by Paul Hoffman
In tsarist Russia, chess was played by the political and intellectual elite. “Thank you, darling, for learning to play chess,” the great nineteenth-century poet Pushkin wrote to his wife. “It is an absolute necessity for any well-organized family.” After the revolution, with Moscow’s encouragement, the game exploded and became a national pastime. The man who convinced the fledgling Communist state to support chess was a midlevel bureaucrat named Alexander Fyodorovich Ilyin-Genevsky. As a player he was not among Russia’s very best (although he was skilled enough to be the three-time champion of Leningrad and to defeat Capablanca once in 1925), but he had the curious distinction of being the only known master who’d had to learn the game twice from scratch, because a brain injury in World War I erased his memory of how the pieces moved. During the Russian Revolution, when food shortages, power outages, and sub-zero temperatures brought Moscow to a standstill, Ilyin-Genevsky buried himself in chess. Even after the central chess club—along with the city’s theaters and other venues of entertainment—had been destroyed, he would hike through the frigid, blacked-out city to play against a dozen other chess addicts in a basement apartment illuminated by match light.
In 1920, Ilyin-Genevsky organized the first Soviet Championship. He was the head of an organization of military reservists and he introduced chess as an activity to build discipline among his men. The success was conspicuous, and swiftly replicated across the Soviet Union: chess instruction became a required part of pre-conscription training in factories, mills, and sports clubs. Ilyin-Genevsky went so far as to proselytize that chess was more important for a soldier than sport, because it helped develop not only boldness and willpower, but also the ability to think strategically.
By the late 1920s all of Russia had adopted the slogans “Take chess to the workers!,” “Chess must be a feature of every peasant reading room!,” and “Chess is a powerful weapon of intellectual culture.” The game was found to increase literacy because chess-crazed workers learned to read so that they could study chess books and newspaper chess columns. Communist leaders also believed that the game combated religious superstition by promoting critical reasoning. The fact that what happened on a chessboard seemed to be within the players’ control appealed to Communist sensibilities and was seen as a welcome antidote to Russian writers like Gogol and Dostoyevsky, who emphasized chance and fate.
The daily papers were full of praise for the game that was sweeping the Soviet Union. The theoretical virtues of chess aside, Kremlin bureaucrats and the press were comfortable promoting the game because they knew that the fathers of Communism were themselves fanatical players. “Our great teachers, Marx and Lenin,” Pravda explained, in 1936,
devoted themselves enthusiastically to chess in their leisure hours. They saw in it primarily a means of strengthening the will, a training-ground for resolve and nervous energy. Lenin’s chief struggle in chess lay in the stubborn struggle, in making the best move, and in finding the way out of a difficult, sometimes almost hopeless situation. The fact of winning or losing meant less to him. He enjoyed his opponent’s strong rather than his weak moves and he preferred to play with strong opponents.1
Chess also became a means for the new Soviet state to triumph on the world stage. In 1936, Mikhail Botvinnik tied for first place at Nottingham, ahead of a very strong field of American and European players.2 It was the first success for a Soviet player abroad, and it was celebrated back home as a great political victory. Botvinnik, twenty-five, was savvy enough to dispatch a telegram to Stalin from England. “I am infinitely happy to be able to report that a representative of Soviet chess has shared first place in the tournament with ex-champion of the world Capablanca,” he wrote to the man whom he addressed as “beloved teacher and leader.”
Pravda ran a photograph of Botvinnik on the front page along with a rousing account of how the victory was not accidental:
Sitting at the chess table in Nottingham, Botvinnik could not fail to sense that the whole country was watching every move of the wooden pieces on the board and…from the most remote corners to the Kremlin towers was wishing him success and giving him moral support. He could not fail to sense the powerful breathing of his great motherland. That is why he played so calmly and confidently, that is why he could allow himself the luxury of playing aggressively, moving away from old, stereotyped patterns of play.
