In celebration of how I will now very much be finishing my second degree before I finish the book:
I’ve been looking for a less…how to say this…wild way of housing my long-form writing on hockey history, specifically the Soviet and other 1980s narratives I’ve written so far (although I always want to expand). Since I need something that accommodates chapters for ease of both updating and coherent reading, and that lets me include pictures and indexing, it’s been suggested that I put them up as meta/original writing on AO3. (Obviously I’d continue to post and update them here as well).
Any thoughts from you all? Would that be readable for you?
Thanks so much for your advice! It always makes me feel better to hear from you guys. I’ll be putting that together in the next weeks.
The Petrov line—Valeri Kharlamov, Vladimir Petrov, and Boris Mikhailov—played on the world stage throughout the 1970s, and pretty much crushed it.
In World Championships alone, their line scored the most points in the tournament in:
1969
1973
1974
1975
1977
and1979.
1973 was the year that they scored 86 points, which still stands as the record for a single line. If you want to know how close anyone is to passing it, the second most points by any line is only 56—them again, in 1977.
Their total works out to about 5 points per game on the national team in the World Championships. During the regular season, all three of them played for CSKA Moscow in the Soviet League, where each member of the line brought in about 1.2 points a game (the top scorer of the group was worth a bit under a goal per game). In recorded international play they scored 539 total goals (plus an incalculable number in exhibition games and discontinued tournaments). In the Soviet League, they scored 1086.
Now, the wildest statistic might be this: they did that over thirteen years together.
Most lines are lucky to last a year or three.
Their records are unbeatable now because World Championship goaltending has probably gotten better, but also because the way the game is not just played, but made, has changed. For better or for worse, I don’t think we’ll see three athletes who know each other so well again.
In the ‘80s the Soviet style would come to be exemplified by the mechanical precision of the Green Unit forwards, who besides being the same size were all equally skilled skaters and all shot in the same direction, so they could pull into tight formations and any player could pass or reposition seemingly interchangeably. Kharlamov, Petrov, and Mikhailov were not like that. Each was the very best version of a very different physical style.
(And, in Kharlamov’s case, fashion style).
As their teammate Tretiak put it, “It is very difficult to talk about [them] separately—and, perhaps, wrong.”
“It seemed,” he felt, “that they were born to meet.”
2. Hang in there, I talk a lot about getting good wood but Wayne Gretzky’s in a sauna at one point and Vladimir Petrov is what we could call the original Soviet Unit
The Soviet habit of holding the puck rather than shooting, and taking wristshots rather than one-timers and slapshots when they did, was both philosophical and practical. Their sticks were pretty terrible, and there weren’t enough.
In the ‘70s everyone used wooden sticks, which had to be made from a single piece of wood with an even grain. Any knot would make a weak spot. In North America the design of the ice hockey stick had been developed and refined by members of the Mi’kmaq nation in eastern Canada since the 1800s, initially using flexible willow, maple, and hornbeam lumber before forest reserves were depleted and quick-growing but heavy yellow birch and white ash got cheaper. In the 1930s production of Mic-Mac brand sticks shifted from individual carvers to a factory, but the design remained otherwise unchanged for decades.
The Sher-wood and Canadien brand sticks appeared in the 1950s. In the 1970s they introduced sticks made from aspen wood, which was lighter than ash, covered in a layer of laminate to strengthen it. The layered and laminated process also meant, in theory, more uniform products, because you didn’t need such a big piece of uniform would. That design would dominate North America until the 90s—the companies competed over who could promise the most consistent product, not through new designs.
In Europe, you had KOHO, Montreal, Toronto, and Titan. All four were Finnish brands.
The first, debuting in the 1950s, provided solid sticks but would really when it came to goalie gear later in the century. Montreal and Toronto were lighter laminate sticks introduced in the early ‘70s. In 1966 a member of the Finnish national apline skiing team called Antti-Jussi Tiitola invented a fiberglass stick he started selling as Titan, which people thought were…okay.
