Places: Khabarovsk

Platinum Arena, home of Amur Khabarovsk.

 

The first thing you need to know about the city of Khabarovsk is that it is way, waaaaay, out East.  The city lies more than 8,000 kilometres east of Moscow by road, in fact, in the VLAT time zone (Vladivostok time, or GMT +10) and just a short distance from the Russian border with China.  Until the arrival of local rivals Admiral Vladivostok, a mere 750 kilometres to the south, in 2013, local KHL team HC Amur’s shortest road trip involved a 5,000 kilometre, four time zone, jaunt to Novokuznetsk.  And yet, despite the city’s remoteness from the big centres of the Russian hockey world, Khabarovsk has nonetheless contributed some very interesting pieces to the history of the sport in that country.

Places: Nizhny Novgorod

The Trade Union Sports Palace in Nizhny Novgorod, shortly after its opening in 1965. (Image Source)

Herewith we begin a new series at this blog!  We’ll be taking a look at the history and current state of hockey in various places across the landscape of Russia (and neighbouring countries), more or less chosen at random, and we start off today with a post about the city of Nizhny Novgorod.  These “Places” pieces will be published on an irregular sort of basis, intermingled with other sorts of posts.

Roughly 400 kilometres east of Moscow, roughly halfway between the Russia’s capital and the city of Kazan, we find Nizhny Novgorod.  Founded in the 13th-century to take guard the confluence of the Oka and Volga rivers, Nizhny Novgorod is now the fifth-largest city in Russia, with about 1.25 million inhabitants.   And, while the city’s hockey teams have never been among the giants of the game (at least on the men’s side, as we shall see), Nizhny Novgorod’s hockey history is far from undistinguished.  How so?  Read on!