A RETURN TO TARASOV
On May 8th, the USHL’s Chicago Steel organized a conference call to discuss the legacy of Anatoli Tarasov, the architect of the Soviet hockey program. Alongside the staff of the Steel, participants included Hall-of-Fame coach Scotty Bowman, Tarasov’s grandson and Golden Puck Tournament president Alexey Tarasov, USA Hockey director Lou Vairo, former CSKA goaltender Yuri Karmanov, former Arizona Coyotes captain Shane Doan, Haaga-Helia researcher Vladislav Bespomoshchnov, Russian teacher and translator Willis Harte (currently working on Tarasov’s book, Coming of Age) and Toronto Marlies head coach Greg Moore. I was honored to assist in the organization of this once-in-a-lifetime call, and will share some impressions here.
In the 1956 film Anastasia, Ingrid Bergman plays a refugee caught by a group of con-artists who conspire to pass her off as grand duchess Anastasia Romanov. If they can convince the remaining members of Russia’s ruling class that she is alive, they would be entitled to an enormous financial prize. As Bergman’s acting and history lessons progress, flashes of artless brilliance force all parties involved to wonder if she is, in fact, the lone survivor of the dynasty. Their dilemma boils down to what she has been taught, versus what may have been buried in the fabric of her memory—or to put it more simply: what is old, and what is new?
This may be an unexpected segue, but I had a similar experience of a wrinkle in time when I first watched the USHL’s Chicago Steel play hockey. I clicked on a highlight reel of their best goals and succumbed to an unavoidable case of deja-vu.
The clip begins with a centrifuge of activity around the net. The Chicago Steel are circling their prey—a series of free-flowing, fast-paced passes that feel familiar. Opponents struggle to interrupt a circular rhythm that reminds more of FC Barcelona than the highest level of men’s junior hockey in America. There is a doggedness about this possession, a certain brand of resilience and intelligence with the puck. Another clip, another game, another goal, and the beat goes on.
If I close my eyes, I can almost hear the Soviet announcers calling their names. Firsov, Fetisov, Ragulin…no. None of the young men playing in the clip are old enough to even know who they were. But something, someone inside of their system knows—a hint of a legacy often forgotten, which makes it feel new. Onlookers call it progressive, and perhaps, in its resurrection, they are correct. But if you were to distill the Chicago Steel down to their essence—it is over fifty years old, and remarkable in its familiarity.
“Going back to my childhood during the ’94 Stanley Cup Final, I was eight years old,” recounted Chicago Steel GM Ryan Hardy, who co-organized the Tarasov conference with assistant coach Mathew Deschamps. “At that time, I had such an affinity for Pavel Bure. Kovalev and Zubov were on the other side. I was so attracted to the skill and grace that they possessed. There was something about the way they played.”
It was not until 2007 that Hardy would understand the origins of the Soviet hockey tradition that dazzled him as a child. In a chance meeting with USA Hockey’s Lou Vairo, a close friend of Tarasov, Hardy was handed an English translation of Tarasov’s memoir—a manuscript bequeathed to Vairo and distributed by USA Hockey in the nineties. Hardy began to integrate the central tenets of Tarasov’s teachings into his hockey management ethos, which made him a perfect fit for the Steel, where hints of this style were already wafting down the coaches’ bench.
“The ideas that our player development guys had, many would consider to be progressive,” Hardy noted. “But they’re not, really. They’re tied to possessing the puck. The common thread is the possession piece, which the Russian players did better than anyone.”
The Chicago Steel topped the USHL by a landslide before their 2020 season was cut short. This possession-based, free-flowing style of hockey seemed to have found fresh sticks (and minds) to execute its original purpose. Of course, no one can play a carbon-copy of Anatoli Tarasov’s Soviet hockey in 2020—times, lines and rink sizes have changed, as have skill levels and analytics. But make no mistake: the entire sport plays a different game because Tarasov lived, a man who once derived his training style from Russian dancers he observed through a window. It just so happens that the Chicago Steel have brought this history into new light, and a Zoom Conference on one Friday afternoon in May confirmed it. The participants—ranging from nine-time Stanley Cup winner Scotty Bowman to 1984 U.S. Olympic coach Lou Vairo—proved the enduring significance of the topic.
