The Moscow Playbook

I’ve been looking forward to this book for a long time. Some of you may remember my friend Bruce Berglund—he provided all sorts of fascinating insights from his background in Eastern European history when we discussed Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny last summer. (You can catch that here if you like.)

Bruce is a historian of Eastern Europe and of sports. He has recently published The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports, and now he has a brand new book out just in time for the Winter Olympics: The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Power.

With the Olympics starting this weekend, this would be perfect armchair reading. I asked Bruce to write a little intro for you all, and he did not disappoint. Dipping deep into History Department lore, he recalled my own glory days as an high school athlete. (When Bruce was a colleague in the Calvin History Department, he was in charge of parties and entertainment…if I recall, this little tidbit came out as part of a “two truths and a lie” game.)

At any rate, read on for a little glimpse into my past, but more importantly, a fascinating glimpse into Bruce’s brand new book, and a sense for how power operates in Russian sports. I hate that he also came to the realization that some of these dynamics aren’t so foreign to our own country these days.

Here’s Bruce:

Thanks to Kristin for allowing me to share a bit of my book with you all.

I’m sure you’re asking: What do sports and politics in Russia have to do with Kristin’s insights into religion and politics in Trump’s America?

First of all, you are probably unaware that, among her many accomplishments, Kristin played third base for her high school softball team. We typically give credit to the 1972 Title IX legislation for making sports a common experience for girls and women in the U.S. But as my book shows, we also owe a debt of thanks to the Soviet Union. In the 1950s and 60s, Soviet sports officials invested heavily in women’s sports. The country’s athletes won dozens of Olympic medals, giving the USSR an edge over the US. As a result, American sports officials recognized that if they were going to keep up with the Soviets in world sports, they needed more women athletes. This was the first step toward Title IX––and ultimately, to Kristin being named “athlete of the week” by her hometown newspaper.

The second connection is that the ways we do sports reveal a lot about the fabric of our society––and our politics. Think of how deeply sports are woven into American life. In communities large and small, everyday social connections are linked to sporting events: Friday-night high school football and Saturday-morning kids’ soccer, church softball and college intramurals, triathlons and turkey trots, Super Bowl parties and March Madness brackets.

Sports are not simply something Americans do: they shape Americans’ thinking. Since the 1800s, athletics have had a constant presence in U.S. schools and colleges. From a young age, our kids are taught essential lessons from sports: be a good winner, be a good loser, and above all, don’t cheat.

In Russia, by contrast, sports participation is not widespread. There are not a lot of weekend athletes; instead, Russia produces top-level athletes. And these athletes are expected to win––no matter how––to prove the greatness of Russia. This is the subject of my book: the strategies, deceptions, and outright cheating Moscow has employed to give its athletes an advantage, from the time of Stalin to today.

Lastly, how does all this relate to Trump’s America? While I was working on this book in 2023 and early 2024, there were several places where I wrote sentences along the lines of: “Can you imagine something like this happening in the United States?” In 2025, when I was editing the manuscript, those lines came out. Now we can imagine a president who covers his administration’s creeping authoritarianism by hosting major sporting events. We can imagine a national leader who expects the corrupt heads of world governing bodies to buy his favor. And we can imagine a president who is just as crooked in the sport he plays as he is in his political and financial dealings.

The reason I write sports history is that there much to learn from studying how we play games. Russia competes only to win, because victories prove Russia is a great nation. In America today, we have a president who likewise believes winning is all that matters, because it proves his greatness. In both cases, it doesn’t matter if the wins come through cheating, or even if the wins are real. All that matters is acting like you’re on top.

Excerpt from The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Power:

The crowd inside the arena buzzed in anticipation. As skaters circled the ice to warm up, rock music thundered over the speakers—songs of Bon Jovi and AC/DC, staples of hockey arenas around the world. But this was a Russian arena—the $300 million Bolshoy Ice Dome, built for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics—and filling the arena was a Russian crowd.

Faces were painted with the colors of the Russian flag: white, blue, and red. Some fans wore jerseys of the national hockey team, emblazoned with the double-headed eagle of the imperial Romanov dynasty. One guy near the ice waved a Soviet naval flag—its red star and hammer-and-sickle insignia visible throughout the arena. In between Freddie Mercury singing “Another One Bites the Dust” and the opening riff of “Eye of the Tiger,” fans chanted their country’s name—“RO-SSI-YA! RO-SSI-YA!”—with all the intensity of Americans shouting “U-S-A!” at an international match.

Except this wasn’t an international match. It was an exhibition game. Both teams warming up were Russian. On the ice were some of the greatest hockey players in the world—or more accurately, some of the greatest retired hockey players in the world. One team was made up of former members of the vaunted Soviet squads of the 1970s and ’80s, winners of multiple Olympic gold medals. They faced a collection of former National Hockey League players, some of the first Russians to play in the West in the 1990s.

But the star of the night was not a former Olympian or an NHL great. Before the game began, the loudest cheers went up for this last player to be introduced. A spotlight followed him as he stepped onto the ice. The announcer’s deep baritone rumbled through the darkened arena, like the prelude to a heavyweight fight:

“President of the Russian Federation, Vladimirrrrrrr Putin!”

