Vsevolod Bobrov (December 1, 1922 – July 1, 1979) is the official first hero of Russian hockey, to the extent Soviet hockey had heroes. The “Big Red Machine,” the formless automaton that was Soviet hockey, all wheels and cogs, the perfectly-engineered game-winning engine with interchangeable parts cast in the foundries of the Red Army, was one-third real, one-third aspiration, and one-third a contrast to North American individualism. But the men, like Bobrov, were still men: they lived and breathed and often enough partied like hellions, they left enough memories that Bobrov was named to the IIHF Hall of Fame on its founding a quarter-century after his death, was named to the IIHF “All-Time Russia Team” in 2020, and the KHL named one of its divisions after him.
Bobrov was a three-sport star: he represented the Soviet Union in soccer at the 1952 Summer Olympics, where he scored the equalizer in a 2-1 extra time preliminary-round win against Bulgaria’s influential goalkeeper Apostol Sokolov. In the first round proper, Yugoslavia took a 3-0 lead at halftime; Bobrov, the Soviet captain, scored the next goal to make it 3–1 but Yugoslavia got the next two to stake a 5–1 lead. At 75′ Vasili Trofimov scored for the Soviets; Bobrov added his second at 77′ to make a game of it, then completed his hat trick on 87′. 5–4. Aleksandr Petrov tied the game in the eighty-ninth of ninety minutes, and the Soviet Union had what match referee Arthur Ellis called “the most honourable draw ever recorded.” There were no penalty shootouts in those days, so two days later they played again: Bobrov opened the scoring in the sixth minute, but the Yugoslavs took control after that, winning 3-1 and going on to the silver medal, losing only to Ferenc Puskás’s unstoppable Hungarian team, the “Magical Magyars.” Ellis said of Bobrov, “he, almost single-handed, took the score to 5–5 [. . .] For once, use of the word sensational was justified.” Stalin is said to have expected a gold medal in soccer (he must never have heard of Puskás then) and to have been especially enraged by losing to Tito’s Yugoslavs; at any rate, the Soviet coach was officially disgraced and most of the 1952 team, including Bobrov, never played for the national soccer team again.
This, it will be remembered, was Bobrov’s second-best sport.
Hockey only got going in the Soviet Union after the Second World War and for many years there was crossover between soccer and hockey players; the greatest Soviet soccer star of them all, goalkeeper Lev Yashin, faced Bobrov in the Soviet hockey league until 1953. Bobrov started out with the Air Force hockey team, VVS, and