“My thinking was that I could sell hockey sticks by motivating hockey players with my engineering skills,” Antti-Jussi says. “It did not happen like that, because hockey players are not engineers.”
Then in the ‘80s Wayne Gretzky sauna’ed with the Finnish national team and liked the look of their sticks, so Titan became a thing.
But when Coach Tarasov had been given instructions to start a Soviet hockey program, he’d also been given a box of Finnish wooden sticks, probably KOHOs or ones a lot like them. Those were copied to carve new sticks, eventually leading to a company called ЗФСИ (“Efsi”) which made sticks under a contract with the Glavsportprom, which distributed sporting equipment in the Soviet Union.
The results weren’t great.
By the ‘70s the rest of the hockey world was moving on. No pro wanted to rely on Efsis. The Finnish companies reached out to Soviet League teams, who took up Torontos and Montreals, but supply was always short. When they traveled Soviet teams begged or borrowed skates, pads, and especially sticks from their opponents. One of the most important pre-game duties of the assistant coach was to go around to the other dressing rooms, and ask if they had extras.
But since Soviet kids grew up playing with the domestic sticks or homemades, most of the players had never practiced hard shots, because their stick might break, and then they’d be left without.
All of this left a massive, Vladimir Vladimirovich-shaped hole in the ecosystem of Soviet hockey.
Vladimir Petrov was built like one of those really homoerotic Soviet propaganda posters, and he acted like it.
He played bandy, basketball, tennis, and soccer as well as hockey, picking up new sports whenever he got bored or ran out of people who were willing to play chess with him. He’s best know for challenging Soviet chess masters, but when that didn’t work out he took up boxing.
As a boy growing up outside of Moscow, he would wake up at 4AM to get to a neighboring town where there was a rink and hockey school—buses didn’t run that early, so he would either try to catch a freight train or walk an hour and a half, apparently unbothered.
One of his two best friends once said, “Volodya has a difficult character: he is quick-tempered, stubborn, and there is no person in the world who could argue with him. But in serious matters, he is principled and will express his point of view to any…and will defend it to the end.” The other called him “a cheerful man of great energy who loves life.”
He appears to have been ambidextrous: he shot from the right side (most people naturally put their dominant hand on top of the stick and shoot from the opposite side), but used both, so either he was left-handed and had to learn to use his right like many kids in that era, or he was right-handed and decided to put his dominant hand on the shaft of his stick, which some people argue lets you shoot harder.
(Petrov and his linemate Kharlamov admiring another team’s stick. I like that two other people are holding onto it, as if trying to psychically project, “Don’t do it. I know you want to. Don’t you dare break it.”)
He was the only member of the Red Army who carried himself like a soldier, posture perfectly controlled. I assume this was either ironic or pointed.
No one had ever seen anyone knock him down. He didn’t have the fine footwork of other Soviet skaters, but he could get up to significant speed on the straightaways—getting out of the way was everyone else’s problem—and as soon as he had a semi-steady diet of sticks he started working on a one-timer shot “like lightning”.
He was a power forward, but when he was pressured by the Canadians, he studied and and made himself more defensively responsible. As such a physical center, probably what distinguished him was just being able to mentally track and anticipate his different wingers—one who was always vanishing and circling back, and the other driving ahead. When it came to questions of hockey strategy, Vladimir was willing to fight God or Coach Tarasov, whoever came first.
There’s a story that one time Coach T was trying to talk in a meeting with superiors from the hockey federation. Lower-ranked players were supposed to be quiet, but Vladimir coughed in the back. Tarasov told him to fix that cough and be quiet: Vladimir told him something to the gist of “why don’t you fix your face first?” The federation representatives, horrified, asked Tarasov whether he was going to do anything about Petrov, and Tarasov sighed and said, “If you don’t want us win, sure!”
3. Beautiful, elegant, and gracious (somehow, this part’s not the sad part)
Cw for some discussion of injury, illness, and chronic pain. No discussion of death in this one.
