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By Tim Harding
When the Bolsheviks seized control of imperialist Russia in 1917, they vowed to remake society along socialist lines. So how did chess—a game played by individuals for personal pleasure—survive and even flourish in the new social order of the Soviet Union?
In the early 1920s Alexander F. Ilyin-Genevsky first used chess as a tool to promote literacy and social discipline in the military reservists' organization Vsevobuch, which he headed. He then initiated a campaign to persuade Soviet officials of the game's educational value. The first Soviet chess body, the All-Union Chess and Draughts Section, was formed in 1924 under the chairmanship of Nikolai Krylenko, a friend of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. This organization, which controlled all organized chess activity, adopted the slogan “Chess is an instrument of the cultural advancement of the masses.” Although chess had been a popular game in Russia for centuries, state support now led to the formation of chess clubs in trade unions and youth groups, with chess masters traveling widely to educate and recruit new players.
The game assumed increased importance during the first Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) when chess players were encouraged to be “Stakhanovites”—model workers whose enthusiasm would inspire others to fulfill the plan. Chess also became a model for the organization of other sports in Soviet society, for example in its structure of regional and national competitions and the classification of players. The number of registered chess players grew from 1000 in 1923 to 24,000 in 1924 and 150,000 by 1929. By 1934 there were 500,000 registered players; the number grew to nearly 2 million by 1960 and to over 3 million in 1976. At its peak in the early 1980s, the Soviet Chess Federation (which succeeded the Chess Section) had at least 4 million members, about a quarter of whom were schoolchildren.
Until the mid-1930s Soviet players had few opportunities for international competition, especially after Efim Bogoljubow, who had won an international tournament in Moscow in 1926, renounced his Soviet citizenship the following year. But the rise of Mikhail Botvinnik in the mid-1930s gave the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) a world class grandmaster in addition to a new generation of masters. Major international tournaments were held in Moscow in 1935 and 1936.
World War II curtailed chess activities but in the postwar era the USSR entered the world arena and dominated international competition for over four decades, in chess as in many other sports. The USSR became a member of World Chess Federation (Fédération Internationale des Échecs, or FIDE) in 1947, in time to cohost a 1948 match tournament of five players to decide the vacant world championship. Botvinnik was victorious and held the title until 1963 with two brief interruptions.
The concept of a Soviet school of chess then evolved, a propaganda exercise involving some rewriting of history. World champion Alexander Alekhine, who had emigrated to France after the Russian Revolution of 1917, was posthumously rehabilitated as one of the fathers of this school. However, the other prominent emigré, Bogoljubow, was never mentioned.
From the 1950s there was a shift in emphasis towards impressing overseas observers: the success of the USSR at chess—both in competition and in producing literature about the game—was intended to demonstrate, especially to Western intellectuals, the superiority of the Soviet system in general. The true reasons for the success of the USSR are generally recognized to be its large population, state subsidies (including free equipment for clubs and sinecures, or salaried positions, for master players) and the coaching system which—as in other Soviet sports—identified talented children and gave them special training.
The USSR's international activity was still restricted while Soviet leader Joseph Stalin lived; it did not enter the biennial Chess Olympiad of 1950 and it was not until Helsinki in 1952 that a Soviet team competed (and won) for the first time. Thereafter, the Soviet chess machine dominated the competitive chess scene almost without interruption until the breakup of the USSR, the most significant exceptions being the reign from 1972-1975 of American world champion Bobby Fischer and the Hungarian success in the Buenos Aires Olympiad of 1978. Top Soviet players had very few rivals in the 1950s and 1960s, causing the FIDE to make a rule restricting the number of Soviet players who could compete in the final stage of the world championship qualifying competition.
Other leading Soviet players included Vassily Smyslov, world champion from 1954 to 1955, and Mikhail Tal, the charismatic Latvian who defeated Botvinnik in 1960 but lost a return match next year. Botvinnik's ultimate successor was Tigran Petrosian, who held the world title for six years until losing to Boris Spassky in 1969. After Fischer, Anatoly Karpov was world champion until 1985, followed by Gary Kasparov, the current titleholder.
Major figures in the era of Soviet chess also included the Estonian Paul Keres; David Bronstein, who tied a title match in 1951; and Viktor Korchnoi, who defected to the West in 1976 and subsequently lost two title matches to Karpov. The only other significant defection was that of the teenage master Gata Kamsky to the United States in 1989. However, many other Soviet masters and chess grandmasters emigrated to the West and to Israel when restrictions were eased in the early 1990s. Some, notably Boris Gulko, were among the “refuseniks” who suffered persecution in the Brezhnev era after applying unsuccessfully for permission to emigrate.
Most grandmasters and top chess trainers, writers, and journalists, however, enjoyed a privileged existence as part of the Soviet elite. Botvinnik, Smyslov, and Karpov were awarded the Order of Lenin, and Kasparov has remarked that being “world chess champion was nothing short of a political post.”
The breakup of the USSR and subsequent economic difficulties in its former republics had an immediate negative impact on Russian chess publishing, and the inflation in postage rates and breakdown of service devastated its legion of correspondence players. While there remains significant official support for and patronage of chess in Russia and most of its neighbors, chess professionals have exploited new freedom to travel to seek Western prize money and publishers.
The popularity of chess in most nations of the former USSR nevertheless means that, while the former levels of subsidized activity cannot be matched, Russia and several of its neighbors will remain a center of excellence and major force in international chess competition for the foreseeable future.
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