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Exclusive: NBC Sports has acquired and set a premiere date for The Russian Five, a feature documentary about the first five Russians to play hockey together in the NHL. The film will air on November 6, following Nbcsn’s Wednesday Night Hockey game between the Detroit Red Wings and New York Rangers.

The Russian Five tells the story of how Sergei Fedorov, Slava Fetisov, Vladimir Konstatinov, Slava Kozlov and Igor Larionov defected and then helped transform the Red Wings from perennial losers to back-to-back Stanley Cup Champions. Toward the end of the Cold War in the late ’80s, the Red Wings hatched an audacious plan to draft the best Soviet players from behind the Iron Curtain and help them defect to Detroit. The team snuck them out under cover of night and whisking them to the Motor City where they won the fans’ hearts and changed the way hockey is played in North America forever.

Anyone over the age of 40 remembers one of sports’ most famous moments, the “Miracle on Ice” – when the United States Men’s Hockey Team beat the Soviet Union in a breathtaking upset at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY.

Knocking out the Soviets led the U.S. team to the Gold medal round against Finland, where they triumphed and relegated the Soviet Union to second place and the Silver medal.

The Silver medal was definitely not what the Soviet team was expecting, and it marked the end of what had been the Soviet Red Army hockey dynasty – the most successful dynasty in sports history.

Told through the eyes of team captain Slava Fetisov, Red Army is a gripping tale of both sports and politics in the former Soviet Union. For them, hockey was everything. Parents would send their sons (some as young as 5 years old) to the yearly tryouts...

Gabe Polsky’s new film Red Army (check out Matt's review) is an exhilarating documentary about the Cold War on ice and how an incredibly oppressive system produced one of the greatest teams in sports history: the Red Army Hockey Team of the late 70’s and 80’s. The story is told from the perspective of its former captain and star defenseman, Slava Fetisov, who was at the center of an extraordinarily talented group of players – Sergei Marakov, Vladimir Krutov, Igor Larionov and Alexei Kasatonov – known as the Russian Five. Fetisov’s impressive career took him from national hero to political enemy to Russian Minister of Sport under Vladimir Putin. In an exclusive interview, Polsky spoke about using hockey as a window into a larger personal and political story, what inspired him to structure his documentary around the legendary Red Army Hockey Team and one of its greatest players, why Fetisov was an interesting interview subject,...