Mashuk-KMV

In 1976 the club topped Zone 4 of the Soviet Second League. Instead it met Krivbass in the promotion play-off and lost, and the step up it had earned on the pitch never came.

By then the club had already been through several names since its founding in 1936 — Dynamo, then Mashinostroitel, then Mashuk, then Energiya — before it settled on Mashuk-KMV in 2002. A first promotion had come earlier still, in 1968, when the side won its group and moved into the first group of Class A.

Promotion returned only in 2023, when Mashuk-KMV won Group 1B of the Second Division and went up to Division A, decades after the 1976 disappointment.

Home matches are played at the Tsentralny stadium, in a kit of red and white; for 2022/23 the home shirt carried a tricolour pattern, blue-and-white drops on a red field. Around Pyatigorsk the side is known as Mashuki, and locally as Kurortniki, a nod to the city's standing as a spa town.

Sergei Dzhatiev holds the club's record for appearances, a career spent as player and later coach entirely within the lower leagues and regional football rather than at the top of the Russian game.

Krivbass is the one name that still stands out from the club's history, the side that ended the 1976 promotion bid at the play-off stage.