Americans find themselves on thin ice in ‘Red Penguins’

The Red Army hockey team has quite a history behind it, one that can be easily summed up: Before the fall of the Soviet Union, at the tail end of 1991, they were known as the best hockey team in the world.

Not long after the new Russian state was established, the government stopped funding them, and some of the best players defected to the National Hockey League.

The glory days were explored, a few years back, in the documentary “Red Army,” in which director Gabe Polsky told the story of the team through the eyes of its player-captain Slava Fetisov. But it turns out that Polsky wasn’t through with the tale of the team.

He’s back directing “Red Penguins,” now switching to events after President Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down and President Boris Yeltsin stepped up.

This story, though, is as much about Americans as it is about Russians. It’s a look at what happened when owners of the Pittsburgh Penguins said yes to the idea of owning 50% of the Central Red Army hockey team, or as it would eventually be known, the Russian Penguins.

This film may be based on the same subject as the earlier one, but it’s a whole different animal. It’s told from the point of view of the American co-owners as well as some of their

Russian counterparts, but there are no interviews with players, and only a bare minimum of games being played.

There’s contemporary footage of them looking back on the events, and archival footage of what was happening in the early ’90s, with a great deal of the focus on then-Pittsburgh Penguins owners Howard Baldwin and Tom Ruta.

But the film’s star is Steven Warshaw, a hotshot American marketing guy who was hired by Baldwin and Ruta to head to Moscow and build up awareness for the new American-Russian experiment in capitalism, to create an audience.

Warshaw, talking about his experiences now and showing up in footage from back in the day, is brash and brilliant and funny and fearless.

Well, maybe not completely fearless, as the landscape in Moscow was a mess: The country was broke, people were hungry, a free market economy was suddenly thrust onto the place, and no one — from businessmen to ordinary citizens — knew how to deal with it.

It’s a fascinating story on many fronts, but mostly because it’s about two very different sides trying to come together to make a lot of money and failing miserably.

“Red Penguins” is available on demand and on most streaming cable platforms.