Fantasia on ice

The Central Sports Club of the Army has past glory hanging over its head during every practice. PHOTO: Michael Serazio

As you wander through the hallowed hallways of Moscow's Red Army Ice Palace, mounds of debris crunch underfoot. Giant metal rods protrude through the ceiling above. That miserable, pungent smell of sweat frosting inside unwashed hockey equipment wafts unchecked near the locker room door. Around the offices, dim lighting flickers on the black and white photographs of championship teams from yesteryear.

It may not seem like it, but this crumbling arena is getting a bit of the facelift it deserves. And during a practice session at the rink, another rebuilding effort continues. Players whirl about with bursts of speed against blurred backgrounds, skates scratching and scraping and clawing into the ice. On their broad, taut shoulders rest the hopes for a return to glory for Russia's most storied hockey franchise, the Central Sports Club of the Army, otherwise known as the CSKA Red Army team. After a decade of decline, when the professional league languished and -- on some level -- national pride slipped, Russian hockey finds itself on the way back up again. CSKA, the controversial symbol of Soviet hockey prowess, hopes to get in on that revival as well.

"Russian hockey is now on the up," said Kevin O'Flynn, a sportswriter for the Moscow Times. "CSKA is better than they were two or three years ago. Players are coming back from the NHL. Fans are going more because the teams are better -- not more than in Soviet times, but better."

Vasily Viktorovich Tikhonov, who coached across Europe and for the San Jose Sharks in the NHL, now works for CSKA as an assistant to the head coach, his father, Viktor Tikhonov, the silver-haired, iron-fisted 72-year-old patriarch of Russian hockey.

When asked how many championships CSKA won in its heyday from the 1940s to the 1980s, the younger Tikhonov's face lit up.

"I need to check it!" he said, scurrying off to an assistant. The numbers came back quickly: 32 Soviet championships and 20 European cups. His father also guided the national team to three of Russia's eight Olympic gold medals and nearly a dozen world championships.

"It was the best club in the Soviet Union by far," said Igor Kuperman, an editor of "Total Hockey: The Official Encyclopedia of the National Hockey League." "More than that, it's probably one of the best teams in all sports in the whole world ever. You can compare it to the Montreal Canadians or the Boston Celtics or the New York Yankees. And the huge chunk of wins came under Tikhonov."

"It was a tradition to win," said the younger Tikhonov. "Always the best wanted to be in CSKA. For years it was one generation after another."

Just like the San Francisco 49ers or UCLA basketball, this dynasty found talent to continually replenish the reserves. New faces replaced their predecessors within a system that continued piling up the wins without pause. Hockey teams in Russia kept them well stocked through junior clubs of their organizations, treating youngsters like little thoroughbreds. Some were nurtured from age 6 until they joined the professional ranks.

"Each club must have a good junior system in Russia," said Tikhonov. "You invest in kids. It's like having a long-term investment."

Others, however, saw CSKA's "investment" as sheer piracy. For years, the Red Army club routinely poached the nation's best and brightest through a legal loophole of military conscription, literally drafting the opposition to exploit their hockey skills.

"The CSKA team was like a concentration camp," said Andrew Zuevsky, 34, a Muscovite deacon who's a huge fan of the club. "They were like slaves. This was no way to train hockey players."

Kuperman counters: "They just used the rules which they had - it had nothing to do with Tikhonov specifically."

Still, some see a former communist coach who was able to capitalize in ruthless ways.

"Tikhonov was really part of the Soviet machine -- he was stoic, he was evil and he was successful," said Stephen Warshaw, who once worked as the liaison between Pittsburgh Penguins and CSKA. "There was some association of torture with success and it was true for so many years."

"The great mystery of Tikhonov was how he was able exploit the advantages of the army even more than Anatoli Tarasov," a previous coach, said Robert Edelman, author of "Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR." "This is a guy who so consistently played the backroom political game so well that eventually CSKA became so dominant that they might not lose a game in an entire season."