Twelve years later, in 1948, Mikhail Botvinnik became world champion. Since then, a Russian player has always held the classical world title with the sole exception of Fischer, from 1972 to 1975.3 It wasn’t just the Russians’ command of the moves that made them superior at the chessboard, it was also their practiced steeliness. Botvinnik, for example, overcame an aversion to tobacco smoke by forcing himself to play training games with a chain smoker who purposely exhaled in his face while at the same time hammering away at his French Defense.
Moscow gave stipends to grandmasters, enabling them to earn a middle-class living. The profession of chess master was appealing to worldly intellectuals because they were granted the rare freedom to travel abroad for tournaments, even during the darkest days of the Cold War.4 In the West, the Soviet chess system was romanticized—and demonized—as a program that identified toddlers who had exceptional talent and spirited them away from their parents to special chess boarding schools. In fact, the children lived with their families, and the chess instruction was conducted after school. A few very gifted kids were invited to chess summer camp for a couple of weeks.
The Soviets dominated international chess not because they snatched children from their homes and drilled them in the Leningrad Dutch Defense and the Volga Gambit, but simply because they had, as the world champion Anatoly Karpov once put it, “such a lot of people playing chess.”5 The game also had a social status that made it far more than a pastime: cultured Muscovites might spend a Sunday afternoon at a chess match instead of the Bolshoi. If a society exposes everyone to chess and values the game, more people are going to catch the fever and pursue it until they’re world-class.
It is intellectually irresponsible to generalize about national temperament, particularly for a place as large and ethnically diverse as Russia, but that hasn’t stopped Western commentators from asking whether the popularity of chess there can be ascribed in part to national character. If a paranoid personality is an advantage in chess—and that’s a big if—the Russians would seem to be naturals at the game, these commentators argue. Lord Taylor, writing in the London Sunday Times in 1962, caused a small uproar among chess players, who resented being described as pathologically suspicious, when he observed:
Pure paranoia is a rare mental illness whose synonym is systematised delusional insanity. Its essence is that it combines suspicion with organised tortuosity. All of us are apt to become paranoid at times, to think others are talking about us, or even scheming against us. Almost always we are wrong.
Taylor described the rare situations in life when paranoia may be beneficial.
In business and litigation, politics and war, a small measure of paranoia may be a useful protective mechanism. But as a rule paranoid feelings are a disadvantage to both parties in the situation. There is only one place, where as a temporary expedient, a paranoid approach is a positive advantage—on the chessboard.
In chess, of course, your opponent really is out to get you from the very first move. Owing to Stalin’s Great Terror and Moscow’s official encouragement of neighbors spying on neighbors, “it will be obvious at once,” Lord Taylor concluded, “that the Russians have more than their fair share of paranoia.” Taylor’s view was shared by Russian grandmaster Valery Salov, who told New in Chess in 1991: “This may sound strange, but probably this habit of always looking for enemies, this persecution mania, is not bad when you’re playing chess.”
The father of modern Soviet chess, Mikhail Botvinnik, a taciturn and robotic personality, certainly had this habit. When he was negotiating the rules of engagement for his 1951 World Championship match with his young compatrio
t David Bronstein, whose passionate, unpredictable personality was the opposite of his, Botvinnik tried to change the rules governing adjournments. A game was traditionally played for a maximum of five hours a session. Whosoever’s turn it was at the five-hour mark did not make his move on the board but instead wrote it down, sealed it in an envelope, and handed it to the arbiter, who would open it in front of the players when the game was continued another day. After adjournment, the competitors and their seconds would pore over the game for hours before resuming play.6 Botvinnik was worried that a partisan arbiter might surreptitiously open the envelope, change the move, and reseal the envelope, so he insisted that the move also be recorded in a second envelope for backup.
“The Soviet chess world was aghast at this peculiar degree of suspicion from the world champion,” Harold Schonberg wrote in Grandmasters of Chess. “There was a month-long negotiation over this alone, and Bronstein finally gave in.” But Botvinnik continued his paranoid behavior by misleading his own second about the move he had sealed in a key adjourned game.7 In subsequent matches, Botvinnik did not even employ grandmasters to assist in opening preparation. He feared that they might leak opening innovations to his opponents.
