from Jordan Ballor of the Action Institute,

Fetisov retired after the 1998 season. He had visited Russia with the Stanley Cup for a visit in 1997 and saw the changes that had occurred since his departure. He had left the USSR to play in the NHL and had returned victorious to a different country. The Russia that Fetisov came back to, he said, has “no heroes. It’s got no system. No structure. Nothing. Everybody runs around trying to get something. It’s not the way I want to live.” As Alexei Kasatonov put it, “Everything is about the material side of things: money, finance. Our country’s crisis is now reflected in hockey. Teams have very little money to keep players from leaving.” More than 500 players have been drafted into the NHL since 1989, a steady flow of talent that is increasingly able to more easily adapt and transition to a new style of play. The adjustment was difficult for players like Fetisov and Krutov, the latter of whom had a short and disappointing NHL career. But new players are more thoroughly Westernized, to both good and bad effect. One of the more disturbing elements of the documentary involves one of the NHL’s current stars, the Russian-born Alexander Ovechkin. The forward for the Washington Capitals is doing some sort of promotional video in which he is asked to shoot pucks and destroy a series of Russian nesting dolls filled with Russian salad dressing. He gladly obliges.

The temptation when coming West, says Fetisov, involves precisely this kind of fetishizing of consumption and fortune. “We forget about patriotism,” says Fetisov. “We are ashamed of what we were before. We lost something. We lost pride. We lost our soul.” Since his retirement, Fetisov has returned to Russia at the invitation of Vladimir Putin in 2002 to work as minister of sport in an attempt to revive Russian hockey. But as Pozner observes, the Soviet history of hockey is equally relevant for the country’s political future: “Much of the problems are still anchored in that past.”

Red Army makes clear that the history of Russian hockey does indeed have something to teach us, not only about the Russia of today, which is so much rooted in the Soviet past, but also for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Western societies. “An outstanding athlete cannot belong solely to himself,” says Anatoli Tarasov. This is as true for the athletes on the ice as it is for the producers and consumers in the broader marketplace and, ultimately, the residents of civil society.

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