Russia’s national sport is bandy, known in Russian as khokkey s myachom (“hockey with a ball”) or simply “Russian hockey”. No federal law makes it official. Its claim rests on history and results: the Soviet Union and Russia together have won 26 men’s Bandy World Championships, and more than a million people in Russia are estimated to play the game. Bandy is played eleven-a-side with curved sticks and a small ball, on an ice field about the size of a football pitch. Football and ice hockey draw bigger crowds and television audiences today, but bandy is the winter game Russians played first. The story below follows it in order, from the frozen Neva to the Super League.
The Neva in the Early 1700s: Stick-and-Ball Games Before the Rules
Where bandy began is disputed. England, the Netherlands, Sweden and Wales all had similar stick-and-ball pastimes, and medieval Iceland had one too. Russians, though, have long seen the game as their own, which is why it carries the nickname “Russian hockey”. A similar game became popular with the Russian nobility in the early 1700s, and the court of Peter the Great is said to have played an early form of it on the frozen Neva River in Saint Petersburg. The first players wore ordinary footwear and used sticks cut from juniper wood. Skates came later.
The game spread across the Russian Empire only in the second half of the 19th century. Meanwhile, the first written set of rules was drawn up in England in 1882 by Charles Goodman Tebbutt of the Bury Fen Bandy Club. Russia’s first national body for bandy, the forerunner of today’s Russian Bandy Federation, was founded in 1898. England had set up its National Bandy Association in 1891 and the Netherlands also formed a federation in the 1890s, while Finland, then part of the Russian Empire, followed in the next decade. In 1907 teams from Sweden, Finland and Russia met at games in Helsinki.
Russian bandy grew up with its own habits. Players used longer skate blades than other countries, which made them faster in a straight line but slower to turn. Russian rinks had a low wooden border along the sidelines, and that border later became part of the international game. Russia even has its own ball. Bandy balls have a cork core covered in rubber and may be 62.4 mm or 63.8 mm across, and the larger size is still known as the “Russian ball”. Early balls were red; today orange and cerise are also allowed.
1917 to 1954: Russian Hockey Behind Closed Borders
After the 1917 revolution, bandy stayed a mass sport in the Soviet Union and was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s, but the country almost never played abroad. One exception came in 1928, when the first Winter Spartakiad, a workers’ sports festival backed by Moscow, was held in Oslo with bandy teams from Norway, the Soviet Union and Sweden. At home, the Soviet Cup, ancestor of today’s Russian Cup, was first played in 1937.
Talks about friendly matches with Sweden in the late 1940s came to nothing. When bandy was a demonstration sport at the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, Finland, Norway and Sweden took part and the Soviet Union did not. Soviet officials had a change of heart after watching that tournament. In 1954 they invited the three Nordic countries to Moscow for a four-nation tournament. It was the first time a Soviet national bandy team had faced other national sides, and the first time all four countries played under one shared set of rules.
Ice hockey also arrived in this period, and it would later overtake bandy. Officials got the idea after FC Dynamo Moscow’s football tour of Britain in 1945, when Soviet players went to watch Canadian-style hockey in London. The Soviet ice hockey league was founded in 1946.
Helsinki Olympic Stadium, 1957: the First World Championship
The Federation of International Bandy (FIB) was founded in 1955 by the four countries that had played in Moscow, with the Soviet Union as a founding member. The common rules were mostly English, with one Russian contribution: the low sideline border that until then only Russia had used.
The first Bandy World Championship was held in Finland from 28 February to 3 March 1957, as part of the 50th anniversary of the Finnish ball games association. Finnish President Urho Kekkonen opened it, and all three matches were played at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium. Norway stayed away in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary the previous November, so only the Soviet Union, Finland and Sweden took part. The Soviet Union won the title, and so began a long period of dominance.
