Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  The winner was Mikhail Botvinnik, an exemplar of Stalinist model citizenry—apart from his Jewishness, though in common with so many Soviet chess players, that was a matter of descent, not practice. He said, “By blood I am Jewish, by culture Russian, by education Soviet.” (At the age of nine, he had determined that he would be a Communist Party member.) For the state, successful Jewish competitors brought a double benefit: they proclaimed the triumph of the system and the absence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

  During the quarter of a century after Botvinnik emerged as the world’s number one player, the championship shifted back and forth among a cohort of Soviets. Twice he lost the title; twice he regained it. He was really primus inter pares in a generation of unprecedented talent drawn from the length and breadth of the enlarged postwar Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  Chess was governed by the state through the State Committee for Physical Training and Sport (GosKomSport) and, more powerful still, the Ideology Department of the Communist Party Central Committee. Lev Abramov, who ran the Chess Department of the USSR Sports Committee for eleven years during the 1950s and 1960s, credits Botvinnik with cementing the ideological significance of chess within the Soviet system: “We had chess achievements before any other achievements. And chess came to be seen as tangible proof that the system worked, something completely reliable. Something that wouldn’t let the state down.” According to grandmaster Mark Taimanov, the Soviets would construct their propaganda edifice on three main pillars, “chess, the circus, and ballet. In all three the Soviet Union could be shown to be far ahead of the West.”

  While ballerinas and clowns enchanted audiences worldwide, verification of superiority in chess was the retention of the world championship. Botvinnik was defeated the first time by the solid and intensely musical Vasili Smyslov, famed for his beautiful baritone voice. Then there was Mikhail Tal, a tactical wizard whose games overflowed with pyrotechnics. He was followed by Tigran Petrosian, whose style relied on a profound, if unspectacular, conception of strategy. Petrosian’s successor was Boris Spassky, the first Soviet world champion to have to defend the title against a challenger not from his motherland.

  After war and evacuation, how had he found his future in chess?

  Like Fischer, Spassky was a second child and brought up in a family with an absent father. In the brief autobiography the world champion contributed to Jan van Reek’s Grand Strategy, he describes his mother, Ekaterina Petrovna, as coming from peasant stock, illegitimate, and nurtured by her godfather. She was a poorly educated, deeply religious woman—though when in a good mood, says Spassky, she sang a post—civil war song with “an optimistic tune. I preferred her Russian songs.” Spassky records how, in despair over sustaining her family, she sought support from the famous saintly monk Seraphim of Viriza. “The old man looked at my mother and said, ‘Be calm. Very soon everything will be alright.’” Spassky’s father, Vasili Vladimirovich, was from a family of priests—a source of pride for Spassky. His grandfather, a priest, had been elected from the Kursk region to the Fourth Duma in 1916. Nicholas II personally presented him with a golden cross. Vasili was a builder by trade: he began work as a laborer on a construction site but earned promotion first to the equivalent of foreman and then to supervisor. Boris Spassky has been widely described as half Jewish. He told the present authors that there was no truth in this; he was mystified as to how it came to be reported.

  In 1944, Spassky’s parents divorced. Vasili left his wife and three children, Georgi and Boris, and the youngest, Iraida, who was born in the year the marriage ended and who would later become a checkers champion, winning the USSR Women’s Championship several times. Back in Leningrad, Ekaterina embarked on a lonely struggle for survival, digging potatoes until the forty-kilogram sacks she had to carry damaged her back. His father gave what help he could and stayed in touch with the children.

  In the summer of 1946, Spassky passed his days watching the players in a chess pavilion “with a black knight on top” on an island in the Leningrad river, the Neva. “Long queen moves fascinated me. I fell in love with the white queen. I dreamed about caressing her in my pocket, but I did not dare to steal her. Chess is pure for me.” He had thirteen kopecks for his fare and a glass of water with syrup to see him through until the last streetcar carried him home. His feet were bare. “Soldiers’ boots were my worst enemy.”