Whether or not Russians in general have been unfairly tagged as paranoid, it is hard to deny that many of the world’s top chess players have a suspicious mind-set. They worry that their adversaries are reading their minds and poisoning their beverages. Hikaru Nakamura, the 2005 U.S. champion, did not have a grandmaster coach or second because, like Botvinnik, he felt there was no one he could trust. “Almost all of the top players in the U.S. are foreign-born,” Nakamura said. “That makes it very difficult because if you want to study with them, there’s a possibility that they’ll go on and show everything to their friends.” Even the most levelheaded players can become unusually suspicious during a heated match. After Spassky fell behind in his 1972 match with Fischer, the normally even-keeled Russian asked that his chair be X-rayed and dismantled to make sure that Fischer hadn’t implanted a harmful radiation emitter inside it.
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, RUSSIA IS STILL A CHESS SUPERPOWER, ALTHOUGH the luster of the game has diminished since the collapse of the Soviet Union. After Moscow discontinued many of the perquisites traditionally given to grandmasters, they emigrated in large numbers to the West, causing considerable resentment in their new countries. Everyone on the 2004 U.S. men’s team—Onischuk, Shabalov, Goldin, Kaidanov, Novikov, and Gulko—was born in the USSR, and all but one member of the 2004 U.S. women’s team was too. Chess instruction in urban centers like New York may have benefited from the influx of Soviet players and trainers, but many Americans resented the Moscow-on-the-Hudson contingent, who started appropriating what scanty money and opportunities were available in U.S. chess. Worse, they suspected Soviet émigrés of colluding—throwing games to each other—in the weekend open tournaments that were the bread and butter of U.S. masters. The American chess scene became polarized, with ex-Soviet players branded as scheming opportunists who knew how to circumvent every regulation and law. As British GM Nigel Short told a journalist, “Those who were brought up under [the Soviet] system all have the same warped outlook: ‘You fuck with my wife—I kill you. I fuck with your wife—you keep quiet if you know what’s good for you.’”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to stumble upon someone in the chess world who conforms to the stereotype of the conniving Russian. On a trip to the Marshall Chess Club, I had difficulty parking. One of the Russian regulars, who was outside smoking, saw me drive past three or four times. After I finally found a questionable place to leave the car and entered the Marshall, he took me aside and offered to sell me physician license plates, which would attach magnetically to my own plates and allow me to park legally anywhere in New York.
AT ITS PEAK, IN THE EARLY 1980S, THE SOVIET CHESS FEDERATION HAD FOUR million members; the United States Chess Federation, by comparison, never boasted more than 95,000. With the top Russians facing insufficient competition abroad in those days, they were left to beat up on one another, and the two who did it with the most gusto were Karpov and Kasparov. To date, theirs has been the bitterest rivalry in chess.
Karpov, who is twelve years older than Kasparov, was the darling of Brezhnev, while Kasparov was an advocate of democracy before the USSR collapsed. The U.S. media portrayed their world title bouts as the bad Russian—the Communist automaton whose nickname was the Fetus because his head seemed oversized for his small body—versus the good Russian—the friendly face of glasnost and perestroika. Hans Ree, a Dutch grandmaster who watched their title match in New York in 1990, was entertained by the American television coverage. “When Karpov is being mentioned, you see tanks and portraits of Stalin,” he observed. “When Kasparov is featured, the screen shows young mothers with children.”
Karpov became champion in 1975, when Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title and slipped away to become the Howard Hughes of chess. Kasparov first opposed Karpov for the crown in 1984, and won it the following year. All in all, the two men played a record 144 games in five title matches. Although Kasparov continuously held the title after 1985, the cumulative score in the twelve dozen games played over six years put him only two games ahead. He won twenty-one, lost nineteen, and drew 104. “The games were fantastic,” recalled Pandolfini, who followed them closely at the time. “It was a clash of two playing styles. Karpov was the wily defender who could nurse small advantages in pawn structure and piece placement into victory. Kasparov’s play, like his personality, was more aggressive. He always pressed for the initiative.”
