Boris Spassky, who loved chess but didn't like playing it

A few days before the blockade of Leningrad in 1941, Boris Spassky, born in that city on January 30, 1937, and his older brother Georgy were urgently evacuated to the village of Korshik in the Kirov region. Their echelon arrived without casualties. The one before and the one after it were bombed by the Nazis.

There, in a children's home in the Siberian village of Korshik, Boris learned to play chess at the age of five.

His father Vasily, a reserve officer of the Red Army and civil engineer, during a short absence in 1943, took the children out of the home and temporarily settled the family in the village of Sverdlovsk in the Moscow region. All of his relatives survived the war, but upon returning to Leningrad, his father abandoned his pregnant wife and children and went to live with another. Boris, his brother and newborn sister Irina were raised by a single mother, teacher Ekaterina Petrovna.

CHESS FOR THE MASSES

Borja Spassky spent the summer of 1946 in the chess pavilion of the Leningrad Home of Pioneers in Kirova Park. He left at 11 in the morning and returned home at 11 at night. "When the pavilion closed in September, without chess it was like death," he said later.

At that time, it was not unusual for a boy to become interested in the chessboard. Frontline soldiers and workers, men and women and youth played chess in yards and parks at stationary tables, in sanatoriums, in transport and on beaches. And every game was usually followed by a crowd of fans. In winter, closed pavilions were sometimes set up for chess players. Newspapers introduced chess sections.

Mythology says that in Soviet times, chess, once a game of aristocrats, barons and writers, was propagated as a mass proletarian sport, pointing to the example of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. One photo shows Lenin playing chess with the writer Maxim Gorky (and getting a little bored).

Yakov Damskiy, commentator of the former Gostelradio, describes how one Yakov Gerasimov Rokhlin in the Rostov Regional Committee reminded the secretary of the Regional Committee of Comrade Lenin's words that chess is gymnastics of the mind. Lenin never said that, but the secretary of the Regional Committee shows that he has the classics of dia-mat, dialectical materialism, on his little finger and immediately promises to quickly form a regional chess union.

The slogan "Chess for the masses" was launched at the All-Union Chess Congress back in 1920. A year later, the world-famous chess players Emanuel Lasker and Jose Raul Capablanca participated in the tournament in Moscow.

The ideologue of the chess movement, Alexander Ilyin of Geneva, said that in some cases chess is even more than a sport, that it develops courage, resourcefulness, poise, will and, most importantly, strategic abilities in a person.

It was not a Bolshevik innovation. Boris Akunjin died Turkish Gambit combined the chess traditions of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov, comparing the country's history to a game of chess.

YOUTH CHAMPION

And Spassky progressed unusually fast in chess for his age. As a ten-year-old, he won the exhibition simulcast of the best player in the world, Mihail Botvinik.

That of Mihail Botvinik, who in 1948 defeated the American Samuel Reshevsky and was declared a beacon of the Soviet school of chess. Almost a quarter of a century later, most of the Soviet chess players who became world champions or tournament finalists belonged to the "Botvinik school".

Spassky was only 11 years old when he became the youngest youth champion in 1948. At the age of 16, in Bucharest in 1953, he defeated the world vice-champion Vasilij Smyslov. As a debutant in 1955, he shared third place at the USSR Championship with Mikhail Botvinnik and future world champion Tigran Petrosyan. At the age of 18, he also won the world junior crown and became the youngest grandmaster until then.

BOBBY FISHER IN MOSCOW

Somehow at that time, a frowning, constantly dissatisfied with something American young man in an ordinary sweater appears in Moscow. The Soviets had already noticed that whimsical American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, who became a sensation at the American Chess Championship in 1956 at the age of only 14.

After Fischer's mother Regina Fischer wrote a letter to Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev in 1956 about her son's desire to visit the USSR for chess, Fischer and his sister arrived in Moscow the following summer.