  When the pavilion closed, he remembers, “it was a tragedy. Life without chess was like dying.” He searched the city “like a hungry dog” for a chess club. The Palace of Young Pioneers, the center run by the junior section of the Komsomol, the Communist Party Youth League, became the scene of his epiphany. Facing the Neva, the grandly pillared, marbled building was the former Anichkov Palace, home to a number of imperial favorites, including Catherine the Great’s lover Prince Potemkin, and to Tsar Aleksandr III. When not receiving ideological instruction or singing paeans to waving fields of collective wheat, the pioneers could play games, chess among them. The chess club met in the Tsar’s walnut-paneled former study, sitting under an enormous crystal chandelier and inspired by a painting of Lenin playing Gorky in sunlit Capri. (Gorky could not play chess.) Spassky borrowed his mother’s boots and went off to join the chess section. To this day he remembers a lecture given by grandmaster Grigori Levenfish on a 1925 game between Alekhine and the British player Frederick Yates: “A pawn majority attack, starting with b2—b4, was very instructive.”

  The club was the making of him. Leading players such as Mikhail Botvinnik, David Bronstein, and Igor Bondarevskii paid visits; its members included future grandmasters Mark Taimanov, Aleksandr Tolush, and Semion Furman. In Grand Strategy, Spassky compares Levenfish and Botvinnik in terms that say much about his prejudices. In Leningrad, “Levenfish was treated as a man of Russian culture and intelligence…. Botvinnik was regarded as a representative of the Komsomol, a thirties man of Soviet culture.”

  Among such stars present and future, the senior chess coach, Vladimir Zak, spotted the little boy’s huge talent immediately. The thirty-three-year-old Zak took on the role of guardian and tutor. As well as chess, Zak insisted on swimming and skating and on visits to the opera and ballet. According to Spassky, Zak looked at him “as if I were a miracle or boy prodigy.” And so he must have seemed: the others in his class were at least five years older. At eleven, Spassky gave a simultaneous display at the Minsk House of Officers. (Play had to be adjourned for fifteen minutes when the prodigy became upset after losing to an officer whom he had allowed to take back a move—never so generous again, he vowed.) He bought his first winter coat with his fee. Under Zak’s tutelage, Boris’s chess evolved quickly—so quickly that in 1948 he was given a monthly state stipend of 1,200 roubles—only 400 roubles less than his father and higher than the average salary of an engineer. (This was before the ten-to-one revaluation in the 1960s.) He was his family’s salvation. At this stage of his life, the preteen breadwinner was a tumult of emotions that he would learn later to suppress; a defeat meant storms of angry tears.

  The sun shines down on socialist chess. Left to right: Maxim Gorky, Nadezhda Krupskaia (Lenin’s wife), Vladimir Lenin. MOSCOW CHESS CLUB MUSEUM

  Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, Spassky’s career was one of effortless success, groomed by the chess authorities for the grandmaster status that such natural ability made his for the taking. In 1952, he parted from Vladimir Zak. His coach, tutor, and friend had realized that he had given all he could. To develop, his protégé needed a heavier hitter. The replacement was Aleksandr Kasimirovich Tolush. In chess terms, Tolush, a master of attack, was exactly the right man. Spassky “watched with delight how K. [Kasimirovich] mobilized reserves, manoeuvred, and created threats.” Tolush continued Spassky’s wider education, “teaching me how to eat with a knife and fork, how to knot and wear a tie, how to use a serviette and handkerchief, things like that.”

  In 1953, in a Bucharest tournament, he justified splitting from his first coach with a sensational win
in thirty-four moves over the world championship challenger Vasili Smyslov. But in Romania he learned about more than high-level chess. This was not long before the death of Stalin in March of that year, and the tremors of his latest, and last, purge—the “doctors’ plot”—were shaking Party and government. Laszlo Szabo, a Hungarian grandmaster, was in the lead, and in a Soviet team meeting, the “commissar” in charge of them read a telegram from the Sports Committee: “Stop fighting each other. Make draws. Stop Szabo.” The committee’s anxieties were unnecessary, says Spassky. “Szabo was stopped because he wasn’t strong enough. Even I won against him.”

