Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  And yet, Fischer’s powers of concentration were legendary. Sometimes he would stare angrily when there was a whisper or rustle of a sweet wrapping. But on other occasions, a door would slam or there would be a commotion in the hall and he would be oblivious. At restaurants, he would take his pocket set to the table, shutting out the rest of the world entirely. In tournaments, other players might stretch their legs between moves, perhaps wander over to observe another game, engage in small talk with a fellow competitor. Fischer would for the most part remain seated, hunched forward over the board, or assume his alternative pose, leaning back, head cocked to one side, with his long legs and his size fourteen feet stretched out under the table, but always with his eyes boring deep into the squares, pieces, and patterns.

  If it was pointed out, as often it was, that other competitors in a tournament had to play under identical conditions to Fischer’s, he would reply, justifiably, that it was he who attracted the most attention: Unless the audience were held back, they would jostle around his table. The press wanted pictures not of Smyslov or Geller or Petrosian or Larsen or Olafsson or Portisch, but of Fischer—photographers were constantly snapping away at him as he arrived at and left a tournament or match location.

  Yet it is tempting to see his demands over lighting and noise, in part, as a means to another end. It appeared that Fischer always needed to be in control. Forcing concessions on the part of organizers was an affirmation of his power, that play was going ahead under his terms, not theirs. Even when tournament organizers did their best to preempt Fischer’s objections by pledging conditions in advance such as that the audience would be so many feet from the stage and the like, Fischer would still manage to identify a fault or two. Every now and again he would test the patience of the organizers to the limit, and then, when they were on the brink of despair, he would suddenly, and without explanation, have a change of heart and either impose an additional condition or pass over his original complaint as though it had never been made.

  Fischer in 1970: the will to win. UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

  His attitude to money was equally mysterious. At one level, his insistence on high fees was straightforward. He believed he should be paid at appropriate rates, appropriate rates being those on a par with sporting superstars such as Arnold Palmer or Joe Frazier. Never mind that chess had never been in the same league as table tennis, let alone golf or heavyweight boxing. Never mind that, with few spectators and little sponsorship, chess had no secure financial foundations outside the Soviet Union.

  Fischer always maintained that his ambition was to get rich. He would say so repeatedly and unabashedly, in a way that made even Americans blanch. “I am only interested in chess and money,” he told a journalist from the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. His incessant financial demands came across still worse in Europe, where emphasis on money was considered embarrassing, even vulgar. In weighing up the bids for the Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian Candidates matches, Fischer declared that one consideration should outweigh all others: which city paid the most. In a letter to the up-and-coming chess prodigy Walter Browne in January 1971, inviting Browne to become his full-time manager and chess second, Fischer says he believes chess is merely a means of making money. Without any evident irony, he remarks that chess players did not become rich because their egocentric nature led them to work alone. But the moneymaking possibilities were limitless. In what he calls the chess business, he could make $100,000 in the first year and double that in the next.

  But what, apart from his expensive taste in suits, did Fischer want money for? He had no dependants, he did not yearn for luxuries, such as going to the opera or collecting art. He did not own a car, he never traveled for the sake of travel, and as far as food was concerned, his preference was for quantity over quality. One has the impression with Fischer that money was not about material possession. He was always reluctant to allow any marketing of himself, whatever the financial windfall. He was appalled by the notion that anyone else might make money out of his name. When his mother wanted to market purses with his signature, he furiously jumped on the idea.

  Cash itself was about status and again about control and domination: if he was offered five, he wanted ten; if he was offered twenty, he wanted fifty. Perhaps his unwillingness even to put his signature on a contract stemmed from the same need; an agreement took his control away. Somehow, the actual amounts were immaterial.