And when she delivered the letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, Bobby Fischer's mother was taken into custody, questioned by informant witnesses who denounced her as having sent a child to a communist camp, checked her bank account and taken her to a psychiatric clinic for observation.

Regina Vander Fischer, daughter of Polish Jews, born in Switzerland in 1913, raised in St. Louis, Missouri, studied in Moscow at the First Moscow State Medical University before the war. There she met Hans-Gerhart Fischer, a German biophysicist who worked at the Institute of Neurology, whom she married in November 1933. They lived in Moscow for five years. Gerhart, a member of the Communist Party, went to Spain during the Civil War, and Regina to Paris where she became an English teacher, returning to America in 1939.

When she gave birth to her son Bobby on March 9, 1943 at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Gerhart had already moved to Chile with a Spanish passport. As a single mother, she raised both Bobby and her daughter Joan.

She was politically active. Later, she participated in the San Francisco-Moscow peace march in 1961, during which she met her second husband, Cyril Pustan, an English professor, and in 1968, she obtained her medical degree at the "Friedrich Schiller" University in Jena, East Germany.

And in Moscow in 1958, her son, an American chess prodigy, was given a car, a guide, a translator and offered to visit the Tretyakov Gallery and the exhibition of the achievements of the socialist economy. But he was not impressed.

In the morning, he went to the Moscow Central Chess Club, returned to the hotel for lunch and then there again, to the old Zimina villa on Gogolevsky Boulevard, in whose room with a pre-revolutionary fireplace the "Grandmaster" chess club was housed.

"You don't even have clean toilets," he repeated, "I'm not going anywhere else."

The translator complained that the American boy was calling the Soviet people pigs because they wouldn't let him play with Botvinik.

And Bob Fisher is being brought home.

In a letter to the Chess Federation of the USSR in 1958, Regina's mother apologized for the inappropriate behavior of her son Bobby Fischer.

Commentator Jakov Damsky believes that his intolerance towards the USSR may have started then, which will come to the center of world attention during the historic Cold War spectacle in Reykjavík in 1972.

CHESS AND CLASSICS

photo: wikimedia

At that time, as a promising Soviet chess player, Boris Spassky had a stipend of 500 rubles, they say in the range of a ministerial salary. But the expectations were no less.

He played one of the more dramatic games in the last round of the championship
of the USSR in 1958 in Riga, where he had to defeat the new Latvian star Mihajlo Talja to qualify for the interzonal world title. The game ended after 45 moves and five hours, and both grandmasters stayed up all night to analyze the next moves.

English chess master Leonard Barden in his tribute to Spassky in the "Guardian" writes that Boris Spassky was cultured, handsome, calm and that his character had an introspective, modest and sometimes melancholic side.

Others state that he was not only interested in chess, but also in history, art and literature. The kultura.rf platform shows numerous examples of how chess connected aristocratic, bourgeois, communist, proletarian and NEP cultural symbolism in a long diagonal.

Spassky recited Eugene Onegin by heart. Pushkin was an avid chess player. He played his last game right before the duel with Dantes. Chess players devised chess problems based on verses from Eugene Onegin: "Isolated far from everyone, they are above the chessboard, leaning on the table, sometimes sitting, deep in thought..."

Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy also played chess. Many characters in War and peace Leo Tolstoy often sat at the chess table - Natasha and Sonya, and Boris. After touring the battlefield, Napoleon says: "The chess pieces are placed, the game begins tomorrow..." Another hero of the novel, Andrei Bolkonsky, disagreed: "In chess... the fighter is always stronger than a pawn and two pawns are always stronger than one, and in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes stronger than a company."

In the autobiographical story of Varlam Shalam Chess and poetry, the hero decided to beat the camp commander's wife in chess, to whom everyone traditionally handed over games. "After all, I play chess. Chess players don't like sycophants", she said unexpectedly.