“I am really amazed because no one is gathering here in Russia to discuss [my grandfather]—but you do,” said Alexey Tarasov at the outset of the call. One could argue that each time hockey is played on either side of the ocean, Tarasov’s influence is present, but the Steel have put a name to the style that they are playing—and brought together generations of hockey talent to honor its provenance.
The following is an attempt to capture nearly five hours of conversation centered around the legacy of Anatoli Tarasov. Participants shared their first encounters with the Soviet coach, discussed his tactics at length, and noted the elements of his legacy still alive in present-day hockey.
Side note: If you are unfamiliar with Tarasov’s basic tenets, I’d suggest starting here—Vladislav Bespomoshchnov’s research paper defines and simplifies his contribution to hockey.
A letter, a launderer and a lion tamer
Lou Vairo’s first encounter with the Soviets occurred on a Sunday night in Brooklyn. The day progressed as every Sunday in his household did: a church visit and family dinner. The latter often involved thirty-plus of Vairo’s Italian immigrant relatives, all of whom congregated at his grandmother’s house.
“I remember in one of the bedrooms, there was black and white Zenith TV with rabbit ears,” Vairo recalled of that particular Sunday afternoon. “I asked if I could go watch sports in there.”
A virtue of good timing, ABC’s Wide World of Sports was broadcasting the finals of the IIHF World Championships. Sweden and the USSR were vying for gold, a matchup that piqued the young hockey fanatic’s interest.
Vairo spent his childhood years playing roller hockey on asphalt, earning just enough cash on his paper route to watch the New York Rangers play at the former Madison Square Garden on 49th Street. After a stint in the military, Vairo returned to New York and began coaching youth hockey.
“I was fascinated,” Vairo remembered of that first vision of the Soviets. “I could compare it to the NHL at that time because I went to a lot of games. I saw wonderful technique and skills. It was very interesting to me.”
At one point, the camera panned to the architect of the Soviet team—the ever-animated head coach, Anatoli Tarasov. Seated at a card table, Vairo took the man’s name down on a piece of paper and shoved it into the pocket of his blazer. Days later, a dry-cleaner would find the forgotten sheet just where he had left it. She asked if Vairo wanted to keep it, but he initially declined.
“But it’s a strange name,” the clerk insisted in Vairo’s account. “I think it’s a name. You might want it.” Suddenly recalling the face behind the Soviet bench, Vairo took the piece of paper and decided to write Tarasov a letter. He asked how he could learn more about the hockey team that captured his imagination, a style of play to which he had never been exposed. Not knowing where the letter could be addressed, Vairo simply wrote, “Coach of the Soviet National Hockey Team. Moscow. USSR.” The postage stamp cost $1.40—a large expense, he recalled, for a youth coach earning $60 per week.
Many months later, Tarasov responded in English. The typeface ranged from green to black to red; it was clear that the transcriber had run out of typewriter ribbons. He thanked Vairo for his profuse compliments, but added, “When you compliment, you steal.” Nonetheless, he extended Vairo an invitation to the Soviet Union—an odyssey the young coach could never hope to afford.
Tarasov would come to Madison Square Garden in the early 1970s for a clash with the U.S. National Team. New York Rangers coach Emile Francis had a son on Vairo’s youth squad, and helped to secure the entire group tickets to the matchup. After the game, Francis escorted Vairo to the locker room to finally face the enigmatic figure he had only seen on TV. Tarasov not only remembered Vairo’s letter from years before, but reiterated his invitation—promising to take care of everything on the ground upon his arrival. Eventually Vairo was able to make the pilgrimage to Moscow, and the pair would develop a decades-long friendship that included a tour of America to train and develop hockey coaches. When Tarasov died, Vairo flew to the Soviet Union for his funeral—he would even be quoted in Tarasov’s New York Times obituary, though unattributed. Not a bad run for a friendship that started with a letter.
Scotty Bowman’s first meeting with Tarasov predates Vairo’s—it was 1956, and Bowman sat at the helm of the self-described “star-studded” Montreal Junior Canadiens. The Soviets came to play an exhibition series, their tattered stockings and poor equipment an inaccurate harbinger of what was to come.
“They were probably in their mid-twenties at the time, and they whipped us so bad,” Bowman shared with a laugh. The following week, the teams faced off again at The Forum, but this time the Junior Canadiens were fortified with talent from Western Canada and Toronto. They still lost, Scotty remembered, “but we got a little more of the puck.”
