Tarasov grandson talks Soviet legend’s 'amazing' legacy

Welcome to the NHL Chat Room, NHL.com's weekly Q&A with figures in the game, gaining insight into hockey on and off the ice. This week we feature Alexey Tarasov, grandson of the late Anatoly Tarasov, the latter widely regarded as the architect of Russian hockey.

Alexey Tarasov is fiercely proud of his late grandfather, Anatoly, and with good reason. Renowned as the father, even godfather, of Russian hockey, Anatoly Tarasov has had an influence on the game in his native country and far beyond that remains strong more than three decades after his 1995 death.

Today, Alexey is working to promote and protect the legacy of one of hockey’s great builders as he presides over the developmental Golden Puck youth tournament that his grandfather founded in 1964.

Alexey Tarasov authored a richly illustrated book celebrating Anatoly on the 2018 centennial of the latter’s birth. Three years ago, he updated the Russian-language volume with “105” on the cover.

A brilliant leader with shrewd insight and an insatiable appetite for knowledge, Anatoly Tarasov molded hockey in the Soviet Union from its skate laces to its clunky helmets beginning in the mid-1940s as head of the Central Red Army program, then for a decade from 1963 shaped the national team into the world superpower at the amateur level.

A biographical photo album on Soviet hockey legend Anatoly Tarasov, published for the 2018 centennial of his birth, then revised in 2023. With it here, a puck and magnet for the Golden Puck youth tournament, founded by Tarasov in Moscow in 1964 and today presided over by his grandson, Alexey.

He was his country’s hockey architect with primitive equipment, virtually no resources on which to draw and often to the distaste of North American observers and the players he drove without mercy. Tarasov recalled shrugging off the advice of Montreal Canadiens legend Maurice Richard during a 1957 Soviet Union tour of Canada, The Rocket telling him: “You’ll never get on the same level as Canadian teams unless you hire Canadian coaches.”

To say that Tarasov used unconventional methods would be a massive understatement. He was a master of cross-training, using dry-land calisthenics, soccer training and even ballet lessons to develop stamina and agility in his players, drawing even experimentally on any element that he believed would make better athletes.

He would be cast aside by the Soviet hockey hierarchy in the early 1970s, losing a battle of wills and politics. That saw Vsevolod Bobrov and Boris Kulagin installed behind the bench, respectively, as head coach and assistant coach for the landmark eight-game September 1972 Summit Series tournament between a select Soviet squad, rich with Tarasov’s superbly conditioned Red Army talent, and an NHL all-star team representing Canada.

It took Canada until the final minute of Game 8 in Moscow to defeat its fantastic opponent, winning the series with four victories against three losses and a tie.

Anatoly Tarasov films the Soviet national team during a Nov. 23, 1962, exhibition game at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Tarasov’s touring squad defeated the Metro-British Columbia Junior All-Stars 6-0.

Phil Esposito, Canada’s inspirational leader and his country’s best player throughout, has wondered aloud about the outcome had Tarasov coached the Soviets.

“I truly believe that if Tarasov had been able to coach the team he had trained for all those years, the Russians would have won in 1972,” Esposito said, quoted in Alexey Tarasov’s book.

“I believe that’s true, though we could never know,” Alexey says today. “It was literally Anatoly’s team, it was taken from him and given to Bobrov and Kulagin. My grandfather was so good at the art of mobilizing his team at the important moment. His conditioning, they already had that. But the emotional part -- Tarasov was a great actor, he could inspire people to do the very best that they could.”

The first Soviet/Russian elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame was not on hand for his Class of 1974 induction, Cold War politics of the day barring his attendance when he was welcomed to the Builders category in absentia. Posthumously, in 1997, he was inducted into the IIHF Hall of Fame.

Tarasov’s body of work was magnificent -- teams he directed won 10 gold medals in IIHF World Championship tournaments in the 1960s into the early 1970s as well as Olympic gold medals in 1964, 1968 and 1972.

Alexey Tarasov, grandson of legendary Soviet coach Anatoly Tarasov, with the commemorative brick of iconic Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak, among hundreds in the Montreal Canadiens’ Bell Centre plaza, on Sept. 2, 2026, and the senior Tarasov’s Class of 1974 Hockey Hall of Fame ring.

