“We felt each other in our cells,” he said.

It is rare to hear hockey described this way, especially Soviet hockey. In the United States and Canada, the great Soviet teams were often thought to be machinelike, monolithic and emotionless, save for glimpses of arrogance and deviousness. Many North Americans recall the Soviet losses: humbled by American college players in the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” at the Lake Placid Olympics and by dauntless Canadian professionals in the 1972 Summit Series.

But others have different memories of those Soviet teams, which skated in great intersecting arcs, winding and unwinding like a Swiss timepiece, advancing the puck from stick to stick with astonishing accuracy. They ignored the pounding their frustrated North American foes employed to try to stop them.

And they usually won. From 1975 to 1991, Soviet club teams compiled a 58-40-10 record against N.H.L. clubs, even though 92 of those 108 games were played in North America. In the Olympics from 1964 to 1992, the national team won seven of a possible eight gold medals, the last as the Unified Team after the fall of the U.S.S.R.

Fetisov, one of Soviet hockey’s last great stars, does most of the talking in “Red Army,” tracing the growth of the Soviet game from its birth in the ruins of the postwar U.S.S.R. through its growth under Anatoly Tarasov, a coach, author and Renaissance man.

“Tarasov was smart, a practitioner and a critic at the same time,” Fetisov said in a recent interview. “He was a philosopher, and as a speaker he was unbelievable. I never heard anyone close to him, how he could put into words what he wanted to see and hear from you.”