  In the media, Fischer was routinely portrayed with a range of derogatory adjectives. He was insolent, arrogant, rude, uncouth, spoiled, self-centered, abusive, offensive, vain, greedy, vulgar, disrespectful, boastful, cocky, bigoted, fanatical, cruel, paranoid, obsessive, and monomaniacal. But what is so intriguing is that those who knew him best rarely had a bad word to say about him. “Oh, that’s just Bobby,” they’d say, smiling indulgently, when discussing one or other bizarre episode. Something in Fischer spoke to his friends as the perpetual lost teenager, to be helped, not punished; to be assisted in realizing his potential for stardom, not hindered. Even allowing for the natural desire to be part of the celebrity’s entourage, it is striking how they chorus, “He was a wonderful kid,” when they are talking about him as a man.

  American chess player Jim Sherwin says Fischer was just a “rough kid” from Brooklyn. Lothar Schmid, the chief arbiter in Reykjavik, tried to understand the American as he tried to understand his children: “He was not a bad boy.” Boris Spassky saw him as “always seventeen.” “He was a boy all the time,” says the former captain of the U.S. Olympic team, Eliot Hearst. “I don’t want you to paint a negative image of him; he was very nice.” And they also all point out that Fischer was capable of great kindness. As a child he would play opponents for a dollar a game and would give twenty-five cents of each dollar to his wheelchair-bound mentor, Jack Collins. In Curaçao, Fischer was the only competitor to visit Mikhail Tal when Tal fell ill and was hospitalized.

  In his biography of Fischer, Brady points out that Fischer’s tantrums at tournaments were aimed always at organizers, not at players. Nobody has a single complaint to make about Fischer’s behavior once he finally sat down at the board. He was the perfect gentleman. There was no gamesmanship, he never deliber ately tried to distract or disturb his opponent. He followed the rules strictly and demanded the same of others. On one well-known occasion, when Fischer was playing Wolfgang Unzicker in Buenos Aires in 1960, he touched a pawn, intending to move it; his fingers then hovered as he suddenly spotted that the move was disastrous. Another less upright player might have announced, “J’adoube” (“I adjust”), a legitimate way of touching a piece when one merely wants to reposition it in the middle of a square. Fischer moved the pawn—and rapidly lost the game. Unzicker, who observed the whole thing, though he was away from the board, says, “If Fischer had moved another piece, I was determined not to protest. But ever since this moment I have known that Fischer is a gentleman at the chessboard.”

  Perhaps the most curious insight into what drove Fischer—curious to the point of being uncanny—comes in Elias Canetti’s masterpiece of obsession, Die Blendung (The Blinding), in English entitled Auto-da-Fé, published eight years before Fischer was born.

  A central character is a hunchback Jewish dwarf and chess fanatic—Fischerle. Fischerle is a thief who lives off his wife’s earnings from prostitution and who dreams of defeating the world chess champion Capablanca, reducing him to tears. He introduces himself with, “Do you play chess? A person who can’t play chess isn’t a person.” Fischerle passes half his life at the chessboard, and it is only there that people treat him as normal, or perhaps normally abnormal, with his potent memory for games and rampaging play.

  During his games his partners were far too much afraid of him to interrupt him with objections…. He dreamed of a life in which eating and sleeping could be got through while his opponent was making his moves.

  Fischerle has unusually long arms and total recall of any chess game he has studied. He imagines becoming world champion an
d changing his name to Fischer. “He’ll have new suits made at the best possible tailor…. A gigantic palace will be built with real castles, knights, pawns, just as it ought to be.” Bobby, who had long arms and total recall of his games, once said he wanted to hire an architect to build a house in the shape of a rook. Canetti wrote Auto-da-Fé in the turmoil of 1930s Vienna. The prophetic similarities between the fictional Fischerle and the real Fischer have their roots in the young Canetti’s attempt to make sense of the apparent chaos of human actions. Thus each of his characters holds a completely personal perspective—and, indifferent to externalities, is driven down one path, like a live one-man rocket. Fischerle’s/Fischer’s view of the world is unidirectional, expressing itself through chess, governed only by the game and the power and rewards it could bring.

