How do you(and Muscovites in general) decide which of the four Moscow-area KHL teams to support?
I am not from there, but I cat throw in some things I know. First things first: there are 3 Moscow teams in the KHL now. Used to be one more with "Krylya Sovetov" back in the USSR. You can't count the Atlants and the Vityazs as Moscow teams. So for now it's CSKA, Dynamo and Spartak.
Is allegiance based on geography, with certain neighbourhoods tending to support a single team?
Partially and loosely. Historically there are neighbourhoods. I mean there is a Metro station named "Dynamo" in Moscow. That's where the football "Dynamo" arena was. That area is still Dynamo dominated, but basically it is true for the families living in Moscow for many generations and is passed on. Same goes for Spartak and CSKA. Look, Ovechkin is a Dynamo kid. His whole family is basically Dynamo
. And Ovechkin's parents do live in the area where Dynamo allegiance is passed on and where a lot of former athletes of Dynamo live I will further down explain how that works.
But Moscow is the nation's capital. Like every capital city in has the largest influx of people from all over the country coming to live there for various reasons, like students or civil service people making careers or just for jobs that pay more.
Is it passed on from parent to child?Do people who move to Moscow from other parts of Russia generally start cheering for a Moscow team or do they stay loyal to their home team?
But Moscow is the nation's capital. Like every capital city in has the largest influx of people from all over the country coming to live there for various reasons, like students or civil service people making careers or just for jobs that pay more. There are a lot of first and second generation people in Moscow. Like you'd probably know kids pick up very quick from the environment. Kids growing up in Moscow whose parents aren't from Moscow will mostly switch to a Moscow team even if parents are still following the team from the area they originally came from. But it is only an issue for people who come from areas with big hockey teams like Omsk, Chelyabinsk to name a few. The transition is much quicker and easier if they come from an area where there wasn't a KHL team.
Is it common for fans to switch allegiances based on which team is doing the best?
I guess that would be considered major treason
There is a rivalry. Part of it the soviet legacy of hockey teams being part of a huge parent org. All sports had a Spartak, a Dynamo and SKA(only Moscow had CSKA with C being for 'central') and Torpedo and Krylya Sovetov and Trudovye Reservy while we are at it. Those big sports societies were parented by specific branches of economics, state structure and so on. SKAs were army's, Dynamo originally what was over time Cheka, NKVD, MGB, KGB and then the Ministry of Interior so basically in simple terms police and national security, Torpedo was specifically automobile industry's, Spartak was light industry's in general and so on. A lot of allegiances would go along those lines in soviet days. Also within a family. Say someone is an army officer, so he would support (C)SKA, but his brother is a police officer. They would have a nice mocking and talking sessions over the Dynamo-CSKA-rivalry at family reunions. The narrative about Spartak being the working class team is only partially true. It's more like they had a lot of support also due to the fact that during the soviet days CSKA and Dynamo would snatch all the best players, so people liked to be behind an underdog. It wasn't necessarily a social tier thing. Soviet society was way more egalitarian anyway. Spartak though still carries a lot of that legacy, like their nicknames of "pigs" or "the meaty" from light industry->food production->meat. Lots of fans embrace it by the way. If you watched the Spartak-SKA game yesterday you'd have seen a guy with a pink piggie toy on his shoulder in the stands. That is common.
Can fandom be tied to other unrelated things like religion, education level, ethnicity, or politics?
Religion not at all, at least in hockey.
Education level not at all. It was never a thing, not during soviet times nor is it now.
Politics not at all. There are weak attempts to tie the SKA-CSKA problematics to politics. But they mostly come from trolls, many of them not out of Russia I would guess. As said, those are attempts that basically don't stick. It's more about money than anything else. And that is what works way more for the people. Rich teams hurting poor teams, the league and hockey in general because they are rich. So people route for any team that plays against them in the playoffs for example. Right now everybody and their mom is united behind Spartak to maybe upset the SKA powerhouse. But those are loose alliances and there is not much politics to it. More like people disliking how dominant those teams are, due to embarassingly huge budgets compared to others. That is the same in every country if there is such a disparity of teams' financial power.
Ethnicity somewhat. Probabaly only for Tatars as they are the only ethnicity with not only a KHL team(2 actually) coming from the their region, but also a significant number of ethnic Tatars who are known names in the sport. But that is a Moscow thing to relate to the thread only partially. Many Tatars would support AkBars even if they aren't from Tatarstan AND people from Tatarstan(not only Tatars) moving to Moscow would continue to support AkBars actually. Probably the most loyal fanbase out of people moving to Moscow. And yes, somewhat based on ethnicity. Otherwise there was some joking about Armenians getting the hype with all the young guys with armenian roots coming up in russian hockey, but it's just jokes for now.
The thing I mentioned above. In soviet times athletes associated with some of those big soviet sports societies would also live in one area, because they would get appartments from the state obviously in one particular area or even house. I wasn't a sports thing only. There were the writers' houses and the KGB houses and whatever houses in Moscow. That is why back then those communities of fans also were way more localized.