Vsevolod Bobrov

Did You Know?

• Bobrov finished third behind Lev Yashin and Alexander Karelin in a vote for the greatest Russian athlete of the 20th century.
• He was posthumously inducted into the inaugural class of the IIHF Hall of Fame in 1997.
• The Kontinental Hockey League has one of its four divisions named after Bobrov.

Early life

Bobrov was born in Morshansk on 1 December 1922. Around 1925 his family moved to Sestroretsk near Leningrad. He began skating at age five and played bandy from a young age. He left school at 13 to work in a factory, though other sources indicate he completed a seven-year classical education and a professional technical school, earning a certificate as an instrument assembly specialist. After the start of Operation Barbarossa, the factory where he worked was evacuated to Omsk, where he graduated from the Red Army Quartermaster School in 1943.

Playing career

After World War II, Vsevolod Bobrov served in the Soviet Army and then got a football invitation from CSKA Moscow in 1945. That same year, he toured the United Kingdom with Dynamo Moscow, netting six of the club’s 19 goals and encountering artificial ice for the first time. His football career, which ran through 1953 with CSKA, VVS, and Spartak, brought him three Soviet Championship titles and 97 goals from 116 matches. He topped the Soviet scoring charts in 1945 with 24 goals and again in 1947 with 14. Persistent knee troubles required surgeries in 1947, 1950, 1952, and 1953, but the problem never fully healed. Bobrov earned three caps for the Soviet national team at the 1952 Olympics, scoring five times—including a hat trick against Yugoslavia—though the Soviets lost that game and left without a medal. The government disbanded his CDKA side after that defeat, and he moved to Spartak Moscow for his final football season. Bobrov started ice hockey with CSKA in 1946, but a football-related knee injury kept him out for the first season. He played hockey until 1957, spending 1950 to 1953 with VVS. In his debut season, 1947–48, he put up 52 goals in 18 games. In 1950, a plane crash wiped out nearly the entire VVS Moscow squad; Bobrov survived because he overslept and took the train instead. His teams won the Soviet League seven times, and he scored 254 goals in 130 games. He is one of only three players—alongside linemates Alexei Guryshev and Viktor Shuvalov—to average more than a goal per game in the Soviet Championship. Bobrov was praised for his timing and vision. Anatoli Tarasov said he “controlled the rubber” and compared his slow-motion style to Wayne Gretzky, noting it gave him extra time to think. He rarely played defense and would linger at center ice for 10 to 20 seconds at a stretch.