Karpov and Kasparov’s clashes were not confined to the chessboard. “Each K had a team of trainers and coaches,” recalled Pandolfini, “and there were charges that each side had paid off the other to learn their secret opening move preparations.” And then there was the war of the so-called parapsychologists—accusations that the teams had hired hypnotists to sit in the playing hall and hex the opposing player. (Such wars were nothing new: In the 1978 World Championship, in Baguio, the Philippines, Karpov asked a parapsychologist to sit in the audience and jinx his opponent, Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoi. But Korchnoi responded in kind; he recruited two saffron-robed mystics, Didi and Dada, who were under indictment for attempted murder, to meditate in the tournament hall.)
In the 1984–85 match, when Kasparov first tried to wrest the title away from his predecessor, whoever won six games first was supposed to be crowned the champion. The ensuing struggle became the longest and most controversial contest in the history of chess. The purgatory began on September 10, 1984, in central Moscow’s prominent Hall of Columns and ended five execrable months later on the city’s fringes in Hotel Sport, to which the punch-drunk combatants had been moved when the Hall of Columns was needed for the state funeral of General Ustinov. The chess press joked that the good general “had been waiting long enough and had given Karpov every chance to finish the match.”
Indeed Karpov had sprinted ahead 4–0 (with five draws along the way) and apparently made the decision to desecrate his would-be usurper by preventing him from ever getting on the scoreboard. So Karpov stopped taking risks and waited for Kasparov, who had been dismissed by the pundits, to make a mistake. In response, the younger man also started to play solidly, hoping that the longer he resisted, the more he would erode the stamina of the physically frail champion. But Kasparov, too, had underestimated his adversary. The two men drew seventeen consecutive games and then Karpov won again, pushing Kasparov to the precipice at 5–0.
Kasparov, wrote Dutch grandmaster Hans Ree,
knew that should he lose the next game, he would never again find the strength to play Karpov. No one who loses a world championship match by the score of 6–0 should ever try again. He should consider gardening. Kasparov’s seconds lapsed into total silence, because no one wanted to be responsible for the fatal advice that could cause the end of Kasparov’s chess career. Kasparov ended up sleeping in his mother’s room, so that at
any time during the night he could hear her comforting words.
In the thirty-second game, after four more draws, Kasparov finally got on the scoreboard with a much-needed victory. There were another fourteen draws and then the Azerbaijani challenger had two consecutive wins, bringing the score to 5–3, with the champion still leading. Even though the match score on paper continued to look bleak for Kasparov, the momentum after forty-eight games and five months of play had swung in his favor. Karpov looked like a ghost: his physique had shriveled and he apparently needed sedatives to sleep and amphetamines to come to the board. On February 10, 1985, FIDE President Florencio Campomanes, under pressure from Karpov’s acolytes in the Soviet Chess Federation, abruptly canceled the match, on the ground that it was injurious to the health of both players. At the closing press conference, Kasparov puffed himself up to look his most robust and decried the unlawful cancellation. In the nasty recriminations that followed, both players claimed that FIDE’s dramatic decision had favored the other. Hindsight suggests that Karpov’s supporters were misguided in orchestrating the cancellation—he only managed to hold onto the World Championship for another eight months. After all, both men were exhausted, and Karpov was one game away from victory; his best chance was to continue the match, propped up by the finest in Soviet pharmaceutical science. Had he managed to win the match, he might well have knocked out Kasparov for good. Ree also pointed out that Karpov was forced to live with the knowledge that
whoever gets such a chance and misses it never gets another, because something inside him has been broken. Kasparov, on the other hand, had looked his own death as a chess player in the eyes, and became hardened by the experience.
