The first time I tuned in to the fact that the Russians might be hockey geniuses was New Year’s Eve, in 1975, when the Moscow Red Army hockey club played the Montreal Canadiens at the Montreal Forum. I was six. We were visiting an uncle and aunt on a farm in upstate New York, near the Canadian border, and my father found the game on an old TV, rabbit ears picking up the signal from (I assume) the other side of the St. Lawrence. He made a big deal out of the prowess and panache of the Soviets. I don’t remember the game itself, either because I was sent to bed or the action was obscure to young eyes, on a small, fuzzy screen. (The medium, pre-HD flatscreen, was never ideal; twenty years later, during the Stanley Cup playoffs, a friend would refer to what we were watching on a ten-inch Trinitron as “the little people.”) I didn’t register that the New Year’s Eve game, though dominated by the Canadiens, had ended in a tie. But my father’s reverence made an impression on me, as did the names Mikhailov and Tretiak. It was a rink-rat-to-be’s version of the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

During the Cold War, certain sporting events became proxies for the wider struggle. The Olympics, with the medal counts and the wide range of sports that one country or another—the U.S.S.R., the United States, Cuba, or the two Germanies—had decided to focus on, to assert supremacy, became a full-on superseries of contrasting ideologies, sporting philosophies, and performance-enhancing-drug regimes. From the beginning, the Olympics had a chauvinistic streak, but the Cold War raised the stakes and turned them into a quadrennial morality play. We were Balboa; they were Drago. The quintessence of this was the Miracle on Ice, in 1980, when a bunch of American college kids beat the Soviets, the best hockey team in the world. History has granted the upset almost as much significance as the Cuban missile crisis. (The Canadian version was the 1972 Summit Series, which Canada, and Our Way of Life, won four games to three, with one tie.)

For years, I rooted for the Soviets in hockey against everyone but the United States and the Philadelphia Flyers. Basically, outside of these two national and notional allegiances, I favored the Russian style of play, an intricate, flowing approach that preferred puck possession and teamwork to (and Flyers haters will find this contradictory) brute force and individual achievement. Call me a Commie, if you want. I prefer to think that I was looking ahead to the post-Cold War sports landscape, when the nationality of teams or athletes mattered less than their comportment and playing style. You could root for Roger Federer or Brazilian soccer without having a fetish for the Swiss or knowing a word of Portuguese. You cultivated an allegiance to the Federer forehand, or the jogo bonito. Soon enough, of course, once sports went global, the world became a free-agency meat market. Athletes went where the money was, often before they were fully formed, and before long the peculiar characteristics of each nation’s sporting culture got diluted and homogenized. The Brazilians fled for the football leagues of Europe, the Russians for the Canadian minor hockey leagues. Tennis emigrated to Bradenton. Soon the mercenaries looked alike, no matter where they came from.

There was perhaps no sports culture as distinct as that of Russian hockey. The wonderful new documentary “Red Army,” on a limited run in New York this week and slated for wide release in January, tells the story of the legendary Soviet teams, principally through the eyes of the great defenseman Slava Fetisov, who eventually, during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the twilight of his career, came to play in the N.H.L.

The Soviet approach to hockey evolved in a vacuum, under the tutelage of Anatoli Tarasov, a self-made hockey mastermind who was tasked by Stalin after the Second World War with creating an ice-hockey program where none had existed before. He integrated elements from ballet, chess, and bandy, and put players through rigorous and unorthodox training rituals. (Vintage footage dug up by Gabe Polsky, the film’s director, who played hockey at Yale, suggests that the key to graceful hockey is doing lots of somersaults in practice.) The players lived together most of the year and played together in units of five for years on end. The result of all this, in the rink, anyway, was a free-flowing weave of improvisational keep-away, with the flamboyance, if not the laughs, of the Globetrotters on ice. Their greatest successes, and most aesthetically pleasing performances, came when they were coached by a dictatorial apparatchik and former player named Viktor Tikhonov, whom most of them came to hate. The irony was always there and is central to Polsky’s film: a rigid, oppressive system, at both national and team levels, created the freest, most expressive hockey there ever was.

As it happens, my colleague and beer-league hockey teammate Keith Gessen gave a talk at the New York Public Library this afternoon on the subject of Russian hockey. He's been reading Tarasov. He said in his talk, "Later on, when Tarasov had visited the U.S. and been amazed both by the prodigiousness of its cities, the variety of its supermarkets, and the tricks of the animals at SeaWorld, he would say to an American scout, 'Your people can build the world's tallest buildings. You can make forty-nine different kinds of mayonnaise. You can teach dolphins to do the most complex tasks. Why can't you teach your hockey players to pass the puck more than two metres?' "

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the number of players adept in this style began to dwindle, as the system’s vestigial influence faded. There are still some great young Russian hockey players, but their way of playing isn’t really distinguishable from that of the élites of North America or, say, Sweden. With cross-pollination came homogenization. The hockey is better here now, and perhaps not as good there. In the absence of a contrast in styles, showdowns between East and West become less interesting, less consequential. They have become, well, just games. All that’s left, to imbue these contests with extra-athletic import, is patriotism, and the hostility that seems to go with it. At the behest of Vladimir Putin, Fetisov, who’d fought the Soviet establishment for the right to play in North America and keep the money he earned here, went back to Russia, after his N.H.L. career was done, in order to help revive Russia’s moribund athletic apparatus. He served as the Minister of Sport, helped put on the Sochi Olympics, and then, perhaps on the basis of these successes, got elected, by a unanimous vote, to the upper house of the Russian Federal Assembly. The Sochi Olympics, like the Tarasov hockey program, were calculated to foster pride at home and envy abroad—to strut Russia’s stuff on the world stage. The man who bucked the system had become a part of it.

“What do you mean, I’m part of the system?” Fetisov said, when I met him a few weeks ago in New York, with Polsky. “I am part of governmental system that tries to bring back pride to the people.” I found him to be remarkably, and at times delightfully, prickly about anything having to do with the nationalistic implications of sport, in spite of his stated mission to use sport to strengthen patriotism. “You are brainwashed,” he said. I professed my love for the way he and his teammates had played, but he detected criticism of modern-day Russia. The American dream, he half-joked, was “to blame everyone for everything.” He was well-armored for Us versus Them.

I asked him if, in light of the deterioration in relations between the United States and Russia (“It’s never been this bad,” he said. “Never.”), he foresaw a return to the kind of Cold War rooting interests and political significance that infused international competition in his playing days. “You think Washington Capitals fans are going to hate Ovechkin now, because he’s Russian? Sounds funny. Do I think the Russian hockey team wants to beat U.S. team because Obama is President? It sounds like a funny thing. They want to beat them because they are good hockey players and want to win. For me as a player, it didn’t matter what kind of political system there was. I had my games, I had my practices. I wasn’t thinking about a fucking Politburo guy during those years. I didn’t give a shit.”

But we did. So did the Politburo guy. And though the antagonism may have brought on bigotry, misery, and ignorance, it also made for beautiful, meaningful hockey. Was it worth it?