Jan. 12, 2026, 5:09 a.m. ET
In “The Russian Five: A story of espionage, defection, bribery and courage,” Keith Gave, the spy-turned-Detroit Free Press newsman whose clandestine mission to Helsinki, Finland, put the Red Wings’ acquisition of the iconic quintet in motion, shares the pulse-pounding and unforgettable tale of how Sergei Fedorov, Slava Fetisov, Vladimir Konstantinov, Slava Kozlov and Igor Larionov slipped past the Iron Curtain, wound up in crumbling 1990s Detroit, helped build a championship empire and changed the landscape of American hockey forever. Gave's writing became the foundation for an award-winning documentary, also titled "The Russian Five," which premiered in 2018 at the Freep Film Festival. Fedorov's Red Wings jersey retirement is Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. Here is a book except from "The Russian Five" on Fedorov's escape from the Soviet Union.
After months of meticulous planning, the moment of reckoning was approaching quickly, and Nick Polano was getting nervous.
Worried about being recognized by the wrong people — and the Portland, Ore., hotel was crawling with them — he and an accomplice ducked into the back of their waiting limo parked in a dark corner on the side of a hotel. Polano, who had coached the Detroit Red Wings before becoming an assistant general manager with the franchise, told the driver that they’d soon be joined by two more men, and he should be ready to leave immediately, heading in the direction of the airport.
Now the driver was nervous. He studied Polano in his rear-view mirror and saw someone straight off a Hollywood set — 6-foot-3, 210 lean pounds, a guy casually dressed wearing a mane of thick, black hair combed high and back, and a chiseled, ominous expression that suggested he may soon be joined by Mafioso hitman.
“Look man,” the driver said, turning in his seat toward Polano, “I don’t want to be involved in anything like this. I don’t want any trouble. I’ve got a family.”
Polano burst out laughing. “He thought we were going to whack somebody,” Polano said. Quickly and calmly, he explained that nothing bad or illegal was happening, but that the driver was playing a key role in a story that would make headlines around the world the next day.
“Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine,” Polano assured the driver as he pointed to the hotel lobby. “And the guy sitting in there right now is going to give you a real big tip.”
That guy, Jim Lites, who had spent nearly a year orchestrating this elaborate escape plan, was sitting there waiting. And waiting. Drinking coffee after coffee as he read and reread a newspaper, trying to blend into the furniture in the lobby of the Shilo Inn — and not rouse suspicion.
As Polano was talking the chauffeur off the ledge, a bus pulled up to the front of the hotel. It emptied quickly. A few dozen hungry young men sprinted to a dining area where a late meal was being served. Last off the bus was the guy who would be making those headlines.
Sergei Fedorov spotted his man sitting there reading a USA TODAY newspaper and walked calmly up to him.
“Ready to go, Jim?” Fedorov asked, in practiced English, as casually as if he were commenting on the weather. Lites rose and they headed out a back door toward the waiting limo. But just as they were about to leave the hotel, an elevator door opened and there stood one of Fedorov’s Soviet Red Army teammates, a tall, older man. Fedorov stopped. Lites’ heart sank. Busted.
“I be right there, Jim,” Fedorov said.
“Sergei, let’s just go, right now,” Lites implored.
“Thirty seconds,” Fedorov said, and he walked toward Sergei Tchekmarev, one of his closest, most trustworthy friends in a society where trust was rare and fragile. Tchekmarev was a massage therapist and equipment manager for the Soviet National Hockey Team — and Fedorov’s roommate.
“Let’s go have dinner,” Tchekmarev said.
“I can’t,” Fedorov said. “I gotta go.”
“Where are you going?” Tchekmarev was now laughing.
“I’m going to Detroit.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s go,” Tchekmarev said. “We can talk about it over dinner.”
“No, there’s a gentleman here right now. I’m going.”
“No, no, no!”
Fedorov turned and walked away, not sure what might happen next. He didn’t look back.
“I knew he might grab me and drag me to the coaches,” Fedorov recalled. “He was twice bigger than me. I had no idea what would happen. It was kind of a nervous moment. But eventually I would be able to get to his mind for him to understand: I was really going.”
Fedorov walked his friend to the elevator. Before a hasty, emotional departure, he reached into his pocket and took out all the money he’d saved after four years of playing hockey as a professional in the Soviet Union, about $1,500, and put it in Tchekmarev’s hands.
“It was a small token of my appreciation if he gets in trouble for me leaving and being my roommate,” Fedorov said. He knew well that in those days in the Soviet system even innocent people were persecuted just for being in the same circle as someone who was perceived to be a troublemaker.
