Could Russian President Vladimir Putin decide to ban Russian players like Matvei Michkov from playing in the NHL?
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All to stop the NHL’s “talent looting.” That’s how we talk about it in Russia and that’s why the KHL was formed in the early 2000s. And all this while the Russian President does not miss many opportunities to win back those who support Ukraine, such as Canada and the United States.
“Could Putin make it? Yes, absolutely, it’s within his ability,” explains Jean Lévesque, professor of history at UQAM, specializing in international sport and Russian politics.
He reminded that the division between politics and sport in Russia is not the same as elsewhere.
“He could impose some kind of embargo that would go towards the owners of the teams who want to keep the talent.”
I asked the professor if he accepted Michkov with all these stakes.
“Can the Canadiens handle it all? This is a question that remains diplomatic because we support Ukraine, which is at war with Russia, so we are indirectly at war with Russia,” he explains.
“If there was no war, I would take it immediately because everything would be negotiated. But it’s a big obstacle there,” he adds, noting that it would be much harder for a Russian player to flee the country than it was during the Soviet Union.
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Your life is at stake
This time is not that far away. She recalls that not so long ago it was dangerous to play in the NHL as a Russian player. The lives of these athletes were at stake.
Outstanding defenseman Oleg Tverdovky was asked for a $200,000 ransom in 1996 while he was playing for the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. His former coach in the Soviet Union had kidnapped his mother. This coach believed he was entitled to that amount since Tverdovsky pocketed $4.2 million to play in the NHL.
Alexander Mogilny was the first to flee Russia in 1989. With Pavel Bure and Sergei Fedorov on his junior team, he was one of the greatest treasures in Soviet hockey history. He just ran away from Sweden after a junior ice hockey world championship.
Photo archive, QMI Agency
Alexander Mogilny
But there’s a reason Alexander the Great, as he was known, shied away from the cameras and spotlight in North America. In 1994, Sergei Fomichev, a Russian who helped the hockey player save himself, tried to extort nearly $200,000 from him.
The FBI had intervened and facilitated Fomichev’s arrest and deportation.
In 1999, the PBS investigative program “Frontline” unearthed a series of stories of Russian criminal businessmen extorting and threatening the country’s NHL players such as Vyacheslav Fetisov, Pavel Bure and Alexei Zhitnik.
Photo archive, QMI Agency
Pavel Bure
In 1993, it was my colleague Réjean Tremblay, then at La Presse, who was one of the first to uncover cases of extortion of Russian NHL players by the Russian mafia, particularly in relation to Fetisov.
According to Frontline investigative journalists, former Nordic Valeri Kamensky played a key role in the arrival of one of Russia’s most powerful gangsters, Vyacheslav Sliva, in Canada in 1994. Kamensky allegedly asked the Nordics to prepare a visa for Sliva, citing that he was a friend of the players. Kamensky then denied this.
A few years later, Sliva was arrested and deported to Europe. Hidden microphones at his home showed “that he controlled all his operations around the world from his Toronto base,” international media RFE/RL revealed in 1997.
The Panarin case
Recently, another Russian player was involved in a mysterious story. In February 2021, Rangers star Artemi Panarin was accused by his former manager of hitting an 18-year-old girl in a hotel bar in Latvia ten years earlier.
The coach said he escaped justice after handing out bribes.
And his ex-coach, who was at stake, was nobody. It’s Andrei Nazarov, a badass player who played 571 NHL games and coached in the KHL for almost 15 years, including last year in Sochi. Nazarov is flamboyant and can go haywire behind the bench. He’s the KHL coach who once hit the fans sitting behind him with a hockey stick a few years ago.
The Panarin story drew attention first by the seriousness of the actions taken, then quickly by the inconsistency of the allegations. No witness could remember the incident.
Archive photo, Getty Images via AFP
Artemi Panarin
However, what everyone remembered was that a month earlier Panarin had posted on social media his support for Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s main opponent.
It was also recalled that pro-Putin Nazarov often spoke out against Russian players who criticize their homeland. He had demanded the resignation of Alexei Kovalev as KHL coach because he had also supported Navalny.
When he accused Panarin, Nazarov was unemployed. The following year he was reinstated as a coach in the KHL. Was that an order or a political request in exchange for a new position?
It’s impossible to know. And that’s the problem with Russian hockey, even decades after the Soviet regime. There are too many things that cannot be known. And these are certainly not sporting or legal elements. It’s much more serious and worrying.