A week after the plane crash near Yaroslavl undimmed sorrow gives way to somber anxiety. A funeral feast to commemorate the Lokomotiv ice hockey players who died in the accident was served honestly and wholeheartedly. But now we’d like to know what happens next. What conclusions will be drawn and what will be undertaken – both to ensure the safety of air service and in the narrow sphere of professional ice hockey? For however trivial this may sound, otherwise 43 young guys perished in vain…
Following the modern approach to news makes one look for some positive signs even in the most sullen disasters… The most amazing thing is that even in the Yaroslavl tragedy such a positive aspect does exist.
People of Russia have not lost their ability for compassion and they can feel with the grief of even rather remote people whom they never knew personally. Moreover our society is now more open to the feeling of sorrow against all the odds.
Comparing the consequences of what happened near Yaroslavl to the most dreadful tragedy of Soviet hockey in the middle of last century, when all players of the Air Force team died (the common-man icon Vsevolod Bobrov was the only survivor as he was late for the plane because of a drinking bout with Stalin’s son Vasily), it is obvious that we’ve reacted to the death of hockey players much more effusively than did our grandfathers.
When Valery Kharlamov died in a car accident, I was standing under a warm rain on Leningradsky Avenue in Moscow among many thousands of other mournful and quiet people who lined up for a civil burial service to part with the forward of CSKA and national Soviet team under the 17th number. Meanwhile the national team which was about to fly to their next tournament without Kharlamov did not even think of interrupting their overseas tour…
It comes out that we’ve become more humane, more sensitive to the human woe, more sincere in our outpourings at all levels. Common Lokomotiv fans were weeping on the funeral day while officials at all levels did not try to check their profuse emotions.
A logical question: could it be otherwise? Of course it could! Let’s try to reason like cynics.
The loss of 30 citizens is of negligible importance for a 150-million nation. A lot more daily perish on Russian roads as they lawfully exploit potentially lethal transportation vehicles. Top public servants of our Fatherland never come to the sites of daily tragedies, where rundown intercity buses along with brand new Gazelle vans become mass graves for dozens of common folks, rather than elite athletes. According to statistic reports, every year 20,000 people die on Russian roads (five years ago this figure stood at 30,000!). Statistically, the downfall of Lokomotiv is not so important in comparison with the wreck of the Bulgaria tourist ship on the Volga.
Let’s continue our barefaced analysis and turn to the sport aspect of the tragedy with our senses switched off, as though the tragedy did not happen near Yaroslavl, but rather in some Pittsburg to the local Penguins, for instance.
The hockey club Lokomotiv Yaroslavl is a unique phenomenon, for it was the only team in the European part of Russia in the early 2000’s capable to compete with the Ural metallurgical clubs, such as Metallurg Magnitogorsk, or with AK Bars and Salavat Yulaev – the ethnic sport brands of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, respectively, which soothed the ambitions of former presidents of those republics. In those years Lokomotiv was the only team that assumed the burden of responsibility for metropolitan hockey.
It’s hard to say what would be the showing of Lokomotiv in this season which was to open with the match in Minsk where the team was departing. According to the iniquitous irony of fate, many journalists thought during the first minutes after the crash that the most experienced defender Ruslan Saley, a Byelorussian legionary of Lokomotiv, survived the disaster like the legendary Bobrov back in Soviet times. But alas, Ruslan lay to rest with his last team.
On the funeral day Lokomotiv’s directors made the only correct decision – they exempted the team that was no more from the Gagarin Cup competition and took a forced break to build a new team. Head coach Pyotr Vorobyov had once created Lokomotiv from scratch in the 1990’s. He will soon have to repeat his exploit, but now on the tragic occasion…
It’s hard to say what conclusions will be drawn after negative emotions subside. Will culprits be found, or will the blame be laid on the deceased pilots? Obviously the Lokomotiv disaster is not the last one in Russia, however strongly we may long for the opposite. It’s a pity that the hockey players who died in the very beginning of the season won’t be the last victims…
But sometimes it is rather difficult to derive positive things from our everyday life, contrary to the rooted tradition…
Andrei Morozov