On the order of Catherine the Great, the chief chamberlain Stroganov organized a game of chess for the empress and the Swedish king Gustav IV in 1796. In a meadow with yellow and green lawn, with living figures, servants dressed in medieval costumes.

One of the popular theatrical performances of "living chess" for the masses in the revolutionary era was played in the hall of the House of Trade Unions in Moscow in 1936, just at the time when Mikhail Bulgakov was finishing his writing. Master and Margarita. In that novel, chess was played by Professor Woland and the cat Behemoth, who revived the chess pieces and turned the horse into a frog in order to delay the moment of defeat by confusion. U To the White Guard Bulgakov writes how the common man can easily sacrifice himself in times of great historical changes like the exchange of pawns in chess.

In 1970, Nabokov published an unusual collection of 49 poems and 18 chess problems - which are "chess poetry".

ALMOST BENDER

U Twelve chairs Ilyfa and Evgeniy Petrov, the chapter entitled "Interplanetary Chess Tournament" is a parody of the chess boom that swept the USSR from Moscow to the smallest "Vasyuki" in the 20s of the last century.

"Chess! Do you know what chess is? He improves not only the culture, but also the economy! Do you know that your 'Four Horse Chess Club', if properly organized, will be able to completely transform the city of Vasyuki?", said Ostap Bender, painting completely fantastic prospects: "Chess thought, which turned a provincial town into the capital of the globe, will turn into an applied science and invent methods of interplanetary communication. Signals will fly from Vasyuki to Mars, Jupiter and Neptune. Communication with Venus will become as easy as moving from Rybinsk to Yaroslav…”

Boris Spassky was once persuaded by his friend, the famous actor Nikolai Rybnikov, to audition for the role of Ostap Bender with the Soviet director Leonid Gaidai. "At the Mosfilm studio, they put on my make-up and gave me the text. We acted out a scene. I said, 'This is not going to work!'”

DEATH OF ALEXANDER ALEKHIN

He explained that the role did not work out because he did not like the authors of the novel Twelve chairs, Soviet satirists Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov: "How do they portray Kisa Vorobyaninov, the leader of the nobility? Caricature type. I can't forgive them for that. Do you know who were the leaders of the nobility? Figures! The leader of the Voronezh nobility was Alekhine's father!"

Alexander Alekhine, the son of a member of the State Duma, was the first Russian world champion, to whom the title of grandmaster was awarded by the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, as patron of the Petrograd tournament in 1914, as well as to the other four participants of the tournament - Emmanuel Lasker, Capablanca, Frank Marshall and Siegbert Tarasch.

He also won the first Soviet championship in Moscow at the All-Russian Olympiad, so in the 1920s he received permission to leave the RSFSR, but later his citizenship was revoked due to his anti-Bolshevik statements, and his request for forgiveness and return to his homeland was not answered.

After the German attack on France, Alekhine voluntarily enlisted in the French army, was captured, wrote two anti-Semitic articles and participated in Nazi tournaments in Germany and in occupied countries, according to Karpov, allegedly because of an agreement that allowed him to save his Jewish wife.

On March 25, 1946, Alekhine was found dead in a hotel room in Estoril, Portugal, slumped in a chair next to a table with plates and a chessboard.

The cause of death was either suffocation with a piece of meat or a heart attack, and the exact circumstances are under discussion.

And on March 23, 1946, a telegram was allegedly delivered to Alekhine that an agreement had been reached to play a match against Botvinnik in England, under the auspices of the British Chess Federation.

Spassky believed that Alekhine was killed for collaborating with the Nazis - and that he was the only chess player who met his death with the title of champion.

photo: wikipedia

THE NEWSPAPERS LIE, A "TRUTH" EVEN MORE

High-ranking party officials disliked Boris Spassky because of his behavior, quite different from the Soviet-era stereotype of a careerist.

Before going to an international tournament, Spassky came to the party commission that issues the characteristics needed for the trip in a bright red suit, with a yellow silk scarf wrapped around his neck.