Tarasov never claimed to be a lone-wolf pioneer in the development of hockey in Russia. He thoroughly studied the work of Lloyd Percival, the Canadian coach, author and fitness guru whose “The Hockey Handbook,” first published in 1951, was embraced by Tarasov as the definitive volume on training for hockey.

Percival’s book covered skating, puck control, goal-scoring, offensive and defensive strategy and tactics, goaltending, practice organization and coaching technique, and training.

In 1969, Tarasov sent Percival a personalized copy of his own 1969 book, “Road to Olympus,” his first of about a dozen titles that he wrote.

“Your wonderful book which introduced us to the mysteries of Canadian hockey, I have read like a schoolboy,” he wrote to his mentor in the inscription.

Tarasov molded many great Soviet players through the years, most famously Vladislav Tretiak. The legendary Red Army goalie devoted an entire 15-page chapter to Tarasov in his 1987 autobiography, with great praise detailing the coach’s almost maniacal training methods that involved three practices a day, with hundreds of lunges and somersaults, the punishment meted out for a single poor goal allowed.

Photos of coach Anatoly Tarasov with his protege, Soviet Red Army goalie Vladislav Tretiak, from the pages of a book produced for the 2018 centennial of Tarasov’s birth.

“There was a method to his madness,” Tretiak wrote. “(Tarasov) didn’t want me to be indifferent to being scored on. He wanted me to feel that each puck in my net was a personal defeat.”

In early September, Alexey Tarasov, 58, was in Montreal, his 19-year-old son, Fyodor, having spent part of the summer training in the city before heading down to Massachusetts, where he plays junior hockey for the Worcester Railers.

He was delighted to pose with the commemorative brick that Tretiak had bought about 15 years ago outside the Canadiens’ Bell Centre arena home, among many hundreds in a plaza celebrating franchise history.

Over coffee a rink length away in Montreal’s historic Windsor Station, where NHL teams used to come and go by rail, Tarasov sat to discuss his grandfather’s life.

How well did you know Anatoly?

“He was always in my life. We lived in the same building in Moscow, our apartments in the same block. We met quite often. He was coaching a kids team where we lived. He was taking that very seriously, as were we. We were 12, 13 … this was after he was expelled from everywhere. He was trying to find something to do, and he did. The Golden Puck tournament … you can’t measure what’s the most important thing that he did, but this was extremely important. I see the impact continues. It’s amazing. I meet so many people who remember him, who still follow his ideas.”

Soviet coach Anatoly Tarasov observes his national team facing the Whitby Dunlop on Nov. 22, 1957, at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. The Dunlop defeated the touring visitors 7-2.

Thirty-one years after Anatoly’s death, what do you see as his legacy?

“That he viewed hockey as both a game and a science. His impact on training, on dry land, all the theory and practice, are very important. It’s impossible to overstate that. One thing I can evaluate is his impact on the whole movement of making children in the (former) Soviet Union fans of hockey, to have a passion for it. You in Canada have had it always. In Russia, it was Anatoly who made it so popular. Not only because of the victories, but because he made the game dramatic, he made it so attractive to people. It became almost like it is in Canada. When the Russian national team played in the 1970s, the streets were empty and everybody followed the games. It’s not like this now but we remember those times. His very valuable role was making hockey popular and creating millions of fans.”

Did your grandfather ever have a sense of how important he was to the game, in Russia and beyond?

“I think he had a sense of his mission. I admired his self-discipline because every day at 5 a.m. he was at his desk, writing and rewriting about hockey. His legacy is so strong because he was putting everything on paper, he was bringing it to the public. He was happy to share his secrets with the ‘enemy.’ Science can’t be a secret; you can’t do it by yourself. You must share and base your work on the work of somebody before you.”

Anatoly Tarasov takes notes while watching the 1971 IIHF World Championship in Switzerland.

Clearly, Lloyd Percival and “The Hockey Handbook” was an influence on him.