  Commentators have made much of the similarities between Fischer and Spassky, pointing out that Spassky too was a second child, had a single-parent upbringing, and spent his early years in poverty. In fact, challenger and champion could scarcely have had more contrasting personalities and attitudes to life. Nor were America’s prosperity and democracy remotely comparable with the Stalinist horrors among which Spassky grew up and where the chessboard provided protection, fame, and, in Soviet terms, a fortune.

  4. CHILD OF DESTRUCTION

  Chess provides indisputable proof of the superiority of socialist culture over the declining culture of capitalist societies.

  — ALEKSANDR KOTOV AND MIKHAIL YUDOVICH, THE SOVIET SCHOOL OF CHESS

  Spassky was born in Leningrad on 30 January 1937 into the maelstrom of suspicion, denunciation, arrest, torture, confession, and death known as the Great Terror—Stalin’s liquidation of a wholly fantastic conspiracy against the Soviet state. Such was the upheaval that in the year of Spassky’s birth, each of the most senior positions in the provincial Party and state apparatus was vacated and refilled, on average, five times. The Great Terror cost between two million and seven million lives. So frenzied was the destruction that an exact total will never be known.

  Stalin placed Spassky’s home city, Leningrad, at the center of the imagined plots against which he directed his savagery. The Leningrad poet Yevgeni Rein, unpublished during the Soviet era, conjured up the deadly effect, writing of the Vitebsk Canal in his home city: “… malodorous and sticky, / like a poisoner palming cyanide, / creeping into union with the river.”

  This I have seen and cannot unremember;

  The war, which destroyed and delivered me,

  And this canal of mine, while I have breath, will

  Companion me until my dying day.

  On 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive ground and air attack on the Soviet Union. The German leader attached particular significance to the taking of Leningrad, a city he despised as “the cradle of Bolshevism.” On 8 September 1941, Leningrad came under heavy assault from the Luftwaffe; incendiary bombs wiped out the food warehouses. Faced with the threat of starvation, the city authorities ordered the evacuation of thousands of children. With his seven-year-old brother, Georgi, four-year-old Boris Spassky was sent to the Kirov district, in the shadow of the Ural Mountains well to the east of Moscow. “Fortunately our train wasn’t bombed,” he says. It was there that he learned the rudiments of chess, watching the other inhabitants of the children’s home where they had been placed. In 1943, his parents escaped the siege and took their two children to Sverdlovka, forty kilometers from Moscow, saving them from starvation.

  Behind him in Leningrad, the agony of the German siege was prolonged for nine hundred days, until January 1944. Over a million of those left behind died, 200,000 directly from German shelling and air raids, but the majority from starvation and cold: in the winter the temperature fell to minus twenty degrees centigrade. The living were too exhausted to bury the dead or fell into the grave after them. Cannibalism was endemic, the bodies of children preferred because their flesh was tender; for a long time afterward, Leningraders could not bring themselves to buy meat pies on the street. Spassky’s future rival Viktor Korchnoi survived only because so many in his family perished, leaving behind their ration cards. “Were we stronger chess players—tougher—because of our background?” Korchnoi asked the authors rhetorically. “On the contrary; imagine what my generation would have produced without this trauma.”

  Returning to Leningrad in 1946, the nine-year-old Spassky would have passed through a lunar landscape of destruction wrought by the retreating German army. The suburbs had been demolished. Scarcely a tree was standing where thousands had stood before. Just outside the city, the Tsar’s Village, renamed for Aleksandr Pushkin in the year of Spassky’s birth, was dominated by fresh graves, Catherine the Great’s breathtaking Baroque palace reduced to a devastated shell. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg noted that not a building in the city was without a wound or scar.

  Amid the ruins of his city, chess provided the near destitute young Spassky with a connection to society, subsistence, and a much needed sense of order.

