Dizel

The Volga Derby against Kristall Saratov carries more weight in Penza than the league table usually does.

Dizel itself has worn three names since it took the ice as Spartak: Burevestnik from 1955, Dizelist from 1962, and Dizel only since 2002. The red-and-blue colours have stayed constant through all of it.

The club's best seasons belong to an era before Russia existed as a hockey power in its own right: RSFSR champions in 1963 and 1974, with bronze either side of those titles in 1956 and 1962. Since the Soviet collapse, silver has been as close as Dizel has come — runners-up in the Russian Higher League in 1995–96, having already finished second in the USSR First League two decades earlier, in 1975–76. A bronze in the Higher League in 2009–10 remains the club's best result of the post-Soviet period.

Penza hockey has produced Olympic gold more often than it has kept it: Sergei Svetlov and Sergei Yashin both won with the Soviet team in 1988, Alexander Gerasimov and Vasily Pervukhin in 1984, Yuri Moiseev in 1968, and Alexander Kozhevnikov twice over — none of it won in a Dizel shirt, since by the time these players reached the top of the sport they had long since moved on from the club that raised them.

What Dizel has not managed, in more than seventy years since that 1963 title, is a Russian championship of its own.