“I came, I saw, I conquered”: 77 years ago, ice hockey captured Russia

December 22 is the birthday of ice hockey in Russia. A winter team sport that is unique in its intensity and intensity of passion, which has become extremely popular in our country and so loved by millions of residents on 1/6 of the landmass. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults, boys and girls, amateurs and professionals, almost all year round, kick the puck around the ice, trying to throw it into a small goal.

“The ice battle is fought by a stern squad: we believe in the courage of desperate guys. Real men play hockey, a coward doesn’t play hockey,” these lines from a song written in 1968 by poets Sergei Grebennikov and Nikolai Dobronravov to the music of composer Alexandra Pakhmutova are well known and familiar to almost every Russian. But few people now know that ice hockey owes its appearance to the Red Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who gave the green light to its development, and the pioneers of this game in the USSR were the masters of Russian hockey with football players who made their own sticks, equipment and ice rinks.

As Nikolai Ivanovich Karpov, a direct witness of those historical events, Honored Hockey Coach of the USSR, recalled in a conversation with an MK-Sport correspondent: “Red Marshal Voroshilov himself came to one of the exhibition ice hockey matches after the end of the Great Patriotic War . He looked at this game and said – it will suit the Russian people.”

On December 22, 1946, the first matches of the Soviet Union Championship in the then mysterious and little-known sport were held in six cities of our country: Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, Kaunas, Arkhangelsk and Kyiv. Despite the cold and frost, snow and rain, thousands of fans rushed to watch a winter game unknown 77 years ago, which most then called “Canadian hockey.” An unprecedented excitement and interest in this sport arose immediately and for several decades made ice hockey the most beloved game in our huge country.

“In 1946, at the Moscow Dynamo stadium with simple wooden sides and primitive sticks, the masters of Russian hockey and football took to the ice for the first time: players of the legendary CDKA: (as the Central Sports Club of the Army was called in those years – Note ed.) Vsevolod Bobrov with his partners Viktor Shuvalov, Evgeny Babich, Pavel Korotkov and others. In the opening game they were opposed by a team from Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), which the army team defeated with a score of 5:1.

At first, this spectacle caused smiles and surprise among the spectators, but soon hockey captured the attention and absorbed the minds of many,” says Honored Master of Sports of the USSR Yuri Ivanovich Morozov.

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All fans then were interested to see how well-known domestic football players throughout the country could skate and wield sports equipment that was then unknown – a stick, instead of a ball, sending a small black disk into the opponents’ goal. The small size of the site, unlike bandy, made the new winter game more dynamic and fast.

“From the very first matches, it became clear to everyone that this game is exciting. Because there were very good and unexpected combinations, great speeds. And our people loved this sport so much that at that time up to 30 and even 40 thousand people went to Dynamo. But there were no artificial skating rinks in our country yet,” recalls Nikolai Karpov.

But all this might not have happened! It was a difficult post-war time – a time of enthusiasts and true fans of ice hockey. With their excellent play, they paved the way forward and proved its necessity. They proved it at almost all levels. The pioneers of hockey in the USSR started practically from scratch. There were no platforms, no uniforms, or other necessary equipment. We had to do everything ourselves – pour the ice, build the boards, sew hockey uniforms, make sticks.

“You can now remember with a smile that then, at the dawn of our hockey, we played with simple wooden sticks, which we made with our own hands. How we had to sew our own ammunition and protection from various scrap materials. My father brought me plastic scraps from the factory where he worked so that I could use them to build myself a shell and knee pads,” Yuri Morozov shares his youthful experience.

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The rapid development of this game in the Soviet Union helped our hockey to break into the world elite like a whirlwind. Already two years after the first matches of the Union Championship in 1948, the first international matches of the Moscow club team took place with the champion of Czechoslovakia, the LTC club, which gathered a huge audience of 20 thousand spectators.

Six years later, in March 1954, having defeated the founders of this game, the Canadians 7:2, we won the title of world champions for the first time. And two years later, at the Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1956, having broken the resistance of the same Canadians in the final match of the tournament (2:0), the USSR national hockey team became the champion of the Olympic Games for the first time in history. After which the glorious history of victories of domestic hockey at the international level began. But that’s a completely different story.