Whether on the bench of the Canada Cup or presiding over the Montreal Canadiens during the heralded 1975 New Year’s Eve game, Bowman would see more of the Soviets—and Anatoli Tarasov—over the following decades. He would eventually acquire five Russian stars of his own during his stint with the Detroit Red Wings, including a Red Army favorite, Vyacheslav “Slava” Fetisov. Tarasov sent a note to Bowman when Fetisov joined the team—he wished to express confidence that his former defenseman would do “quite well.” Tarasov was right—but he would not live to see fulfillment of the prophesy. Fetisov hoisted the Stanley Cup twice as a member of the Detroit Red Wings in 1997 and 1998. Tarasov passed away in the summer of 1995.
Bowman’s admiration for Tarasov, to whom he often refers as an “innovator," was deeply reciprocated. In fact, it was Lou Vairo who would pass on the Soviet coach’s congratulations when Bowman won one of his numerous Stanley Cups. In his eponymous memoir, Tarasov likened his legendary Canadian counterpart to a lion tamer:
Bowman looked like a military leader during hockey battles. Being on the surface peaceful, at those minutes he was aloof from all earthly things, with every cell in his body belonging to hockey. And what sort of miracles he worked on ice! It even seemed to me that he came to hockey after going through a school training lions and tigers. His hockey players became as meek as lambs obeying every word of his. He generously gave his players his expertise and skillfully trained them demanding in return only one thing—the precise execution of his plans leading to a desired success.
“The Russian Five” were NHL alum Shane Doan’s first real exposure to the legacy that Tarasov had imprinted on the Soviet hockey school and its proteges. “As a Canadian guy that grew up in Western Canada, it was different than anything that I would have ever seen,” the former Arizona Coyotes captain shared. “I think in that [1997] playoff series, Fetisov and Konstantinov each scored on a breakaway. I was blown away by it.”
One could say that proximity breeds contempt, and the North Americans’ views of Tarasov were painted in lush colors due to their relative degrees of removal from his outlandish tactics. But Yuri Karmanov played for Tarasov’s Red Army in the 1970s—a team forged in the heat of those notorious training camps—and glowed with equal admiration.
“My impression of Anatoli Tarasov was very deep; I thought a lot of him when I was a young kid,” Karmanov explained from Moscow, clad in his old Red Army jersey for the call. Details of what transpired in those exacting days on the Black Sea are to follow, but his overarching premise—echoed by both Vairo and Tarasov’s grandson—was one of mutual positivity and respect. “[Tarasov] created such a great atmosphere that players never really felt tired,” he recalled. When you consider what those training camps entailed, the notion is nothing short of a miracle.
The first dance on dry land
Russian hockey is often described in terms more suited to a Tchaikovsky suite or the Boshoi Ballet. There is a grace inherent in its ferocious power, a softness that masks painstaking exactitude. Hands and plays are often described as “silky" or “smooth.” Pavel Datsyuk never skated in the NHL, afterall. He danced.
Much as a ballerina’s grace is the reward for decades of hellish repetition, so were the dazzling performances of the Soviet hockey icons—their elegance earned in the gymnasium of an army barracks for eleven months out of the year, or during three-a-day workouts on the Black Sea.
In this context, perhaps, it comes as no surprise that a former mentee of Anatoli Tarasov described his late leader in a musical metaphor.
“[Tarasov] acted like a composer,” said former goaltender Karmanov, who once endured the grueling dryland training camps that became Tarasov’s trademark. “He made his practice like a performance. He always said, ‘Guys—it’s your preparation for future spectators.’”
The inspiration for Tarasov’s off-ice practices originated from the world of dance—an important slice of heritage for many of the Soviet republics. Russian ballet and character dance became the informants for the rise of Red Army; the strength and agility gained from endless repetition defined the superior conditioning of the Soviet hockey players.
“[Anatoli] said that he was walking down the street in Moscow. It was spring time one year and he heard music and jumping,” described USA Hockey’s Lou Vairo. “He looked in the window and he saw a famous dance troupe practicing…he was fascinated. The leader saw Tarasov looking in, and invited him into the building and he took notes. He noticed that [the dancers’] lower bodies were so strong and so explosive in the types of dances they were doing. He told me that was when he created his first off-ice exercises, drills to strengthen the lower body. It came from that.”
