On January 5, 1950, a small plane with the Russian ice hockey
team, VVS Moscow, onboard, had crashed near Sverdlovsk (renamed later to
Yekaterinburg). The crash was the usual story in Russia…… neglect, low skills,
and low quality of air fleet all mixed together to cause another deathly
incident. This time the entire national Soviet hockey team, 44 young men died
in the crash. Vasily Stalin, Stalin’s son, (among the many, many, other no-show jobs he
held) was the team’ manager. As it was, he was already on the out’s with his
father, a very dangerous place to be since his father was a paranoid psychotic
mass murderer. So Vasily Stalin did what anyone else would do in that case. He
didn’t tell his father about the 44 deaths in the sky. Vasily, who had a
fearsome reputation for being more than a little nuts himself, kept the story
out of the newspapers. He had the bodies from the crash buried in a mass grave
near the crash site. Since, sooner or later, he would have to explain what
happened to the team and the team's next game was in two days, Vasily found
players who have the same last names as the dead players. He then secretly
ordered the press to publish news about the team, using only their last names. Remarkably,
the team he slapped together in 24 hours won the next game. They ended the
season in 4th place and won the next three championships. After Joseph Stalin’s
death in 1953, the team was merged with CDKA. A month later Vasily was arrested
and judged as an “enemy of the state and ideology” but was only placed under
house arrest. He died in the early 1960s due to alcoholism.