Viacheslav Fetisov was the best defenceman Russia has ever known. He was part Bobby Orr, in playmaking ability. He was part Rocket Richard, for the cultural grip he had as captain of Red Army, the team most revered in the Soviet Union.

He was a willing propaganda tool during the Cold War, an officer in the army and a patriot. And he knew he had to get out.

Director Gabe Polsky’s documentary, Red Army, uses Fetisov’s story to tell the story of the rise and fall of the Soviet hockey program.

Captured is the brilliance of its founding coach, Anatoli Tarasov, who’s sent to pasture; the dictatorial style of his usurper and successor, Viktor Tikhonov, who pushes too hard; and the use of hockey players and hockey victories as propaganda tools.

You get an inside-feel for what it was like behind the Iron Curtain as well as an idea of how an entire nation looked at hockey in a completely different way.

You can’t help but wonder, what if the Russians won those big games that are benchmarks in the sport in the West: 1972 for Canadians, 1980 for Americans? (The Russians have big victories of their own — world championships, other Olympics and the 1981 Canada Cup.)

What if there’s this parallel planet where the Iron Curtain never fell? Where the Cold War continued, where players were developed the way Tarasov intended when he studied both chess and the Bolshoi to develop skills, patterns and plays that turned Red Army — the best club team in the world and the backbone of the Soviet national team — into a powerhouse.

Sure, life, the economy and geopolitics would be different. And so would hockey. Today the Russian mystique is gone, but the Russian influence remains.

“We learned a lot from the Russians,” Paul Henderson, Canada’s goal-scoring hero from the 1972 Summit Series, said in an interview. “(In our era) you never passed the puck backwards. They came up the ice and if they didn’t like what they saw, they turned back. You have to credit Tarasov for that. He was a progressive thinker.”

Canada’s victory in 1972 led Canadians to believe our brand of hockey was superior. That mindset, with the brutality of the Broad Street Bullies personifying it best, continued for another couple of decades.

“That was not one of the greatest times to play,” Henderson said of 1970s hockey. “No one respected that kind of hockey.”

The Russians — by then under Tikhonov — continued to train in the summer and cross-train with other sports. That’s something that has only come into vogue with Canadian hockey players in the last 10-to-15 years, after Canada’s failure at the 1998 Olympics.

“They played a puck-possession kind of game,” legendary coach Scotty Bowman told the Star. “They didn’t go up and down the wing so much as cross over a lot. They anticipated and took off. Their game was offence. They weren’t trained to play defence. They had the puck a lot.”

The Russians, starting with Tarasov and continuing under Tikhonov, were driven by the belief that a victory by the Soviet national team over a western team was a victory for the Soviet way of life. And the West — at the height of the Cold War — saw things the same way. That is shown in the documentary through a phone conversation between Team USA coach Herb Brooks and American president Jimmy Carter, after the American upstarts beat the Russians in the 1980 Olympics.

“It proves our way of life is the proper way to carry on,” Brooks tells Carter.

This was Fetisov’s world. He was to Red Army what Maurice Richard was to the Montreal Canadiens, what Bobby Orr was to the Boston Bruins. Its heart and soul. He tried out at eight, got taken in by the program at 10 and was its youngest captain.

So when Fetisov — a proud Soviet, but one who believed strongly in his own rights — quit Red Army in a dispute with Tikhonov, he quickly became a threat to the power structure of Soviet politics. He found himself in a kind of exile, with Tarasov his only friend.

Then, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika policies were taking root, and as the likes of Alexander Mogilny defected and others, like Igor Larionov were released, Fetisov was granted his wish to join the New Jersey Devils.

The Russians — due to the Cold War mentality — were hated when they arrived, sometimes by teammates. It took time for them to adjust to us, and us to adjust to them.

Finally, Fetisov found a home with Bowman’s Detroit Red Wings. The Wings also had Larionov, Sergei Fedorov, Sergei Makarov and Alexander Konstantinov. Bowman put a five-man Russian unit together, just the way Tarasov intended, and the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1997. Fetisov and the others brought the Cup to Moscow.

Fetisov had missed the fall of the Iron Curtain. He was in North America when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. He returned, Stanley Cup in hand to a Russia that seemed alien to him.

“The day the Berlin Wall fell, a buddy of mine called me and said: ‘Henny, they never recovered. The goal you scored in 1972 was the last nail in their coffin,’ ” said Henderson. “We laughed like crazy. But who knows?”

Fetisov is now a senator in Russia. He became minister of sport under President Vladimir Putin, helped the KHL turn into a respected league and assisted in developing junior hockey in Russia, which helped bring the Winter Games to Sochi.

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Fetisov believes the way things turned out for real for Russia is far better than a parallel universe with the likes of Tikhonov in charge.

“Russians are just like Canadians,” Fetisov told the Star. “They love their families. They love hockey. They’ve got lots of food on the table. They’ve got luxury cars. They’ve got their hockey league (KHL). Any player can go anywhere. Anybody can say anything in the press.”

Red Army opens Friday in Toronto.

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