, we have to hope that someday we’ll win in exactly the same way as long ago…
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