Opinion | Cold War spy tactics, police harassment and partying like a ‘Grey Cupski’ — How fans in Moscow did their part to urge Canada to victory

It was 50 years ago this week that the 1972 Summit Series shifted from Canada to the Soviet Union for the concluding four games of a now-legendary eight-game odyssey. And in this newspaper, and others around the country, the hockey questions were pressing.

Team Canada, loudly booed in a Game 4 loss in Vancouver, was reeling. But for at least one Canadian, the series-wise concerns went well beyond the not-so-small matter of how exactly downtrodden wearers of the Maple Leaf would turn the tables on the formidable Soviets, who now led the series with two wins, one loss and a tie.

For Gary Smith, a Toronto-raised Canadian diplomat in Moscow, there were other frightening matters to consider beyond how many games the so-far-superior Russians might yet win: Among them, how many of the 3,000 Canadian hockey fans about to make a trip behind the Iron Curtain would be arrested by the no-nonsense Soviet authorities.

“We figured the number would be 35,” said Smith in a recent interview. “And that was providing everything went well.”

If the Russians had never seen a crowd of foreign sports fans so immense, certainly the few of the foreigners had never been on a journey so rare. Though no Russian fans accompanied the Soviet team on its trip to Canada for Games 1 through 4, tour packages were offered to Canadians at the reasonable price of approximately $700 – about $4,800 today, adjusted for inflation. That all-in sum that covered return airfare, tickets to all four games, accommodations, meals and, on the nights there was no hockey, outings to the ballet and the circus. Not included in the price was a supply of Russia’s famous vodka, which was readily available for about 90 cents a bottle. For Canadians carrying coveted Western currency, the booze might as well have been free.

“We started to hear from travel agents that these (Moscow-bound Canadian fans) were all jacked up and intending to party — that this was going to be a Grey Cupski,” said Smith, then a 28-year-old Russian-speaking public servant at Canada’s embassy in Moscow.

The problem, Smith said, was that a Russian version of a traditional Grey Cup celebration posed a potential for peril. It wasn’t only cheap alcohol that was a concern. The Intourist Hotel, where most of the road-tripping Canadians were to stay, was home to a bar that was the base of operations for prostitutes and black-market hustlers with ties to the KGB, the Soviet spy agency. Smith referred to it as “the viper’s nest,” because it was standard procedure for the presiding KGB agents to entrap foreigners in compromising situations.

With that in mind, the “Canadian Pilgrims,” as they were called by Canada’s external affairs department, were given a list of travel tips that Smith, in his excellent book “Ice War Diplomat,” referred to as a sort of “Ten Commandments.”

“There were a lot of passages beginning with ‘thou shalt not,’” Smith wrote. “No selling of clothing (read: blue jeans) or other personal items. No bringing in or taking out of letters or packages for others. No distribution of religious objects or publications. No distribution of unauthorized foreign literature … No taking of photographs from air-craft, and a long list of other photographic prohibitions.”

Tourists will be tourists, of course. Hugh Graham, a then-28-year-old postmaster from St. Andrews, N.B. who was among the Canadians in Moscow for the series, remembers taking a photograph of a police officer who immediately protested.

“The cop saw me and he came rushing over, ‘Nyet! Nyet!” Graham remembered in a recent interview. “He grabbed me. He wanted my camera. So he took it. And he put my arm up behind my back.”

Luckily Graham had followed one of the other commandments of Iron Curtain tourism: Thou shalt not walk alone. He was with a group of countrymen, among them Jim Herder, a then 25-year-old newspaper ad salesman from St. John’s, Nfld.

“They started to hustle (Graham) off,” Herder recalled recently. “So about 15 of us guys said, ‘You’re not taking him anywhere.’ And we sort of surrounded (the police), and they let (Graham) go.”

Smith said that, thanks in part to the relatively cordial Canada-Soviet relations of the day — in 1971 Pierre Trudeau became the first Canadian prime minister to visit communist Russia as part of an engagement policy to help reduce the risk of military confrontation with a nuclear threat — Canada’s ambassador in Moscow, Robert Ford, had successfully lobbied the Soviet hierarchy to allow the travelling hockey fans freedoms beyond the norm.

“If it wasn’t a hockey series and people had come over and done some of the things they did — the yelling and screaming and drinking in the streets — they would have been picked up,” Smith said.

Not that the Russians let down their guard. Just as Canada’s players have told tales of being surveilled by Russian intelligence and harassed with middle-of-the-night phone calls, Canada’s fans have their stories.

Herder said his roommate for the series became quickly convinced that his belongings were being searched every time the pair left the room. To convince themselves they weren’t merely paranoid, the Canadians tried an old James Bond-style spy trick of their own, leaving a strand of hair across the dresser drawers. Every time they returned, Herder remembered, the hair had been disturbed.

“That was kind of a disquieting scenario,” Herder said. “It was intimidating to have someone going through your things.”

And though the initial estimate of Canadian arrests proved overblown, there was at least one pilgrim picked up by police. Pierre Plouffe, a water-skiing champion who became known at the Moscow games for waving a flag and tooting a bugle, did not escape the viper’s nest at the Intourist Hotel. The story goes that he was arrested after he was accused of busting up some glassware before an ill-advised run-in with an undercover policeman in the wee hours of a long night. The Russians promptly circulated a story that, once in custody, Plouffe’s head had been shaved bald and his heels had been tattooed, a ploy to convince the rest of the Canadian contingent to stay on the straight and narrow.

Maybe it worked. Though Plouffe faced charges for resisting arrest and “hooliganism” — crimes attached to a sentence of one to five years, including hard labour in Siberia — no other Canadian fans found themselves on the wrong side of the law.

They came to cheer on their countrymen. And cheer they did. Canada’s players, to this day, credit the road-tripping compatriots for fuelling their now-legendary comeback with relentless encouragement..

“What I enjoyed most about these games in Moscow was the Canadian fans,” Ken Dryden, the Team Canada goaltender, wrote in his new book, “The Series.”

“Most of these fans didn’t have a lot of money. Many of them were from small towns. And these fans weren’t there to check off one more item from their bucket lists, to be able to tell everyone they would ever meet in their lives that they had been there. They didn’t make this moment about them. Instead, it had something to do with a feeling they had for their country and a feeling they had for hockey, and some mix of the two that they didn’t quite understand. They just knew they needed to be there.”

Henderson, the Canadian hero who scored the winning goals in Games 6, 7 and 8, has never failed to give credit to the three-thousand-strong cheering section that drowned out the 10,000 Russians in attendance for every contest. Speaking at a recent Toronto event attended by a handful of Canadians who’d been among that Moscow crowd, Henderson said one of his most vivid memories of the series was hearing the travelling contingent sing “O Canada” in throaty unison.

“Honest to God, the hair on my arms stood up hearing that,” Henderson told his audience. “We just couldn’t let you people down. And I’ll tell you what: When you’re down, you just need something like that. It just lifted all of us up. Thank God you were there then. And thank God you’re still around to celebrate now.”

And thank heavens, Smith might add, that the Moscow leg of the Summit Series ended with just one Canadian fan in jail. Plouffe, who’d been allowed to watch Game 7 on TV in prison and Game 8 at the arena under police escort, did not end up in Siberia, as threatened. Not long after Henderson scored his epochal goal, he was released from custody and boarded a flight home.

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