Tarasov’s circus-like training camps became notorious across the Soviet Union. Karmanov was recruited from fellow Moscow-based club Soviet Wings, yet struggled to keep up in his first practices with Red Army. He detailed multiple trainings per day involving weight circuits, sprints and on-ice drills. The team would travel to the Black Sea for twenty days every summer, where they would engage in three-a-day practices including grueling cardio circuits on the sand. When traditional weights were not available, Tarasov substituted rocks and even teammates. “It was demanding, but not humiliating,” Alexey Tarasov explained—a sentiment confirmed by Karmanov, who had endured them.
“The off-ice is a concept that they were doing fifty years ago,” Scotty Bowman recalled in contrast to his early NHL years. He had experienced the impact of this strength training first-hand on Fedorov’s powerful stride, and Fetisov’s impressive longevity. “If you look at any kind of videos of Anatoli Tarasov—what they did off-ice was way ahead of what we ever tried in North America.”
The strength of the Russian players’ lower bodies left an impression on Bowman and Doan decades after Tarasov had left Red Army. While leadership changed, the focus on strength training never left the program. Doan joked that Big Star jeans were created with the Russians in mind.
“Every one of them had huge legs,” Doan said. “They had the legs that couldn’t fit into American jeans.” Karmanov substantiated the claim with evidence from his own playing days, when his teammates used to cut open jeans they bought abroad in order to add more fabric.
Armed with examples from regional folk dance and ballet, Tarasov believed strength and agility were inextricably linked—the former useless without the latter. “He told me that if you were only able to do one exercise, nothing else, do somersaults forward and backward,” Vairo recounted. “You can also use it as a means of punishing players. They benefit from it because every muscle in the body has to be used, and it takes courage to do a somersault.”
While the notion of off-ice training is well-accepted in today’s hockey world, the use of somersaults as punishment may still strike some as bizarre—even comedic. Tarasov often allowed his imagination to take the lead when developing new tactics, and one exercise in particular left call participants in shock.
“He liked to make a soccer and basketball drill with pairs,” Karmanov described. “Some guys were sitting on the shoulders of others and playing basketball, while the ‘first floor’ guys [the carriers] were playing soccer. It was five-on-five. It got pretty tough, you know, after one minute of carrying Alexander Ragulin on your shoulders.”
Despite the unconventionality of some of these techniques, Karmanov did not recall a high frequency of injuries during his time with Red Army. In what we would classify as interval or HIIT training today, Tarasov focused on short bursts of exertion and rest, versus long runs and marathon on-ice practices.
“In those days, I never heard the word ‘meniscus,’ or knee injury,” Karmanov said. “The first time I heard this word, I was forty years old and working [as a coach]. We had Canadian guys who were strong in their upper body, but the legs were so weak. All these guys had problems with their knees.”
Side note: A Bolshoi-trained ballerina who works with NHL players shared her views on the incorporation of ballet into a training regiment (read it here). She called ballet the Soviet Olympic Program’s secret weapon for injury prevention.
In 1979 at the height of Cold War tensions, Lou Vairo organized a four-week North American tour for Tarasov, his colleague Arkady Chernyshev and Czechoslovakian coach Ladislav Horsky. The trio traveled to eighteen U.S. cities and led dryland training seminars during the summer. "We’ve got to show Americans what dryland training is like and how valuable it can be,” Vairo told Tarasov. “We didn’t have the money to buy ice time and do all the things we wished to do, so we could use off-ice training as a means of getting better, quicker.”
USA Hockey initially feared that the Soviet camp would not appeal to the domestic hockey community, but Tarasov won over the hearts and minds of players and coaches across America, often shouting in Russian—or at last resort, German—yet somehow conveying his point across the language barrier. The governing body expected to lose $1,000 on the trip, but ended up turning a profit of $30,000 in their coaching clinics.
“Tarasov changed hockey in my life, and he changed it in USA Hockey’s life,” Vairo recounted. “We’re a better hockey country today because of his expertise and his willingness to share. And I tell that to anybody who listens.”
A matter of possession
If Tarasov’s dryland trainings were a dance, then his on-ice drills were a symphony. Dizzying passes might remind of a complex orchestration—chaos, perhaps, to a goaltender’s eyes, but harmonic when observed from above. He labeled his practices “the flow method,” and the premise was quite simple. Never stop moving.