  In no other country would chess have bestowed on a child the financial support Spassky received. But in no other country was chess seen as part of the state system and its players’ success as a symbol of that system’s superiority. In the Soviet Union, chess stars were lauded and privileged, the top players revered household names, their results followed in the newspapers, their faces recognized in the streets.

  Official encouragement of chess had not begun with the revolution in 1917. Some Tsars approved of chess: Nicholas II conferred the original “grandmaster” title on five players of legendary skill during the great St. Petersburg tournament of 1914: Emanuel Lasker, José Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Frank Marshall, and Siegbert Tarrasch.

  But with the revolution came the idea of the game as a socialist sport. Three years after the revolution, a strong chess master, an old Bolshevik who had played chess in exile with Lenin, Aleksandr Fiodorvich Iliin-Zhenevskii, was appointed chief commissar at the General Reservists’ Organization in Moscow, responsible for preparing young men for conscription into the factory workers’ militia, the Red Guard, and later the Red Army, providing them with both physical and military training. The physical training included a range of sporting activities, ball games, athletics, swimming, boxing, and so on.

  Iliin-Zhenevskii believed that chess could take on a political role and purpose and that it should be subordinated to the ideological struggle. In the USSR, he wrote, “chess cannot be apolitical as in capitalist countries.” Sport improved discipline; it taught patience, composure, and determination; it enhanced concentration, endurance, and willpower; it sharpened and focused the mind. Chess in particular could help educate the proletariat and sharpen the minds of the workers, offering an ideologically sound activity after the rigors of a hard day’s toil in the factory or on the collective farm.

  In 1924, the All-Union Chess Section was established, answering to the Supreme Council for Physical Education. The chairman of this Chess Section was Nikolai Krylenko, short, bald, and burly, an old Bolshevik who shared a platform with Lenin, rousing the masses during the October revolution. Lenin appointed him supreme commander and commissar for war. Later he became public prosecutor for the revolutionary tribunals, terrifying defendants and sending thousands to their deaths before he himself became one of the victims in 1938. To the British agent Bruce Lockhart, he was a “degenerate epileptic.”

  In the previous fourteen years, working alongside Iliin-Zhenevskii, Krylenko had created a Soviet chess production line. “We must for once and all put an end to the neutrality of chess…. We must organize shock brigades of chess players and immediately begin fulfilling the five-year plan for chess,” he proclaimed. Hundreds of experts began to receive a stipend from the state. They were dispatched to the far-flung corners of the Soviet empire to evangelize and proselytize. Krylenko founded and edited a chess magazine, 64, still going today. Major newspapers such as Pravda and Izvestia began to carry regular chess columns.

  The results
were spectacular. It is estimated that there were only 1,000 registered chess players in 1923. By 1929, the number had risen to 150,000. In 1949, four years before Stalin’s death, 130,000 people entered a tournament for collective farm workers. By 1951, there were 1 million registered players; by the end of that decade, almost two million; by the mid-1960s, three million.

  At the end of World War II, much to Stalin’s pleasure (he telegraphed them, “Well done lads”), a Soviet team twice beat one from the United States, but the ultimate prize—the world championship—still awaited capture. In the interwar years, the Soviet Union had fought shy of such international competitions. In 1945, the title was held by the Russian exile Alexander Alekhine. He was not someone the Soviets wanted to claim as their own, having (in their eyes) the temerity to rail continuously against the Bolshevik takeover.

  During the war, Alekhine (then living in France) had been discredited by allowing himself to be used by the Nazis to propagate their racialist worldview. With his reputation in tatters, this peerless champion died alone in a hotel in the Portuguese resort of Estoril. A picture taken after his death shows him still in his overcoat, slumped over a desk. There in front of him is a chessboard.

  In 1948, the International Chess Federation arranged a tournament to decide Alekhine’s successor. It involved five of the top players in the world—Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasili Smyslov, and Paul Keres from the USSR, Samuel Reshevsky from the United States, and, from Holland, the former world champion Max Euwe.