The Chess Struggle in Practice

"Bronstein was very nearly world champion. In 1951 he played a match that was drawn, and because he was the challenger, the titleholder Botvinnik kept the title. It was very controversial because Bronstein was one game ahead with two to play, and lost the penultimate game in rather strange circumstances. This was during the Stalinist period, and it was said that because he was distantly related to Trotsky, and his father had been in a gulag, the Soviet system didn’t want him to win. I don’t think he deliberately threw it, but he was under certain unusual pressures. Bronstein is a marvellous writer. He wrote the best books of the era, and this is by no means his only great book. It’s about one of the great tournaments of all time, to find an official challenger for the world championship then held by Botvinnik. Apart from Botvinnik, of course, it had all the great players of an extraordinary era: Bronstein himself, Keres, Smyslov, who won the tournament, Reshevsky, the American champion. It was a massive tournament, 28 rounds, of the sort that nowadays you just wouldn’t have. Bronstein’s notes, rather like Fischer’s, are full of verve and honesty. He gives you a tremendous sense of what is happening in the middle game. He tends to ignore the opening and the ending, and concentrates on what he says is “the heart and soul of chess”. He gives you very sharp analysis, of course, but also the sense of having a ringside seat, right next to the players. So he describes a game where Reshevsky is playing and wins against another Russian, Boleslavsky. He says: “To understand the following curious events, one must know, first of all, that they occurred when Reshevsky was in tremendous time trouble, and secondly, that all this occurred very late at night. The 22nd round fell on a Saturday.” Reshevsky was an orthodox Jew, so, “For religious reasons, he started his Saturday games after… the rise of the evening star; on Fridays he played his games during the day, so as to finish before the rise of that same star.” So Reshevsky was not just moving very quickly because he didn’t have much time, but because he couldn’t play any longer. Bronstein is full of these flashes of insight, which explain what otherwise would be a mystery if you just studied the moves. It’s the kind of book one never stops reading, and it also marked a significant period in the development of chess. These were the golden years of what became known as the “Soviet School of Chess”, when there were an extraordinary number of very strong Soviet players, who developed openings in a way that had never been seen before. Their preparation went right into the middle game, and their analysis was much deeper and much more rigorous than anything that had happened before. It was the dawn of the professional age. They called themselves amateurs, because they had commissions in the Soviet armed forces, but they were the first fruits of a special generation created by a great nation committing itself to the idea of people playing chess full time. It was a mixture of things. Yes, Lenin in particular was very keen on chess. He was rather an addict, I think. Apparently he once said that one could make a revolution, or one could play chess, but that it wasn’t possible to do both. As you know, the Soviets liked to portray themselves as scientific in everything that they did. Marxism was scientific – dialectical materialism. Then there was the Sputnik and the space race. This is what Soviet man represented, a nation of engineers and scientists. Chess fitted in beautifully with that Soviet image because it was seen to be remorselessly logical and objective. It was also cheap, because all you needed were some wooden or plastic pieces. It could be given to very many people who were very poor. It was a way of proving that the Soviets were better than the West in a way that would have been more difficult to do in other fields that required more money. Also, at the individual level, if you were a bright, intelligent young Russian, it was a very good way for the authorities to deflect people who might otherwise be quite troublesome, because it was entirely apolitical. I suppose the Chinese today have a very similar attitude to chess – they like it very much. Lots of them, including Bronstein, Botvinnik and Tal, were Jewish. Jews were discriminated against in more conventional areas of expertise because there was a lot of antisemitism in Russia. Chess was somewhere where they could be tolerated. Here they were innocuous, they weren’t exploiting anyone, they weren’t gaining power or money. Also, without being flippant, what would you do for many, many hours in the evening, if you were in the Soviet Union in the 1950s? How, as a young person, would you actually amuse yourself? It would be perfectly sensible to spend five or six hours at the Moscow Central Chess Club, because what would be the alternative? Not a whole lot that was very interesting or exciting. And what would be interesting or exciting might also be rather dangerous. The Russians still, or part of what we used to call the Soviet Union. The Armenians are fantastically strong, they have hugely disproportionate strength as a nation – they’ve won the chess Olympiad twice in recent years. That’s partly a legacy of the Soviet period, and partly because they had a world champion in the early 1960s called Tigran Petrosian. That created a huge surge of interest in Armenia, just as Fischer’s did in America for a while. Another country that has a huge interest in chess and a disproportionate number of grandmasters is Iceland."