Fedorov rejoined Lites and they jumped into the idling limo. Twenty minutes later, the four men were sitting in owner Mike Ilitch’s plush Gulfstream G2, which was fueled-up and ready for take-off. The defection of one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent young hockey stars was under way.
On July 23, 1990, nearly a year after our first meeting in Helsinki, Sergei Fedorov, five months shy of his 21st birthday, arrived in his new hometown to begin his career in the National Hockey League.
“We had him in Detroit before the Russians knew he was gone,” Polano said.
In an interview shortly after his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in November 2015, Fedorov admitted he didn't quite know what to make of that meeting in Helsinki when I showed him the list of Detroit Red Wings draft selections and handed him the media guide stuffed with the letter I had written inviting him to Detroit as a defector.
“I still didn’t understand what the draft is, who the Red Wings are, nothing really about the NHL,” he said. “I just say, ‘OK. Great. So what?’ That was my attitude. I had no idea that in a year I could have gone anywhere.”
The letter, though, eventually created some anxiety. “It was a nervous time, an uncomfortable time,” he said. “Later, I read the letter and understand. It was exciting kinds of thoughts.”
Exciting enough that Fedorov put the brakes on an offer from his Red Army coach and commander, Viktor Tikhonov. The Red Army club was intent on promoting Fedorov from private to lieutenant, a significant advancement in prestige, pay and other perks. But it also came with substantial strings attached. He would be asked to sign a 25-year contract. Fedorov’s father, Viktor, had urged him to sign it — and Sergei was tempted.
But the dollar signs the younger Fedorov saw in that Helsinki letter prompted him to reconsider. On arriving home in Moscow, he turned to the one person outside his hockey circle and his family that he thought he could trust: Valery Matveev, a sports writer with Pravda, one of two national newspapers in the Soviet Union at the time.
Matveev, a slight, bespectacled man approaching his 30s, had chronicled the young Fedorov’s rise to stardom during his four years with CSKA Moscow. He was the first journalist to write a lengthy feature story about Fedorov. In the process, the reporter earned the player’s trust. And I eventually earned Matveev’s trust over a series of lengthy conversations in Moscow about five years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Tikhonov paid much attention to the young guys, and when he brought Sergei to Red Army, Fedorov was the coach’s favorite guy on the team. He was quiet, worked hard and he was big and strong. Tikhonov knew it was unusual to find so many good things in one person.
“After he got that letter, Sergei started thinking for the first time seriously of his future in the NHL,” said Matveev, adding that he immediately advised Fedorov to seek a release from the Red Army so that he could play in the United States.
“Oh, no,” Fedorov responded. “My parents would be very upset with me if I change my mind now and try to get a release.”
Matveev advised him against it. He felt the shifting political winds in the collapsing Soviet Union.
“I told Sergei it would be a stupid thing to sign with Red Army,” Matveev said. “Then it becomes very hard to get a release. It’s not comfortable to play hockey for a man who is also your commanding officer. If he did something to anger the coach, Tikhonov could sign an order sending him to the Chinese border for 25 years.”
About the same time in Detroit, Jim Lites found someone else willing to facilitate a defection. In October, early in the 1989-90 season, Lites was in the Wings’ locker room when he was approached by Phil Myre, the team’s goaltending coach. Myre mentioned that he had a good relationship with renowned Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak, and Tretiak had a good friend in Montreal, a photographer, who had nearly unbridled access to the CSKA and the Soviet National Team’s players.
Within minutes, Lites was on the phone with the photographer, Michel Ponomarev. Within a few days, the two were meeting in Montreal. There, Lites met a man pushing 50, a Russian ex-pat who had left his country when he was in his 30s.
Because he spoke Russian, French and English, the Soviets used Ponomarev as their official photographer whenever they were in North America or Western Europe. “I can talk to the guys for you,” he told Lites, who was beginning to feel like he could make the kind of deal that would pay enormous dividends for the Red Wings.
“As Mike Ilitch told me over and over, always close,” Lites recalled. “So I sat there and said, ‘Let’s talk. If we do this, you have to work for me. I have to know your loyalties are to us.” Their handshake deal was followed up with a written contract that said the Detroit hockey club would pay Ponomarev $35,000 for a successful defection of Sergei Fedorov or Vladimir Konstantinov.
“And Michel, from that day on, was my guy. That’s how all this started.”
Not long afterward, Fedorov’s representative, Valery Matveev, and Lites’ rep, Michel Ponomarev, began to communicate. Both understood that Fedorov was reluctant to leave the Soviet Union, even when his military service ended.
He worried about his family, his parents and brother, and what might happen to them if he defected like his best friend and linemate Alexander Mogilny, whose family was harassed and faced some minor reprisals after he left.