The idea that you had to be big to play hockey was well-rooted in Canada by the ‘60s. You know it, it’s still in vogue today, I won’t go on about it. Later, Soviet hockey would become known to the world for their small players, but in this moment Coach Tarasov was flirting with the idea that if they were going to compete with Canadian players, they would have to draft big too. Valeri Kharlamov made him change that.
Kharlamov played beautifully. That was what he always said he wanted to do. Everyone who saw him said he was beautiful, elegant, artistic, modest, neat, clean, and gracious—on and off the ice.
As a kid he was chronically ill and just as chronically small. Possibly born premature, he was often unable to eat or keep food down, had joint pain that sometimes paralyzed his hands, and developed perpetual throat infections, which eventually led to rheumatic fever (an inflammatory condition that affects the heart, joints, and connective tissue, which can develop from untreated infections in the mouth and throat). It kept him on bedrest in a hospital from the spring of 1961 until August.
(As an adult he would continue to live with chronic joint pain—whether that was mostly the fault of the illness, major injuries, or the cumulative stress of the all-weight-lifting, all-the-time Soviet training regimen is up for debate. Some people say all his ‘problems’ went away when he was a young man just because he did start to grow, but I don’t believe that. It seems like he lived with it, which is what you have to do. Always cheerful in public, there are reports that his friends would find him crying in private, which they believed was from pain. After an injury, when his teammates hovered and asked if his knee hurt, Valeri would smile, and joke, “No. Everything hurts!” )
His mother, a Basque refugee from the Spanish Civil war who now worked in one of Moscow’s factories, took him to Spain with her for a while, maybe hoping a respite from Moscow’s cold and smog would help, but they both missed home. When they returned his father, who played bandy for the factory team, taught him to skate, hoping a little activity would make him feel better.
And it seemed that it did—Valeri loved being outside. He loved plants and trees. He seemed to love being active and having a sense of purpose while working in the Young Pioneer programs that took kids from the city out to the countryside. He would demonstrate wilderness skills for the younger kids, and taught them to speak Spanish.
In September of ’61—after being released from the hospital in August—he snuck into try-outs for hockey schools around Moscow, and was accepted by CSKA. The entrance age was 11 or 12: Valeri was turning 14. Usually gentle and rule-abiding, he felt a little cheating was only fair—after all, he hadn’t tried out when he was 11, so it wasn’t like he was double-dipping, and he would have told them if they’d asked. No one did, because he still looked like what they expected of a much younger child.
For the next few years he played with a young defenseman named Nikolai Makarov, from Chelyabinsk. His brother Sergei, who was ten years younger than them, came to watch their games whenever he could…but not so much for Nikolai.
Most people thought teenage Valeri was…okay. A pretty skater but also pretty small. He still hadn’t gained back the weight he’d lost as a kid. Nothing about his individual performance was outstanding. I often see new fans who are trying to understand his legacy assume he was Russia’s top scorer—he would become a very good scorer, but his linemates were the monsters. His role would be to be elusive, to trick you into chasing and then take off, to distract and blind opponents.
I don’t know whether Sergei Makarov could see the pieces Kharlamov was starting to put together, or whether he just thought he seemed nice, but Nikolai invited Valeri home to hang with his biggest little fan, and teenage Valeri agreed, apparently just because he wasnice.
(He liked winning, but didn’t like beating people—he said he felt sorry every time.)
By the time he was 18 he was good enough for the junior team, enough that they didn’t kick him out for fudging his age, but whether he could compete with the men was still in question. In October 1967, Valeri’s junior coaches recommended sending him up to CSKA. Coach Tarasov sent him right back. Canada had giants, he said: he couldn’t play a child.
But over the next year Valeri finally put on muscle, developing thick thighs and sturdy shoulders. With new strength, his skating reached a new level: he is famously described as having “three speeds”—the explosive speed and maneuverability of his skating, his fast reactions with his stick, and his quick thinking. His friends on the junior team said they hardly recognized him. But Coach Tarasov remembered him, like he seemed to remember every player, and invited him back the next season.