From the starting face-off, all eyes were on Putin, both in the arena and on the nationwide TV broadcast. He moved down the ice with tentative strides, slower than the other players. Noise rose from the crowd in the opening minutes when he collected a teammate’s pass. Viewers across Russia heard the commentator’s voice lift in excitement: “Putin with the puck! The president skates to the goal!”

Defenders slowed to a stand-still, allowing him to stickhandle past. The goalie stiffened.

“Putin shoots! Goooooal!”

The camera zoomed in on the president giving fist-bumps to his teammates. Inside the arena, the siren wailed, the music started, the spectators slapped their plastic thundersticks. Without expression, Putin skated to the bench and took his seat, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to score a goal against some of the best players to ever lace up skates.

Putin went on to score seven more goals this night. His team won 14–7. The president’s hockey exploits have been repeated once or twice each year, usually with the same lineups, always with the same result: Putin scores a half-dozen or more goals in leading his team to a lopsided victory.

Putin started skating in his fifties, and it shows. His strides are hesitant, his turns wobbly. He has taken his tumbles. On this night in Sochi, in May 2019, Putin famously face-planted while taking a victory lap after the game. As he waved to spectators, the president didn’t notice a rug had been placed on the ice for the postgame ceremony. Down he went, to the horror of his teammates.

Admittedly, I felt a tinge of sympathy for Vladimir Vladimirovich in that moment. As I can attest from being a middle-aged amateur hockey player, it hurts to hit the ice. And at our age, it’s hard to get up.

So why does he do it? Why does the Russian president risk embarrassment and injury to have former pros feed him the puck and let him score easy goals? Justin Trudeau is a seasoned skater, but he never got on the rink with NHLers during his years as Canadian prime minister. Barack Obama has played basketball his whole life, but he didn’t make himself the star of nationally televised games against NBA old-timers. Why does Putin take the ice against some of the best players in hockey history, only to show he is clearly out of his league?

During Putin’s two decades in power, the Kremlin has used sports to build his standing as president, a leader attentive to his people’s welfare as well as a vigorous man of action. Putin’s high-scoring hockey performances can be viewed alongside photos of him competing in judo or swimming in Siberian lakes or taking bare-chested rides on horseback over rugged mountains. Yet the aim is not simply the greatness of Putin. It’s the greatness of Russia. The exhibition hockey game was more than an exercise in presidential image-building or a charity event for an amateur league. With the chants and flags, the faces painted in national colors, the legendary players who had won the Stanley Cup and Olympic gold, it was a celebration of Russia.

Putin’s hockey games are not intended to be real competitions. They are a performance of victory.

Since the time of Stalin, Moscow’s rulers have sent Russian athletes into the world with one command: you must win. Whether they wore the colors of the Russian Federation or the Soviet Union, Russian competitors at international events, especially the Summer and Winter Olympics, understood their victories had political meaning. Winning at sports showed the greatness of their nation, their motherland.

Of course, people of every nation want their athletes to win at world events, whether it’s Argentinians watching soccer or Australians following cricket. I have watched international hockey with Swedes, international soccer with Germans, and international rugby with the English and Welsh. We all cheer for our own. We are lifted when our athletes win; we are disappointed when they lose.

In Russia, however, support for the country’s athletes goes beyond wanting them to win. Russia’s athletes need to win.

During the Cold War, the demand for victories had an ideological motivation. According to the Kremlin’s propaganda, the Soviet Union was the most advanced, most equal, most just country in the world. Even more, the communist system enabled citizens of the USSR to reach new heights of production and creativity. It was difficult to prove, however, that the Soviet Union had the world’s best scientists or coal miners. But you could prove that the USSR had the strongest weightlifters, fastest runners, and most skilled gymnasts.

At the same time, there were deeper roots to this drive for victory. The belief in Russia’s unmatched role in the world goes back centuries before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and it has lasted past the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet while medieval Orthodox monks could only take it on faith that Moscow’s czars had been chosen to rule in God’s place, contemporary Russians can point to more objective signs of greatness. As one proud Russian told researcher Nina Kramareva, an expert on sports and politics, “You came in first—you are the best.”

Of course, I can’t fault anyone for thinking their country is the greatest on earth. After all, my countrymen carved the heads of their favorite leaders into the side of a mountain. But Russian national pride has a twist that distinguishes it from the American variety: Russians are convinced of their country’s greatness while at the same time being deeply self-conscious about its deficiencies. Historian Sergei Medvedev writes about these competing senses of superiority and inferiority as contributing to an “infantilism of the Russian consciousness.” Russia makes demands, throws tantrums, nurses grudges, and refuses to follow rules of the adult world. Stir in a tendency to black-and-white thinking, along with spirals of self-delusion and self-loathing, and you have a collective mentality resembling that of a teenager.

Medvedev sees this immature national consciousness as key to understanding Russian support for Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule and his decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. We can also point to these intermingling currents of pride and resentment, supremacy and failure, in Russia’s drive for sports victories. Because Russia is great, wins are expected. Because Russia has to prove its greatness, wins are necessary.

It doesn’t matter how those victories are achieved.