But Fedorov was still willing to listen. With Ponomarev facilitating, Fedorov agreed to meet Lites in Chicago, just before Christmas in 1989, when Fedorov’s Red Army club was competing in the Super Series of exhibition games against NHL clubs. Lites was well-prepared, and he was confident that he could get Fedorov to walk away right then.
He booked a suite at the luxurious Drake Hotel, a favorite shelter by Detroit hockey clubs when they were barnstorming around the NHL. The Soviets were staying at a hotel nearby. Ponomarev, who had flown in from Montreal, arranged to have dinner with Fedorov. The dinner would be served by the Drake Hotel’s room service.
“Sergei walks in and he’s dressed in his best suit,” Lites said. “It was a good Russian suit, especially for a 20-year-old kid. But really it looked like something he had gotten out of the Goodwill. It was shiny. But it didn’t matter. He was a handsome guy, really good looking. And he was confident.”
They talked for hours, during and after dinner. Lites showered him with all manner of Red Wings gear, including home and road jerseys with his name on them. Then he got serious.
“I armed myself with all the things I thought would matter to the Russians,” he said. They included a copy of Steve Yzerman’s player contract. Lites was offering Fedorov the same terms.
That seemed to get Fedorov’s attention even more than the Corvette brochure Lites gave him. Lites understood that it was important to him that he would be making as much as the team captain. The Wings’ executive thought for sure he’d be leaving Chicago right then with the newest Detroit Red Wings star. Instead, Fedorov stood up, shook Lites’ hand and, with Ponomarev interpreting, thanked him for his generous offer and declined.
“I cannot leave now,” Fedorov said.
“But Sergei, all this is yours if you leave right now,” Lites pleaded. “You never know what is going to happen in world politics. Russia could change. You never know when you will have an opportunity like this again. It might change politically. It might all go away. If you do this now, I have lawyers here who can make everything good.”
Incredibly, considering how frustrated he was at toiling in conscripted servitude and kept in what he called “a cage” by the Soviet hockey system, Fedorov still resisted.
“My military service is going to end soon,” Fedorov told Lites through his interpreter. “I do not want to desert from the military. I will be out the first week in January, and I am not going to continue my service. I want to play in the NHL and I will come out in the summer. You can count on it.”
Lites was disappointed, but he left feeling good about what had transpired. Fedorov left the meeting feeling confident, too. He told Matveev about the contract Lites had offered him, the same one the Detroit club captain had signed.
“It was an official document with dollar figures that had lots of zeroes,” Matveev said. “Sergei starts to understand that he is an important person.”
Not so fast. Fedorov’s military service was to end on Jan. 1, 1990, but Tikhonov arbitrarily extended his term of service until the Super Series ended to guarantee he would return with the team to Russia. Fedorov was losing patience with the Soviet system when he nearly landed in jail while trying to vacation at a Black Sea resort.
“Sergei and I and a couple of my friends decided to spend a few weeks on vacation at a nice Intourist hotel near Sochi, one of the nicest cities on the sea,” Matveev said. When they checked in, they had to show their passports. Fedorov’s passport listed no home address.
“Every person in Russia has to have a home address stamped in the middle of his passport,” Matveev said. “If you don’t, it’s like you are a street person, a beggar, and the hotel wouldn’t let him stay there. We tried to explain that Sergei Fedorov is a very famous hockey player, and that he was born in Pskov, but living in Moscow with me while the Red Army is promising to get him his own apartment very soon. But Red Army wanted Sergei to sign the (military) officer papers first.”
The hotel referred Fedorov to the police for help.
“But the young officer at the desk in police headquarters didn’t want to even talk with us,” Matveev said. “He took Sergei’s passport and said the best place for him to stay is in jail at the police station. Sergei got very angry, and we tried to relax him.
“We went to the store and bought a lot of beers, Heineken, and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. We came back to the police station and gave the beer and cigarettes as a present for the police officer, and he gave us the paper that Sergei needed immediately.
“We had a nice vacation, but that’s when Sergei started thinking: ‘Get me out of here.’”
► Russian Five excerpt: Covert mission brought iconic Red Wings to Detroit
► Red Wings limo crash, 20 years later: Doctors recall the surreal night
Keith Gave spent six years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist during the Cold War, then transitioned into a 40-year career in the news industry, spending 15 years at the Detroit Free Press. Gave resides in Roscommon, where he continues to write. Follow him on X @KeithGave. You can buy "The Russian Five" on Amazon.com, or other online book outlets. Gave's new book is "The Grind Line: The gears that powered the Detroit Red Wings to the summit," available online.