Major honours
Run by the Soviet army, CSKA Moscow is the most dominant club in hockey history. Founded with the launch of the Soviet league in 1946, it won 32 league titles and 20 European Cups and topped the league for thirteen straight years from 1977 to 1989. Anatoli Tarasov blended football, ballet, and chess into a training system that defined Soviet pass hockey; Viktor Tikhonov continued it by keeping players in barracks-style camps most of the year. Most roster players were military personnel, so prospect acquisition was effectively unrestricted — the Soviet national team was CSKA in all but name. The mid-1980s KLM Line of Vladimir Krutov, Igor Larionov, and Sergei Makarov, plus the Petrov–Kasatonov defensive pair, were entirely CSKA products. After post-Soviet decline, the club rebuilt under the KHL and won the Gagarin Cup in 2019 and 2022.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
Domestically, the feud with Ministry of Interior-backed Dynamo Moscow mirrored power struggles inside the Soviet system. Internationally, road games against NHL champions after the 1972 Summit Series created a rivalry all its own.