The order to start playing hockey came, in 1946, from the very top. Stalin believed that with the war finished and his objectives in Eastern Europe achieved, the Soviet Union’s isolation was at an end. The USSR had good athletes. They could send them to international championships and win over the nonaligned nations. As Charlie Chaplin once quipped, of early Soviet movies, it’d be better propaganda than executions.

The first great Soviet player was Bobrov. He wore #8. He liked to hang out by the red line and wait for a pass to send him on his way. He dangled the puck before him, daring defensemen to take it, then scuttled past them with a burst of speed. He missed the first Soviet hockey season, 1946–47, with a knee injury sustained while playing soccer for the national team, but in the league’s second season he scored fifty- two goals in just eighteen games, for TsDKA, the Central House of the Red Army — Red Army, for short.

Bobrov’s linemate on that team, and also his coach, was Anatoly Tarasov. Tarasov had grown up playing soccer, as well as an old Russian game known as “hockey” but which in the West is known as “bandy,” played on a large ice surface the size of a soccer field with eleven players on each side, with curved sticks held in one hand and a ball. The new hockey was thus called “Canadian hockey,” or “hockey with a puck.”