The elder Tikhonov's resume speaks for itself, though his methods certainly earned him the animosity of opponents and players alike. His puritanical regime fit squarely into the growling, grueling tradition of Bobby Knight or Bill Parcells. Scandal erupted two years ago when three Siberian stars were forced by Russia's Defense Ministry to play for CSKA. The players were eventually returned and CSKA denied any responsibility for the incident.

CSKA players are not soldiers in a strict sense, however. Nowadays, the Red Army affiliation is more of a "brand"; a financial relationship that would be like the Pentagon sponsoring the New York Yankees.

Elsewhere, Moscow's Dynamo hockey club has historically been backed by the Soviet secret police and other teams get funding from local governments and private factories. For politicians and executives -- and organized crime, some claim - hockey can serve as an advertising vehicle, like NASCAR's whooshing decal competitions. In the bigger picture, it represents a metaphor for domestic jousting and grounds for social swagger.

"Hockey right now is big politics -- real, real big politics," said the younger Tikhnov. "All want to show that their team is the best, so they invest big money."

That the Superleague, the Russian equivalent of the NHL, is now flush with cash represents a drastic improvement over 10 years ago. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, players fled west as the NHL vacuumed up talent throughout the 1990s. CSKA superstar alumni like Sergei Federov, Pavel Bure, and Alexander Mogilny made their mark on the western game with breathtaking speed and dazzling puckwork. The North American game had its bruisers, its hard-hitters with slap shot cannons, but the Russians brought something special to the rink.

"In Russia we had a different kind of hockey," said Zuevsky. "Very creative. More artful; more combinations."

Russian hockey has always emphasized team play over individual initiative. Critics have knocked this approach with derisive labels like "robotic." On one level, though, the style provided a fascinating mirror for communism's ideological clash with North American capitalism.

"There's less of an individualist tradition in Russian history," said Edelman, a professor in the Russian and Soviet Studies Department at the University of California-San Diego.

That pull toward collectivism played itself out on the rink.
Kuperman noted: "Because the years of communism and socialism was the collective effort of the people, where no individual comes ahead of the society -- that could have mirrored the idea in hockey. The team definitely came first. There were no creation of superstars back there -- and it worked for so many years."

But when the Iron Curtain crumbled, the system crashed with it. Arenas emptied. CSKA split in two, with one team demoted to a lower level. At the 2000 World Championships, Russia plummeted to 11th place, before a dismayed St. Petersburg home crowd. The national sports atmosphere turned as glum as a Dostoevsky novel.

"Because of the fall of the Soviet empire, we lost a lot of our pride in sports and culture," said Zuevsky. "With CSKA, we lost the spirit of victory. That's why we lose now, everywhere. It was a bad system, but it was patriotic."

Still, very recently, the turnaround has begun. With capitalism hurtling forward like a Russian star off the blue line, some clubs can now compete with NHL salaries and many older players are itching to return home. Of note, veteran Valeri Zelepukin and upstart Alexander Korolyuk recently bolted for Ak Bars of Kazan, a gifted regional club.

This reversal has produced a thaw in relations toward America and the NHL for the recent talent drain. And CSKA, back together again as one in the Superleague, placed in the middle of the pack last season. They hope to improve "year by year," according to Tikhonov.

Some hockey experts remain uncertain about the team's prospects.

"I don't think there's going to be a rise again," said Warshaw.

"There's only one way for it to rise again and that's if some rich mafia guys decide that it's important CSKA is good again."
In the meantime, a nation works to repair the damage.

"Before the breakup of the USSR, if you could briefly characterize, Soviet was the best in the world in ballet, space and hockey," said Kuperman. "When players started leaving for North America, definitely pride is hurt, because we can't win at a top level. Hopefully it will get better again. But it will be different, because the whole mentality has changed."

Until then, Muscovites like Radik Amirov, 33, a die-hard CSKA fan, manage in other ways.

"Sometimes we have fights with fans of other teams," said Amirov, proudly adding, "but we retain traditions of CSKA and we always win in fights with fans of other teams."

"Americans should know what our guys are made of -- there's always a steady supply of strong and talented guys. The Russian team has never been written off the books of world hockey."

top

A project of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism made possible by the Scripps Howard Foundation. Comments? E-mail us.

Copyright © 2003 The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.