fuelled by a grudge held by Furtseva. According to Soviet Union team-mate Nikita Simonyan, speaking in 2006, Streltsov wrote home to his mother "saying he was taking the blame for someone else". Streltsov and Lebedeva did sleep together, Simonyan said, and he did not believe their meeting had been set up, but he was unsure about whether or not Streltsov had raped her. Simonyan proposed that consensual sex could have been twisted into a rape accusation by "the system", which he said bore ill will towards the Torpedo forward. However, in the same interview Simonyan revealed incriminating photographs of both Lebedeva and Streltsov from the time of the trial, including one in which the Torpedo player's face "was streaked from nose to cheekbone with three parallel scratches". "[T]here is the possibility that the photographs were doctored or the injuries inflicted at a later date", Wilson comments, "but Soviet justice rarely required such damning evidence." Streltsov's wife of just over a year, Alla, filed for divorce soon after the accusations were made. Apart from Streltsov himself, the only members of the team present at his trial were Ogonkov and Tatushin, who appeared as witnesses. Conviction; the Gulag Streltsov confessed to the crime after being told this would allow him to keep his place in the Soviet team for the 1958 World Cup. This did not happen, however; far from remaining in the national side, Streltsov was sentenced to twelve years in the forced labour camps of the Gulag, and barred from ever returning to professional football of any kind. Plans for a march by 100,000 workers at Moscow's ZiL car factory, the base of the Torpedo club, to show support during the trial, were abandoned when Streltsov was sentenced before the march could be arranged. Ogonkov and Tatushin, meanwhile, were banned from playing any kind of organised football for three years, and barred from representing the USSR for life. In the camp where he was incarcerated, Streltsov was initially victimised by a young criminal who inflicted so much physical harm on him that he spent four months in the prison hospital, suffering from injuries caused by blows from either an "iron bar or a shoe heel". Camp authorities later started to include Streltsov in football matches to calm down the inmates in times of trouble; one prisoner, Ivan Lukyanov, later said: "[w]e loved Streltsov, we believed he would return to football.