In October of ’68, he placed the 20 year old Kharlamov with two other call-ups, the 21 year-old center Vladimir Petrov, and 24 year-old right winger Boris Mikhailov.
4. The fighter of all fighters (this part is sad)
cw death
Boris Mikhailov had been born Soviet, but really he was an expat to ‘your goalie’s net’.
Today, professional and internal players wear thick soft pads at the chest, thighs, and sometimes at their back, and wear hard-cap pads on their shoulders, elbows, and arms, which have an additional hard outer shell. If someone is trying to shove or hammer on you, those are the spots they’re most likely to hit. While it makes instinctive sense to protect our softer parts (I see people asking why players don’t wear pads on their stomachs every time there’s a kicking incident!), your back and arms are where you’re most likely to see injuries.
While hard cap pads have adverse affects when it comes to laying hits, there’s no question that they’ve made driving and diving into the net much, much safer for the individual player. The prolonged scrums and screens we seen today weren’t practically possible in the early game. In the ’70s, you had cotton shoulder pads and prayer.
Mikhailov was willing to hurl himself in front of the net and hold his position in a way many players at the time just couldn’t.
His admittedly advanced case of resting bitch face would start to show just how many times he’d broken it; in 1981 coach Herb Brooks tried to convince his American players that Boris looked like a famous comedian, because Boris was the scariest thing on ice.
From his dugout in front of the net he would knock in 98 World Championship goalsand429 more in the Soviet League. He still reigns as the top all-time scorer for both.
(Now, you could say that no one has a chance to beat one of those because the Soviet League has shuttered and been replaced by the Kontinental Hockey League, but no KHL player is close to passing him either.)
When he’s asked how he went from being CSKA’s cast-off to its captain, Boris says, “By accident!”
He was raised in Moscow in the aftermath of World War II. It was a little ironic, Boris says: surrounded by families who lost their fathers to bullets and mustard gas in the war, his father survived to die by gas in peacetime. Petr Mikhailov had become a plumber after the war, and he came across a gas leak: he managed to get his partner out, but couldn’t save himself.
The family had had four boys: Boris began to watch his brothers while his mother took on double-shifts. Even though he wasn’t the oldest, he (at least he thought) was the sensible one: every day before she left his mother reminded the others, “Listen to Boris!” One day when the younger two ran away he chased around the whole neighborhood hunting them down before his mother came home. He said that his mother taught him “to fight to the end, and never give up.
At fifteen, he apprenticed to be an electrician. At sixteen, he started working after school as a car mechanic. When he was 18, he sold his father’s tools to buy a new pair of used skates and a bicycle helmet, determined to try out for CSKA’s junior team.
CSKA didn’t want him. Boris figured that was fair. He said he wouldn’t even dream of CSKA again. So instead he packed up and moved to Saratov, eleven hours drive from home. He worked and played for the local junior and then second-tier men’s teams.
One day his coach took the boys back to Moscow District to play an expo game—except the coach got the day wrong, and they showed up when Lokomotiv Moskva was holding tryouts. Lokomotiv was a Soviet League team, struggling in the shadow of the three monster teams in the city of Moscow. Boris figured it couldn’t be that hard to break into their roster, and he did.
In ’67, when he was 23, CSKA reached out to him to attend another group try-out. Most of the CSKA staff weren’t really sure why. When they asked, Coach Tarasov just looked at al the young men attempting the ponderous panel of strength and fitness tests set for them, and pointed at Boris, who was practically chewing through the equipment.
The staff “were convinced that this guy will endure everything, he will work tirelessly, and, what’s especially important, he’ll do it without showing off.”
One assistant coach commented, “Boris Mikhailov made me believe in myself.”