Eleven Titles in a Row and the Krasnoyarsk–Khabarovsk Rivalry
The Soviet team won the first eleven World Championships, from 1957 to 1979. The tournament was held every two years from 1961. Sweden ended the streak in 1981 and won again in 1983. The Soviet Union then won in 1985, 1989 and 1991, losing only in 1987, for 14 titles in all. In the years without a world championship, the Soviet newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya organised the Rossiya Tournament, played from 1972 to 1990 and nicknamed “the small world championship”. The Soviet team won it eight times in ten appearances.
At club level the game moved east, to Siberia and the Far East. Yenisey of Krasnoyarsk won the Soviet championship every year from 1980 to 1989 and again in 1991. It added five post-Soviet titles, the last in 2021, for 16 in total. The club also won the Bandy World Cup for club sides in 1982, 1984, 2011 and 2015, and the European Cup seven times. One of its regular opponents was SKA of Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, whose open-air ground drew crowds like the one above. The club, now SKA-Neftyanik, became Super League champion for the first time in 2017 and has won five titles since.
1992 to 2019: Russia Takes Over the Soviet Record
After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, a Commonwealth of Independent States team appeared once, at the 1992 Russian Government Cup. Russia joined the FIB in June 1992 and played its first world championship in 1993. Sweden won that year and again in 1995 and 1997, but Russia then won twelve titles: 1999, 2001, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. Finland’s win in 2004 is the only championship ever taken by a country other than Sweden, the Soviet Union or Russia. Russian women won their first world title in 2014, the first time Sweden had failed to win the women’s event.
New indoor venues helped. Arena Yerofey in Khabarovsk, named after the explorer Yerofey Khabarov, opened in 2013. It covers 46,000 m², seats 10,000, hosted the 2015 World Championship, where Russia beat Sweden in the final, and hosted the top division again in 2018. Krasnoyarsk opened a new indoor arena for Yenisey in December 2018, and bandy made its debut at the Winter Universiade there in 2019. After the 2016 title, won in Ulyanovsk, President Vladimir Putin received the team in the Kremlin, the first time a head of state had met players to discuss Russian bandy.
2022 Onwards: a Super League Without World Championships
The 2020 World Championship was due in Irkutsk and the 2021 event in Syktyvkar, but both were postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rescheduled tournament was cancelled on 1 March 2022, after Finland, Sweden, Norway and the United States refused to play in Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Every world championship since then has been played without Russia.
The domestic game continues. The Russian Bandy League was set up in 1992 and became the Russian Bandy Super League in the 2011–12 season. Twelve teams competed in 2025–26. They play a 22-game regular season from November to February, followed by play-offs and a final in March. The latest champions are Dynamo Moscow, who beat SKA-Neftyanik 8–6 for their tenth Super League title. The Russian Orthodox Church gives official support to bandy, the only sport to have it.
Luzhniki and the KHL: Where Russia’s Bigger Crowds Go
Bandy may be the national sport, but ice hockey and football are where the larger crowds go. The Soviet hockey team won the world title on its debut in 1954, beating Canada in the final game. From its Olympic debut in 1956 it won gold at all but two Games up to 1988, the losses including the “Miracle on Ice” defeat by the United States in 1980. Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League, founded in 2008, had 22 clubs in 2025–26, 19 of them in Russia. Its 2025 regular season drew 5,706,785 spectators, an average of 7,256 per game.
Football’s national home is the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, which holds 81,000. It was the main stadium of the 1980 Olympics, hosted the 2008 Champions League final, and staged the final of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. That tournament ran from 14 June to 15 July 2018 across 12 venues in 11 cities, and the host nation reached the quarter-finals.
Bandy needs long, hard winters, which is why its strongholds are cities such as Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk; our guide to the climate of Russia explains how cold those winters get, and our list of the largest cities in Russia shows where most of the country’s sports fans live. Finland, the only country besides Russia and Sweden to win the bandy world title, has its own answer to the same question in our article on the national sport of Finland.