VVS Moscow

VVS Moscow (Russian: Военно-Воздушные Силы Москов / in English: Moscow Military Air Force) was a Soviet sports club representing the Soviet Air Force. Among the sports the club participated in were football, ice hockey, basketball, and volleyball. They won the Soviet national basketball league championship in 1952, as well as the Soviet national volleyball league championship in 1952, and the Soviet national ice hockey league championship three times, in the years 1951, 1952, and 1953.

Vasily Stalin, the son of Joseph Stalin, was the president of the club. Vsevolod Bobrov played on the football team 1950-52 and the ice hockey team 1949-53. Viktor Tikhonov, the future Soviet national team's coach, played on the ice hockey team, as did Boris Kulagin, future coach of other Moscow-based ice hockey teams. Yevgeny Babich, otherwise a CDKA/CSKA player, played with the VVS hockey team for its three championship seasons.

History

In 1946-47, the VVS hockey team played in the new Soviet Championship with Anatoly Tarasov as player-coach. VVS finished second in group A in the opening phase and fifth overall. Tarasov scored 14 goals, the highest total of the season. Angry with Vasily Stalin in the next season, he quit and joined CDKA, later known as CSKA. At the end of the 1947-48 season, after the team finished seventh out of ten, Vasily Stalin brought the first line of forwards from Spartak Moscow to the team: Zdenek Zigmund, Ivan Novikov, and Yuri Tarasov. They finished second in 1948-49.

On January 7, 1950, as the team was on the way to Chelyabinsk, their airplane crashed in Yekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk), killing all 19 persons on board.

The following members of the team perished in the crash:

• Ivan Novikov – wing
• Zdenek Zigmund
• Yuri Tarasov
• Harijs Mellups – goalkeeper
• Roberts Šūlmanis – forward
• Yuri Zhiburtovich
• Victor Isaev – second goalkeeper
• Alexander Moiseev – forward
• Mikhail Alperin – team's doctor
• Alex Galkin – team's masseur
• Boris Bocharnikov – team's coach

The crash occurred two and a half weeks after the 70th birthday of Joseph Stalin. Stalin's son Vasily Dzhugashvili, an Air Force commander of the Moscow Military District and the patron of the ice hockey team, was afraid of his father's possible reaction and of the crash investigation; he decided to recruit a new Air Force team in less than a day, except for three original players who were not on the crashed plane. Vesvolod Bobrov overslept and took the train instead, and Viktor Shuvalov was injured. In memory of the crash victims, a memorial was erected near the common grave in Koltsovo. VVS finished fourth in the Soviet League that season. Shuvalov led the league with 31 goals, and Bobrov placed second with 29.

The 1950-51 season saw the best players from other teams starting to play on VVS, and the team won the league championship. That year was also the first year of the Soviet Cup, where VVS lost the final 4-3 to Krylya Sovetov, also of Moscow.

In 1951-52, VVS won another championship and the Soviet Cup, beating CDSA (CDKA before, CSKA later) 3-2 in the tiebreaking game for the former and Krylya Sovetov 6-5 in the final for the latter. They won the championship again in 1952-53 despite Bobrov's injury. After Joseph Stalin died, destalinization resulted in the unceremonious dissolution of VVS.