At about 5'11”, he wasn’t too big or too small. He does not believe he has any particular talent. But Boris, it turned out, fucking loved training. He loved practice. I think he even loved the exercise bike. He felt he’d never gotten to practice as a kid, and he was determined to take advantage of every second now.
(It’s worth noting that he would always be hardest on himself. He never started to believe that every kid should have it just as hard–he says that hockey should always be a game for children, that they should get to run around in the yard and just have fun. Now he hosts little league tournaments, and cheers just as fiercely as he used to on the national team bench. As captain, he said it mattered to him to talk to every player the way they needed to hear–some directly, some softly, some needing inspiration. When he criticized a teammate for not meeting his own standards, he apologized. He didn’t believe in one-size-fits-all or rules for rules sake–something that would lead to his greatest regret in his career. His friends said that he tried hardest to be just.)
His teammates and opponents would call him “the fighter of all fighters.”
5. from a half-letter: love hockey; love yourself
The three of them began to play together on CSKA’s reserve team in October 1968. In December, they were invited from CSKA’s reserves to the national team’s second tier team, who played smaller international tournaments while the big national team travelled abroad for must-wins. After playing that first tournament in Moscow, they were summoned to join the main national team in Canada, where they played two exhibition games in 1969.
The Americans and Canadians still thought Valeri was too small, and called him “The Kid” or “Baby,” but the tone changed. The line developed their characteristic but still unpredictable pattern, with Boris driving the net and demanding half the other team’s attention, while Vladimir patrolled up and down to knock out whoever was left, and Valeri wheeled around them.
By the 1969 World Championships, they were ready to start that almost-endless scoring run.
Valeri once said, “It’s great when real friends are next to you! Friends who won’t lie when they see you’re in the wrong, who won’t be afraid to say it to your face. I’m glad for honesty in my friends, straightforwardness, clarity, a desire to help, to help out… They are sometimes funny, sometimes harsh, but they don’t ever lose heart. You know, it’s rare for linemates to be friends. Others, if they come together—it’s only on the ice. Mikhailov and Petrov and I almost never part, although we are all different.”
Boris and Vladimir struck everyone as an odd couple. Vladimir was overly honest, and also snored. Boris had a sarcasm problem. But Soviet Bert and Ernie were roommates for almost fifteen years, sharing a room that was no wider that Vladimir was tall at the training compound, hotel rooms on the road, and Boris’ dacha outside of Moscow in the short summers.
Teammates walking past would often hear them arguing, “but those disputes died out as quickly as they arose. Friends are friends. If Mikhailov made barbecue at home, then, be sure, Petrov was busy with the fire.”
And both of them doted on Valeri.
In 1971, just before the Olympics, disaster stuck. The coaches moved Kharlamov to another line. Tarasov told Boris, “I’m taking Valerya from you,” because Tarasov was worried about propping up the veterans on another line.
He gave them another winger, but the spark just wasn’t there. Vladimir said, “Mikhailov and I felt like a man whose finger had been cut off. We missed Kharlamov.”
They decided on a joint plan of attack: whining.
Valeri wrote, embarrassed, about how his now-former-linemates dogged their Coach around the training compound, interrupting whatever Tarasov was trying to do to complain. He gave in and gave back their winger before the year was out.
In 1972, Canada was expected to win the Summit Series, only to lose the first game 7-3. The next morning, the story goes that an NHL executive promised Kharlamov a million dollars if he’d come play for them.
“I can’t come and play without Petrov and Mikhailov!” Valeri demurred. The executive asked him if they’d like a million dollars too.
There’s a coda to this story I hadn’t hear before, though:
Valeri agreed to take the meeting, but he was worried what would happen to his family if he left the Soviet Union. At the end of the meeting the NHL executives slipped him some money to try to convince him. Valeri, who had become a bit of a fashionista, wandered back toward the hotel. He arrived with two boxes, containing two pairs of stylish women’s platform boots: he’d spent the money on presents for Mikhailov and Petrov’s wives.