“I was able to sit and watch the Russians practice after us,” Bowman recalled of the 1975 New Year’s Eve matchup between the Montreal Canadiens and Red Army. “I was always amazed about Russian hockey, how their practices were so much different than ours. Back in the 1970s, we were standing around a lot. We had some good drills but not even close to their drills.”
Side note: While Tarasov did not coach that ’75 squad, he did travel to Canada and requested a meeting with Bowman. For more on Tarasov’s advice to Bowman with regard to Guy LaFleur, check out our conversation from earlier this year.
Bowman described three or four goalies stationed in each corner, with non-stop repetition of two-against-one and two-against-two scenarios. “I could never understand how they could do it without confusion, but they did.”
Precise, elegant and clever passes were the pillars of a strategy that centered upon possession. Tarasov was particularly fond of the no-look pass, a unique skill he trained ad-nauseam.
“We teach our defensemen to strip the puck carrier using their mind,” Tarasov once explained to Vairo. “Don’t take more than one step after you get the puck and make a camouflage pass to a teammate on the move, preferably up the ice.” Vairo classified the notion as thirty or forty years ahead of its time. In his stunning essay for The Players’ Tribune, Igor Larionov described this Soviet sixth-sense best: “You didn’t have to see your linemate. You could smell him. Honestly, we probably could have played blind.”
When Slava Fetisov joined the Red Wings in 1995, he helped to crystallize Tarasov’s thoughts around passing and possession for Bowman.
“[Tarasov]’s theory was that if you had a team that passed the puck, not quite twice as much as the other team, but a lot more than the other team, you were getting closer to a scoring chance,” Bowman explained. “So [Slava] said that 75% of his drills, no matter what he did—and they did them at a high pace—were concentrated on passing. The defense passing would be longer naturally, wider. He didn't mind long passes in his own half of the of the ice, but then he wanted to make shorter passes.”
This interest in possession did not translate to an overabundance of shots. In fact, Tarasov was keen on limiting unnecessary shots, which he classified as a loss of possession. “When I looked at some of the tapes of the games that we played, I mean, we could triple their shots on goal,” Bowman said. “Even the famous [New Year’s] game that they tied three to three, they only shot the puck about 13 or 14 times. His philosophy was if they had the puck, they were not in any danger.”
Bowman attributed this hesitance to shoot as a source of strife between Igor Larionov and the Florida Panthers, where he spent less than a season after leaving the Red Wings in 2000. The disagreement ultimately brought “The Professor” back to Detroit in time for a third Stanley Cup run.
While Bowman feels that the game has changed in a way that may render some elements of the Russian style less effective, the focus on sharp passing has merits beyond the golden years of Soviet hockey. “Slava often told me that the puck could move faster than any player,” he explained to the other coaches on the call. “That was the strategy he learned from Anatoli—and it’s still a pretty good theory.”
The Red Army wives’ society
It is no secret that life as a Soviet hockey player lacked the glamour of today’s NHL experience. While the hardware earned at Olympic and World Championships may have glittered on television, it hardly represented a gold rush for the players at home. Situated in army barracks and training eleven months out of the year, Soviet players rarely saw their families. Their connection to the outside world was a brief chat on a communal telephone; the occasional ability to go home after a game was a celebrated luxury. Despite these harsh circumstances, many former Soviet players have expressed great warmth in their experience of Tarasov as a mentor. Soviet goaltending legend Vladislav Tretiak penned the foreword for Tarasov’s autobiography, a glowing depiction of profound reverence.
“Some people are irreplaceable—Pelé, Michael Jordan, Gordie Howe. God gave them an incredible talent and they were able to realize their potential. Anatoli Tarasov is one of them,” Tretiak wrote. Aside from assigning Tarasov to the pantheon of sporting gods, Tretiak also noted his “abundant energy” and “great heart”—two descriptions echoed frequently throughout the five-hour conversation.
“He always tried to see the personality in everyone,” Alexey Tarasov described of his grandfather. “To find a way to take out of everyone what he was capable of. He paid much attention to psychology, which in that time, was not popular in sports.”
When asked about his own approach to coaching stars such as Guy LaFleur and Sergei Fedorov over the years, Bowman’s ethos felt rather similar. His approach was personalized and meant to maximize the individual, but most importantly, it was a two-way conversation. “You can really learn a lot from your players,” Bowman said.
