Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Soviet national ice hockey team won seventeen Ice Hockey World Championship gold medals and seven Winter Olympic Games gold medals during its history from 1954 to 1991, according to the tenure records of the team's research group head, Yuri Korolev.
The Soviet national team was called the Red Machine. Journalist Vsevolod Kukushkin traced the nickname to a headline in a Minneapolis newspaper during the 1983 Super Series that read, "The Red Machine rolled down on us." Kukushkin recorded this origin in his 2016 book, also titled The Red Machine.
After the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, the team competed as the CIS team, part of the Unified Team, at the 1992 Winter Olympics. Russia then replaced the CIS at the 1992 World Championship and was recognized by the IIHF as the successor federation, inheriting the Soviet ranking. Former Soviet republics such as Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine formed their own national teams and were placed in Pool C.
The Miracle on Ice was the 4-3 loss the Soviet Union suffered to the United States at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. The Soviets were considered the top international team in the world, while the American team was composed largely of university-level players. The United States went on to win the gold medal, and the Soviets finished with silver.
Soviet officials got the idea for an ice hockey program during FC Dynamo Moscow's 1945 tour of the United Kingdom, where they watched exhibition hockey in London. The Soviet Championship League was established in 1946, and the national team played its first matches against LTC Praha in 1948. The team debuted at the 1954 World Championships in Stockholm, winning the gold medal in their first appearance.
Four of the six players on the IIHF Centennial All-Star Team came from the Soviet program: goalkeeper Vladislav Tretiak, defenseman Vyacheslav Fetisov, and forwards Valeri Kharlamov and Sergei Makarov. All four played for the Soviet team during the 1970s and 1980s.