Americans of a certain age, even those otherwise indifferent to hockey, are likely to have vivid memories of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., when a bunch of American college players upset a formidable Soviet team. It was the Miracle on Ice, a Cold War victory greeted with chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and, according to Herb Brooks, the United States coach, proof that our way of life was better than theirs.
But there are two sides to every story, and from the Russian perspective, the Lake Placid games are a minor, unfortunate episode in a glorious and sometimes tragic history. The Soviet squad that lost in 1980 won gold medals in the next two Olympics and is almost universally regarded as the greatest hockey team ever assembled. In 1991, the system that spawned and sustained it — making national heroes and political pawns of its members — collapsed, an event that altered the course of global sports, along with everything else. Former Soviet players made their way to the N.H.L., where they did not always find a warm welcome.
This stirring, crazy story — a Russian novel of Tolstoyan sweep and Gogol-esque absurdity — is recounted in “Red Army,” Gabe Polsky’s jaunty collage of a documentary. Mr. Polsky is a tireless researcher and a dogged interviewer, sometimes to the annoyance of his subjects. In an early sequence, his pushiness earns a raised middle finger from the great defenseman Vyacheslav Fetisov, but Mr. Fetisov’s occasionally grumpy participation is crucial to the film. As handsome as any movie star, thoughtful and temperamental, he is both narrator and hero, and serves as a guide to the curious, vanished world of high-level Communist athletics.
Mr. Fetisov was at the core of a team distinguished by speed and fluidity. The architect of their approach was Anatoly Tarasov, a coach whose roly-poly physique seemed at odds with his devotion to grace and finesse on the ice. He borrowed techniques and ideas about training and strategy from ballet and chess, other great Soviet obsessions, making his players perform somersaults and pirouettes in skates and heavy pads. In archival footage, he appears jolly and cherubic, in notable contrast to his successor, Viktor Tikhonov, a K.G.B. man who looks like a caricature of the gray-faced, dogmatic Brezhnev-era apparatchik.
Life for the Soviet players was a tangle of contradictions. They were celebrities in a society devoted to conformity, and as high-ranking members of the Soviet military, they enjoyed privileges denied to most of their fellow citizens. But their lives were also restricted and controlled to a degree that caused resentment and heartbreak. Their year-round training regimen under Mr. Tikhonov kept them away from their families for months, and they chafed under his impersonal, rigid discipline.
But there were also those gold medals, and a genuine camaraderie that Mr. Fetisov and his colleagues look back on with nostalgia. When they make their way, post-U.S.S.R., into the commercial world of the N.H.L., “Red Army” takes a poignant, slightly surreal turn, with cheesy American and Canadian television clips stepping in for old Russian newsreels and Western show business vulgarity sweeping aside the pomp and bluster of official Communism. The mid-’90s provided a happy second act for Mr. Fetisov and his erstwhile teammates, who reunited as the Russian Five to win back-to-back Stanley Cups for the Detroit Red Wings.
Good sports movies are always about more than sports. “Miracle,” Gavin O’Connor’s 2004 feature about the 1980 American team, with Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks, is a fable of underdog grit and can-do spirit. “Red Army” touches on themes of friendship and perseverance, and also offers a compact and vivid summary of recent Russian history. It provides as clear an explanation as I have seen for the appeal of Vladimir V. Putin, who has revived some of the patriotic sentiments that held the old system in place, including the emphasis on sports as an expression of national greatness. For Mr. Fetisov, a former minister of sports, a member of the National Assembly and a prosperous businessman, this is a happy ending. It may also give Mr. Polsky or some future documentarian material for a sequel.
“Red Army” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Some salty language.