Because players were not getting paid regularly, the football team of Dynamo for some time had a shortage of playing staff (only eight players). The team's captain Konstantin Shchegotsky even tried to escape to Dnipropetrovsk, where he played for FC Dynamo Dnipropetrovsk, but was forced to come back. During the Holodomor in 1932–33, half of the team escaped to Ivanovo near Moscow. Two of Dynamo's players, Pionkovsky and Sviridovsky, were arrested by NKVD agents during an attempt to exchange several cuts of cloth for products and therefore had to work "for the good of the country" for two years in a penal colony. During the Great Purge in 1938, Piontkovsky, and one of the Dynamo's team creators, Barminsky were targeted, and eventually shot in 1941. The season was never completed, as Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Several Dynamo Kyiv players joined the military and went off to fight. The initial success of the "Wehrmacht" allowed it to capture the city from the Red Army. Several of the Dynamo Kyiv players who had survived the onslaught found themselves in prisoner-of-war camps.