Heralded Soviet winger Valeri Kharlamov was killed in a car accident in 1981, but he suffered severe injuries in an earlier crash that occurred during his playing career. Upon his return to Red Army, Kharlamov expressed frustration at his inability to “skate through” his opponents to Tarasov. In an attempt to help his star revive confidence, Tarasov devised a plan to send Kharlamov down to the CSKA juniors—a novel concept at that time.
“He picked one or two players, or three or four, and just played with them for one or two hours,” sports science researcher Vlad Bespomoshchnov explained. “Tarasov put Kharlamov in a bit easier context to facilitate his skill. He said that this was an experiment, and he was doing a random thing that popped into his head…but there is an emerging, huge amount of scientific literature that proves this method was actually one of the best things that Tarasov could have done for Kharlamov.”
If you can learn a lot from your players, then perhaps it goes without saying that you can learn even more from their wives—a wily tactic Tarasov used to his advantage. Karmanov recalled the creation of a “women’s society,” a meeting of Red Army wives and girlfriends that convened weekly with the head coach himself.
“He was so interested in everything—how do the players behave at home? Do they drink?” Karmanov described. “It was a very kind atmosphere and it was easy for the girls to open up to him. And some of them told him the truth—‘My husband came home drunk tonight, and I fought with him!”
So much of Tarasov’s success, and his players’ buy-in to a demanding system, boiled down to an ability to consistently innovate. Mental fatigue can notoriously give way to physical fatigue, therefore Tarasov was militant in the development of new drills and tricks. His sources of inspiration were diverse—from gardening to the Russian ballet—but his motivation was singular: to stoke the coals of passion within his players, and to engage their minds as much as their bodies.
“As a coach, take risks,” Tarasov once told Lou Vairo. “Don't be afraid. Take risks and definitely give permission to your players to take risks. Otherwise, they’ll never become great.”
It is a position Scotty Bowman has taken often in his career—exemplified in his willingness to take on the Russian Five, and to allow them to play a system that he himself had not devised. “You have to have a mentor, and you have to have beliefs,” Bowman counseled the coaches on the call. “But you have to be an innovator too.”
The melody lingers on
Alexey Tarasov noted at the outset of the call that he was dialing in from his grandfather’s country home, or dacha, in the outskirts of Moscow. It is a setting that Lou Vairo knows well, although it is remarkable he remembers anything at all—he recalled getting drunk with Anatoli and falling asleep under the trees, only to be awakened when Alexey’s grandmother sprinkled water on their faces. The lush green behind Alexey’s shoulders faded as the hours rolled on, but not before he could point out the flowers his grandfather had planted, still in bloom decades later. It is an easy metaphor for Tarasov’s hockey principles, which perennially resurrect themselves in the DNA of the modern game. They are perpetuated in ways we might find hard to disentangle at times, making conversations like this one fundamental to their preservation.
“The mentality of never being satisfied…is a Tarasov thing,” Ryan Hardy told me after the call. “When you start with nothing and create it, you have to find new frontiers on your own. No one else is going to do it for you. That kind of pioneer spirit, the Chicago Steel tried to take.”
In Gabe Polsky’s documentary Red Army, there is footage of Slava Fetisov training in Tarasov’s now infamous garden. The decorated defenseman was shunned from the Soviet hockey program when he stood firm in a desire to play in North America, no financial strings to the regime attached. Tarasov, a fellow outcast from the Russian hockey sphere at that time, welcomed his former protege with open arms. He found new ways to train Fetisov on dry land when no ice rink would permit his entrance; once again, Tarasov played the role of a composer.
Over the decades, musicians have rearranged the Russian folk classic Ochi Chernye (Dark Eyes) in a thousand different styles and genres. Liberace added a hint of jazz; Stan Getz gave it a bossanova spin. No matter how you transmute its performance to suit today’s tastes, the original melody lingers—whether or not you know its name.
There is something wonderful to me about this push-pull between history and innovation. At times it is valuable to riff on others’ ballads, to add a modern spin to an old classic. But if there is anything to be admired in Tarasov’s legacy, I believe, it was the audacity he possessed to compose a melody of his own.
Alexey Tarasov and Yuri Karmanov kindly provided the photographs used in this article.
