Victor Starffin — baseball (legend) with roots in the USSR (Civil War)
Victor Starffin was a Russian-born Japanese baseball pitcher born in Nizhny Tagil who became one of the greatest pitchers in Japanese baseball history. He was the first pitcher in Japanese professional baseball to record 300 wins, and his life — from Russian Siberia to Japanese baseball legend — is one of sport's most extraordinary stories.
Tracing the roots — Nizhny Tagil
Born in Nizhny Tagil (Russian Empire, now Russia) in 1916 and brought to Japan by his White Russian émigré parents who fled the Revolution, Starffin grew up in Hokkaido and learned baseball from scratch. His Russian birth and Japanese career make him one of the most compelling Russian Imperial diaspora stories in world sport — a Siberian-born boy who became Japan's first 300-win pitcher.
Nizhny Tagil. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.