“Some people who defend Tarasov in Russia are saying that he invented everything from scratch, but I don’t think so. I find it completely normal that someone who develops something must learn what was done before. It’s like any field of science. He treated hockey like science; he thought a lot about that. That’s why he’s a Builder in the Hockey Hall of Fame, the man who is considered to be the father of Soviet hockey.”

Anatoly had a special relationship with Lou Vairo, the United States junior, World Championship and Olympic hockey coach and the first American coach to travel to the Soviet Union to study with Anatoly. Vairo says in your book, “His knowledge, enthusiasm, courage and steadfastness, and his unique ability to translate dreams into reality have had a profound effect in a most wonderful way on how hockey is played around the world today. We all owe him a great debt of gratitude.”

“My grandfather’s final book was published first in the U.S. in 1994 or 1995. Nobody wanted anything to do with it in Russia, thinking that what an old coach wrote wasn’t interesting. He asked his friend Lou to do something with it, and it might have been published after Anatoly had died. It had success among fans in North America -- it’s difficult now to get a copy. A few years after Anatoly’s death, I found the contract between himself and Lou in a family box. I wrote to him, saying it would be nice to finally publish it in Russia. So, I got the manuscript back from Lou and after some effort we did the book in Russia, 20 years after it was published in the U.S. Scotty Bowman has also been very kind. In the book I published, he says, ‘Anatoly was a giant among hockey coaches worldwide in having Russian hockey become a superpower. I’m honored to have met and to have followed Anatoly on the occasions we got together.’”

Soviet coach Anatoly Tarasov behind his team’s bench during a 1960s game at Maple Leaf Gardens.

Vladislav Tretiak, and other Soviet stars, are effusive in their praise of Anatoly, despite the fact that the coach drove them relentlessly in practice. You were happy today to have found Tretiak’s brick …

“I’m grateful for their praise of my grandfather. I know two sides of Tretiak -- we have a personal relationship, and I know him as a student of Anatoly and a champion who played for him. Of course, he’s a legendary player, even today every child wherever you go in Russia knows him. Even here in Montreal. A couple of years ago I was driving in Montreal with the Golden Puck logo on my car -- a goalie with Russian script around him in a gold circle -- and a homeless man in the street told me, ‘Oh Tretiak … very good!’ I realized then that Montreal is a special place. Here, it’s really amazing, it’s unique.”

In a different political time, Anatoly wasn’t able to attend his historic Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Did that bother him?

“Not much. First of all, he was quite a modest person. It would be strange for him to stand in front of his wife and kids and talk about this. … Maybe it was a political decision, as always, to keep him from attending his ceremony. I am proud to keep his Hall of Fame ring at home.”

Anatoly Tarasov in an undated portrait, featured in a 2018 book produced for the centennial of his birth.

Though he’s probably a mystery, or even unknown, to many North American fans, what should we know about Anatoly Tarasov?

“The most important thing is that even if he was training and working and playing against North Americans in the time of the Cold War, these great rivalries, he never considered the opponent as an enemy. I believe his nationality was hockey, not Russia, not the U.S.S.R. That’s why he’s such an important person in world hockey. It’s not because he built a rink or financed something or created some material thing. It’s because he impacted hockey as a whole on the world stage. During his life and since his death, hockey around the world has studied what he wrote and what he did.”

So there’s a sense, as you speak, that you believe your grandfather’s work is still alive and well.

“Yes, the effects of Anatoly’s life and work continue. I’ve attended a few hockey science events in Canada the past few years where his name and methods were mentioned. I have recently seen articles and books and heard podcasts of detailed analysis in Russia, Canada and the U.S. Meeting so many good hockey people and youth coaches in Russia and North America makes me believe that my grandfather’s mission is not over. Hockey is much more important than just a game played by professional athletes. It’s philosophy. It’s (an) instrument of developments for hundreds of thousands of children around the world, a phenomenon which can unite people and nations, which is vital today.”

Top photo: Alexey Tarasov with a photo of his grandfather, Anatoly, at Montreal’s historic Windsor Station on Sept. 2, 2026, and with his grandfather from a book he produced for the centennial of Anatoly’s birth.