Czechoslovakia’s victories over the USSR at the 1969 ice hockey world championships – just a year after Soviet tanks had rolled into the country – represent a famous moment in the country’s modern history. Those games, and the riots they sparked in Prague and elsewhere, are a central theme of Freedom to Win, a gripping, freshly published book by Ethan Scheiner, professor of political science at the University of California, Davis. I spoke to the author on the eve of its release.