“What kind of parrot flew in to us?” asked a comrade with long party experience.

Spassky cheekily gave a short lecture on fashion.

Everything could have ended peacefully, even happily, if someone had not asked Boris Spassky to describe the situation in Italy (at that time, all the newspapers were writing about the Sicilian mafia). Spassky began to talk in detail about the situation in Holland.

The president of the Commission for Characteristics interrupts him: "But you didn't understand the question: they asked you about Italy."

"No, I understood perfectly, but the last time I was in Holland. I'm used to sharing my impressions of what I saw with my own eyes."

“You don't read newspapers?”

"Excuse me, I am a journalist by education and who, if not me, should know how much our newspaper is worth. Unfortunately, they lie more often than they don't," replied Spassky, who graduated in journalism from the Leningrad University in 1955.

“And Justice?”

“Justice, even more!”

The secretary of the Chess Association, Vera Tikhomirova, managed to convince the party officials that Boris Vasiljevic is, admittedly, a bit cheeky witty, but ideologically loyal.

Boris Spassky later explained in an interview for "St. Petersburg News" in 2018: "I have always been an independent person. I had to move from Leningrad to Moscow in 1963". Some official Bondarevski then told him: "The KGB is too interested in you, get out of here!". The KGB, it was claimed, had a thick folder of compromising information on Spassky.

In the company of friends, he imitated Brezhnev and Botvinik, even Lenin. They say he was an excellent imitator. He was often ironic in conversation.

A local Rostov party leader reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow that at a meeting with the audience in the city of Shakhta in 1971, explaining why he was not playing in the USSR championship, Spassky said that the prize for first place was only 250 rubles, while he received $1966 for first place in the tournament in Santa Monica in 5.000, where he defeated Bobby Fischer.

Spassky himself welcomed the "Prague Spring" and expressed his indignation at the introduction of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968. And he refused to sign a collective letter of support to the member of the Communist Party of the USA, the black leftist Angela Davis, Red Angela, against whom the process was being conducted in America at the time.

Some associated him with the generation of the sixties poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and writer Vasily Aksyonov, author Generations of winter - while others found a common language between that promising chess player and the poet Josif Brodsky, who was convicted of social parasitism in 1963 because he could not prove that he was a poet. Spassky's favorite writer was Dostoyevsky.

When in the early 1970s, party functionary Yevgeny Tyazhelnikov spoke inspiredly to a group of Soviet grandmasters at a reception about the need for athletes to go among ordinary workers and thus contribute to the construction of communism, the non-party Spassky switched to Botvinnikov's French defense e2-e4 e7-e6: "Building communism is not for me."

In the reports from that time, it is mentioned that Spassky once somewhere in Rostov publicly said that if he had not been a chess player, he would have become a priest! His paternal grandfather, a Red Army officer, was the Orthodox priest Vladimir Spassky, a member of the State Duma of the 4th convocation, elected in 1912 from the party of the so-called Black Hundred (Черная Сотня, Black Hundred, far-right grouping in Russia 1904–1917).

Vladimir Spassky survived the persecution of the clergy in the early USSR, but died at an advanced age from beatings inflicted on him by German soldiers during the occupation of the Kursk region.

Much later, in 2006, in an interview, Boris Spassky described himself as an Orthodox Christian, a monarchist and a Russian nationalist, who believes that Russia's greatness is connected with the actions of its leaders, such as the Russian tsars, and added that in modern Russia it makes him happy that the church is coming back to life...

If we are allowed to express ourselves in far-fetched paradoxes, it turned out that in Reykjavík in 1972, on the communist side, the grandson of a black man was making dramatic moves, and on the side of the anti-communist bloc - the child of a communist...

To be continued in the next issue:

The Saga of Reykjavik; Vysotsky, French wife of Russian origin, Ford Mustang and more; Rematch of the century organized by the boss of Jezda; Divorce from a French woman