(Note: Tatyana “Button” Mikhailov is also a character. Like several other women married to members of CSKA, she organized aggressively against the hockey program, including a PR battle with Mrs. Tikhonov that played out in letters to the editor of the major Soviet papers. Allegedly, after Tikhonov told Boris to quit hockey in 1980 (which would have meant taking the public blame for the loss) and Boris told him he didn’t feel like doing that, Tatyana ran into Tikhonov at a hockey federation banquet and “told him everything she thought of him,” loudly and at length. The hockey federation told Boris that Tatyana had to apologize, and he was like ‘or what, you’ll fire me?’ and quit hockey. Their friends called her Button because she had a little round nose compared to his beak.)
In 1976, Valeri broke several ribs and his leg in a car accident, swerving to avoid pedestrians. When he returned to the team he said, “I was playing as if in a fog. And not because I was weak. Physically, I had already regained my form. I just saw that the guys were protecting me - both my partners, and our opponents. And it touched me unusually. I needed it. And they knew it. The feeling is - I’m about to burst into tears. I could hardly cope with my nerves…”
He suspected Boris of using his excellent international reputation to make people to be nice to Valeri. Maybe he did, or maybe, as Valeri never quite seemed to believe, people just liked him. (Vladimir definitely did use his reputation to make people be nice to Valeri.)
“We understand each other,” Valeri said, “not from a half-word, but from a half-letter.
“I know what they can do at one moment or another, I can guess what they’ll choose to do, even if they look somewhere else. Or more accurately, I don’t so much know as much as I feel what they will do in the next second, how they will play in this or that situation, and so at the same instant I rush to where the puck is waiting for me, where—according to my partner’s plan—I should appear.
“Without saying a word, just glancing at one another, we immediately find a strategy that suits everyone - having lost the puck, we know who should run to help the defenders, we know when a partner is so tired that you should go back and help him, even though he is closer to his goal.”
I won’t talk about the car accident in 1981 here, but three more little stories:
Of course, there was another Petrov line. Vladimir Petrov played one season with new wingers: Vladimir Krutov, and Sergei Makarov, who had been that little Kharlamov fan. Neither were giants: they were built like Valeri, and they skated like him, and they helped keep the style he’d started growing. (Then Petrov quit to chase Mikhailov into coaching, and was replaced by a new overly-honest blond center.)
After 1981, Boris Mikhailov ran out of the rink where he had just started a new coaching job and flew to home to meet Valeri’s father. He was also named Boris, but Mikhailov called him Uncle Borya. Maybe having lost his father, he could imagine what it was like to lose a son. He invited Uncle Borya and Aunt Begonita to go to his empty dacha outside the city, to get away from the memories and mourning crowds in Moscow, hoping that working outside in the garden would help, just like it had helped Valeri.
Valeri’s family lived there for the next seven years. Every summer, Vladimir Petrov would visit the dacha too.
Boris returned to caching in St. Petersburg, but in a few years Coach Tikhonov convinced him to return to CSKA. For years, he tried to throw himself between the players and the coach. He now says his greatest regret is that he stayed.
He believed Tikhonov each time the head coach promised him that things would get better. His work fed, and probably prolonged, the CSKA system that had tried so many times to throw him away. But it was understandable, and in a way his protective presence did make space for change.
Young Igor Larionov and Slava Fetisov both said that they watched how the Tikhonov treated Mikhailov, and it made them think: if even someone like Boris Mikhailov wasn’t treated with respect, and if even he couldn’t make justice work within the system, then maybe it was time to break it. Sergei Makarov, Kharlamov’s heir, probably cast the deciding vote.
Last: I like to think that Petrov kept his friend’s survivor’s guilt in check. Part of an open letter that Vladimir wrote to Boris:
“Dear Boris Petrovich! With great joy and love….Love hockey, love yourself, your wife and children. Love your homeland. She gave you a lot. But you are not in debt to her either.
My best—Vladimir Petrov.”
(Bringing this back because the final version got lost when I first posted and I’m biased but I like it)
