Tamara Moskvina

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Tamara Nikolayevna (Bratus) Moskvina (Russian: Тамара Николаевна (Братусь) Москвина) (b. June 26, 1941) is a Russian pairs figure skating coach.

She was born in Leningrad. During the Siege of Leningrad in World War II, she was evacuated to a village in the Ural Mountains where her mother had relatives. Moskvina has said that she owes her small stature to childhood malnutrition during the war years. The family returned to Leningrad in 1948, where she began to skate.

As Tamara Bratus, she won the USSR ladies' championship five times during the early 1960's. Her best finish at an international competition in singles was 14th at the 1965 European Championships. Shortly afterwards, she married her coach, Igor Moskvin, and switched to pair skating. She and her partner Alexei Mishin won the 1969 USSR championship -- defeating both the two-time Olympic gold medallists Ludmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov, and the future champions Irina Rodnina and Alexei Ulanov -- and placed second at the 1969 World Figure Skating Championships, before deciding to retire to concentrate on a coaching career.

Moskvina earned her doctorate in educational psychology from the Leningrad Academy of Physical Culture. Her students have included Olympic champions Elena Valova and Oleg Vasiliev; Artur Dmitriev with his two partners Natalia Mishkutenok and Oksana Kazakova; and Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze.

During her own skating career, both in singles and in pairs, Moskvina was known for including unusual flexibility moves in her programs; she may have been the first to perform what is now called a Biellmann spin. She has passed this on in the choreography for the various pair teams she has coached, inventing many unique pair-skating elements in which the man and woman, although performing different movements, still work together as a unit. This style of choreography is sometimes referred to as "opposition choreography", as opposed to shadow or mirror skating, when the two partners perform similar movements in unison together.

Moskvina, who speaks excellent English, was one of the first Soviet coaches to collaborate with Westerners, as she co-authored the International Skating Union's judging handbook for pair skating in 1984. With the end of communism in the Soviet Union, she acted as an agent and promoter for her skaters in the West, and spent several years coaching in the United States. She currently coaches in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Moskvina was awarded Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1984)^[1]