Viktor Tikhonov, the domineering coach of the powerful Soviet national hockey team, the “Big Red Machine,” that won three Olympic gold medals and one devastating silver — when the Soviets, shocking the hockey world, lost to the United States in Lake Placid in 1980 in the celebrated “Miracle on Ice” — died Monday in Moscow. He was 84.

Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League announced his death.

Tikhonov did not invent the blend of ballet and relentlessness that made Soviet hockey so successful for so long. Most of the credit for that goes to a predecessor, Anatoly Tarasov, who was widely regarded as the father of Russian hockey.

But after Tikhonov took over the national team in 1977, he continued to nurture — or, as his players complained, ruthlessly demand — the effortless skating and uncannily fluid passing that Tarasov had taught.

He held practice for as many as 11 months a year and often required players to sleep in barracks, preventing them from being with their families. He fought efforts by some of them to join the National Hockey League, though he later relented in a few cases.

His methods generated deep resentment. They also led to global domination.

From the late 1970s until the early ’90s, he led the Soviets to eight world championships and to Olympic gold medals in 1984, 1988 and 1992, the year after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the team consisted of players from several countries formerly in the USSR.

His most notable failure came early.

Two weeks before they met in the 1980 Winter Olympics, the Soviet and U.S. teams played an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden. No miracles occurred. The Soviets crushed the Americans, 10-3.

Yet by the time the teams met again in Lake Placid, the Americans were playing far more cohesively. They pulled off a surprising 2-2 tie with Sweden; stunned Czechoslovakia 7-3; then defeated Norway, Romania and West Germany.

When the Soviet Union met the U.S. in the medal round, on Feb. 22, 1980, tensions were high between the countries. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and President Jimmy Carter was proposing a U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics, to be held that year in Moscow.

The Soviets took an early lead in the medal round, but the Americans rallied, tying the score 2-2 just before the end of the first period. It was then that Tikhonov made what he later called “the biggest mistake of my career.” Frustrated with the American goal, he surprised both teams by replacing the Soviet goaltender, Vladislav Tretiak, regarded as the best in the world, with Vladimir Myshkin.

Although Myshkin helped hold the United States scoreless in the second period, the Americans scored twice in the third and won the game, 4-3.

In “The Boys of Winter,” by Wayne Coffey (2005), Tikhonov was quoted as saying that his decision to pull his starting goalie “was a result of getting caught up in emotions.”

Not that he blamed only himself for the defeat. After the game, he pointed his finger into the faces of Tretiak and other star players, saying: “This is your loss! This is your loss!”

The Americans played one more game, defeating Finland, 4-2, to win the gold medal.

The Soviets won the silver, though some of the players threw their medals into the trash in Lake Placid.

On the flight back to the Soviet Union, defenseman Valery Vasiliev grabbed Tikhonov around the neck.

“I will kill you right now,” Vasiliev told his coach, before his teammates pulled him off.

Viktor Vasilyevich Tikhonov was born in 1930 (sources differ on the exact date) in Moscow. As a player, he was a star defenseman who won four consecutive championships, from 1951 to 1954, with two teams: the Soviet air force team, known as VVS, and Dynamo Moscow.

In 1964, he became an assistant coach for Dynamo, and in 1968, he was an assistant coach for the national team. He then became head coach of Dinamo Riga, a Latvian team, which quickly improved under his guidance.

In 1977, after the Soviet national team had lost to Czechoslovakia for the second straight time in the world championships under Boris Kulagin, Tikhonov replaced him as head coach and was also named head coach of CSKA Moscow, the army team. He led CSKA to 13 consecutive Soviet championships, from 1977 to 1989, and 13 consecutive European Cup titles, from 197 to 1990, according to the International Ice Hockey Federation.

Information about survivors was not available. Tikhonov’s grandson and namesake, Victor Tikhonov, played in the NHL for the Phoenix Coyotes (now the Arizona Coyotes) and now plays for SKA St. Petersburg in the Kontinental Hockey League.

Tikhonov’s team fared less well after the breakup of the Soviet Union, as more young players left the country. He lost his job as national team coach in 1994 and was fired from the army team in 1996.

In “Red Army,” a documentary about Soviet hockey released this year, one of Tikhonov’s former stars, Vyacheslav Fetisov, was among several players who had few kind words for his former coach.

“Coach with no heart, can he teach us to play?” Fetisov asked. “No. He give us drills, discipline. He wants to see us still as puppets, dancing to his whistle for the rest of our lives. That’s dictatorship.”

Tretiak, the goalie Tikhonov pulled from the game in 1980, is now president of the Russian Hockey Federation.

“People like Viktor Tikhonov should never be forgotten,” Tretiak said Monday, Russian news outlets reported. “This is our history, and if we forget our past, what can be said?

“Viktor’s name is forever inscribed in the history of Soviet and Russian hockey. We must cherish that name.”