Red Army, film review: the story of the heroic Soviet ice-hockey team of the 80s

Gabe Polsky’s doc portrays the training conditions of the hockey players who became national heores

Gabe Polsky’s superlative sports doc tells the story of the all-conquering Soviet ice-hockey team of the 1980s, whose exploits were milked for propaganda value by the Soviet regime. The players were national heroes, yet they were paid poorly and forced to train in isolation for up to 11 months a year, separated from their families. Slava Fetisov, the tough captain of the Red Army team, is the film’s main figure. He could skate backwards as fast as his western opponents could skate forwards, and he had a rebellious streak: he eventually defected to North America’s National Hockey League.

Red Army is full of ironies and surprises. One of them is that the Soviet team played with a grace and freedom that their US and Canadian opponents, with their brute individualism and appetite for violence, couldn’t match. The Soviet coaches and politicians treated the players with brutality but the coaches in North America weren’t much more sympathetic and the Americans were every bit as jingoistic in victory as their eastern bloc opponents. Fetisov seemed to be the archetypal rebel but he was also fiercely patriotic, and later became a Minister of Sport for Putin.

Red Army (15) Gabe Polsky, 84 mins