Veteran sports fans know that the United States shocked the world when its ice hockey team upset the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics. It was as much a a Cold War showdown as a sporting event.
But the Soviets' loss was also an anomaly: that Olympics was one of the few times the Russians actually lost. The new documentary “Red Army,” by director Gabe Polsky, examines how one of the greatest teams in modern sports was created, with Kremlin politics shaping the team, its coach and the players.
When Polsky came by The Frame, host John Horn asked him about the connection between sports and politics, the disappearing notion of teamwork in sports, and just what it was that made the Soviet hockey team the best on the planet.
Interview Highlights:
How did you find yourself immersed in the world of Soviet hockey?
I was born in the United States, my parents are immigrants from Soviet Ukraine, and when I was growing up I wanted to be a professional hockey player. I really didn't look into my roots that much. At the time, the Cold War was still happening. It was in the '80s, and it wasn't that cool to say that I was the son of Soviet immigrants.
So I really pushed that to the side, but then when I was 14 and I saw the Soviet Union play on a VHS tape, it was mesmerizing. I couldn't believe it. It was like a creative revolution. That really inspired me and I wanted to know more about my roots and I looked into the story of the Soviet hockey team. It became something much different and something much bigger, a huge story.
"Red Army" posits that there is an intense, almost inseparable relationship between sports and national identity.
Yeah, especially during those times, which were very charged. Everything in the Soviet Union was political, and that meant sports as well. Chess, ballet and the space program were all heavily funded by the government. And regarding the sports program, Stalin said that he wanted sports to be number one in the world.
The reason for that is that sports are a way to communicate ideas to people. The Soviet Union developed hockey in particular to be the most dominant program in the world, and they achieved that. In these totalitarian systems, you can decide that you're going to do something, and there's no resistance.
The Soviet Union dominated hockey by creating a version of the game that was unbelievably poetic. Explain a little bit about what the Soviet Union's game style was and why it was so effective.
The Soviet hockey system was created in the 1940s by a man named Anatoli Tarasov. He was a visionary, a creative thinker, a philosopher who read a lot of literature, and he's the man [who] took hockey and created an entirely new system of play. It really became an art form, in the way that they passed and possessed the puck. Sometimes they would pass 100 times more than the other team.
The ideology was not to think as individuals, or about who scored the most goals, but rather about this collective creativity and the team, and serving the country. After all, they all [earned] as much as engineers or teachers.
We're living in an era of professional sports, particularly in the United States and European soccer, in which it's all about star athletes, some of whom are paid enormous sums of money. One of the things that worked in the Soviet model of hockey was that it was a team sport, that everyone was relatively equal even though there were great players. Has that kind of play vanished?
You hit it on the head — you don't see that kind of collective mastery and creativity that you saw in Soviet hockey. It's just not there nowadays. If you watch an NHL hockey game, you'll see maybe one or two good, fantastic plays a game.
But then when you watch old tapes of Soviet hockey, you see that every time they touch the puck they do something interesting, and that's amazing. That's what people want to see, but that can only happen when you're working as a unit and the unit understands each other so well that they can play more or less blindfolded.
One of the things that set the Soviet style apart is that they would pass backward—they would move backwards to go forward. Did you see that as an analogy for politics? They were working in a creative yet mechanized system that needed a certain kind of math to lay out their game, and there was a real plan for the ways in which the Soviet Union approached politics and propaganda.
One of the ironies of the story of Soviet hockey is that these guys could only be free on the ice. In literature or poetry, it's pretty clear what the intent of the author is, but on the hockey rink you could be creating a revolution that the KGB or the government might not recognize as an expression of freedom. They were winning, too, so the players could create their own revolution of creativity on the ice, and that was the only place that they could really be free.
"Red Army" opens in theaters on Jan. 23.