Thread by @SlavaMalamud

Exactly 8 years ago, the Russian national hockey team was humiliated in the IIHF Worlds by USA, the day after goalie Ilya Bryzgalov gave a scandalous interview to a Russian website in which he defended Stalin and said "there was a lot of logic in what he did..."
1/?

In the run-up to the game, Russian media was in convulsive hysteria about the sheer pleasure the Motherland would extract from defeating villainous America and prove once and for all that the KHL is a superior league to the NHL, which was locked out earlier that year...

The game was instantly deemed a great political battle, despite the fact that nobody in America knew it was happening, as Team USA, as is traditional at the Worlds, was composed of 4th-liners, AHLers and, possibly, someone's cousin Ralph who knew how to skate good or something...

In the anticipation of The Great And Decisive Motherland's Triumph, the website Sports dot ru sent a reporter to do a big interview with Bryz. Using a time-tested technique, the reporter was a flirty female who did her best to goad the goalie into something juicy...

Bryzgalov, who rarely needs to be goaded, easily obliged. Of course, it also helped that the reporter was feeding him "questions" such as, "You have, of course, heard the saying that Stalin took over a country of the plow and left it a country of the atomic bomb!"

Bryzgalov mused about how Stalin was, in essence, just an effective manager who did what was needed, and how Russia could really use some of this management style.
Than, he skated out onto the ice against America and had his ass beaten into oblivion...

So, afterwards, I wrote a column for @sportexpress about how having Stalin at the helm would have resulted for the Russian national team, and for Bryzgalov in particular. I wrote about the 1952 Olympic soccer team, four of whose players were banned for life after the defeat...

I wrote about how, back then, USSR would never play in a competition it wasn't guaranteed to win. How nothing was ever advertised in advance, in case the win didn't materialize, and how dire the consequences were when it didn't.
I also wrote about Team USA...

About the fact that the lack of political hysteria, or indeed any publicity at home, did not prevent the American scrubs, so gleefully derided in Russia before the game, from actually, like, trying hard and playing with conviction and desire...

And then I predicted that the same type of lunacy that backfired for Russia in 2013, would be dialed up to 11 in Sochi and backfire the same way.
The column was stricken by editors. It was never published anywhere. This was the moment I knew I'd need to change jobs soon...

Later that year, Ovechkin demanded the Capitals strip me of my credential for making fun of his bud Semin on Twitter. In 2014, a lot of my Olympics work was severely censored (as I later found out, the editor was specifically told to do so by Putin's Sports Minister)...

Then, in 2014, the Capitals (who were forced to give me my credentials by the Writers Union) finally blacklisted me after I criticized Ovechkin's support for Putin's war of conquest in Ukraine. And finally, as Putin's mistress was installed as @sportexpress's new owner, I left...

Never looked back since. Russia is long in hell in a handbasket, to the point where Bryzgalov's and Ovechkin's lunacy seems rather quaint now. Everyone is much more insane in 2021. Sports don't seem nearly as important anymore.
At least Stalin is still dead.