  Two years later, Spassky won the World Junior Chess Championship in Antwerp, and a year after that he tied for first place as Soviet champion and became the youngest player ever to qualify for the Candidates round. He finished third at the Amsterdam Candidates tournament in 1956, making him by that measure one of the top five players in the world—and at the age of only nineteen. It all seemed so simple: a life full of promise, apparently destined for glory. He was now a student. In 1955, he had enrolled at Leningrad University, choosing journalism over mathematics. He says chess competitions prevented him from studying every day—and anyway, he had no talent for math. The young student was already being spoken of as a future world champion. Thanks to his chess, his family jumped the interminable housing queue, moving from one room of fourteen square meters to a “palace”—two rooms of twenty-eight square meters.

  Spassky at eleven, already seen as a “chess miracle” by his trainer, Vladimir Zak. NOVOSTI

  Then, just at the age when he was expected to secure his position within the ranks of the world’s elite, the highflier’s career stalled and went into a spin. The nadir came in an encounter with Mikhail Tal in the 1958 Soviet championship. Spassky needed to beat him to enter the Portoroz Interzonal, lost, and cried for the first time in years. His future opponent for the world championship, Tigran Petrosian, participated in the tournament and watched the game. “When I went up to the board, Spassky raised his eyes. They were the eyes of a cornered animal.”

  Spassky now discovered how easily the authorities’ benign smile could turn to a frown. Later that year, in the student team championship in his home city, he was on first board and was defeated by the talented American William Lombardy, who would be Fischer’s chess aide in Iceland. The United States took first place. Criticized for not preparing sufficiently, Spassky was banned from playing abroad for the next two years. He also twice failed to qualify for the Interzonals and so for the Candidates rounds in 1959 and 1962. “My nervous energy was completely destroyed,” Spassky recalls.

  His game’s entering a trough coincided with turmoil in his relationships. In 1960, he parted from Aleksandr Tolush. Mikhail Beilin, who was head of the Sports Committee’s Chess Department from 1967 to 1971, remembers, “Tolush was quite depressed after this episode—he didn’t have children of his own, and he had spent a lot of time with Boris. He could empathize with bad boys, and he taught Spassky a great deal.” Spassky acknowledged his debt to Tolush:

  My play became active over the whole board. My imagination, intuition, sacrifices, and tactics improved. I had almost reached my greatest strength, staying cool during a crisis.

  Tolush’s influence endured. In the 1969 world championship match against Petrosian, long after teacher and pupil split, grandmaster Efim Geller still detected the trainer’s fingerprints on Spassky’s game. At a critical moment, Geller wrote, “Kasimiro-vich’s cannon roared.” But after eight years together, according to Spassky, their relationship slowly wore out: “Tolush complained that I had become an unguided missile.”

  The coach was exhausted from constantly having to shield his pupil from trouble, with school, the KGB, the USSR Chess Federation. There were also domestic problems.

  In 1959, he had married a philology student at his university, Nadezhda Latyntseva (Tolush opposed his choice of bride). A daughter, Tania, was born a year later. Married life cannot have been easy, living with Spassky’s mother, brother, and sister in that twenty-eight-square-meter “palace.” Shortly after Tania’s birth, Boris suggested a divorce, explaining later, “We had become like bishops of opposite colors.” Nadezhda refused—and refused to leave the palace. A state of war ensued. Through his trade union chess contacts, Spassky found her a one-room apartment and she finally moved, but the divorce proceedings were still very drawn out, naturally preying on his mind.

  During this tough phase, Spassky had a tendency to dwell on lost games, on might-have-beens; a tendency toward melancholy and pessimism. However, by 1962 both his personal life and his chess had rebounded. His divorce had finally gone through, and he had met his future second wife, Larisa Solovieva. They got to know each other on a beach in Vilinagorsk, a small town near Leningrad, discovering that they lived in the same block back in the city. They married in 1966.

  Spassky also had a new, more congenial trainer, Igor Bondarevskii. Bondarevskii was descended from the Don Cossacks; his nickname was “Cossack of the Don.” War damage to his nervous system prevented him from making the most of his chess gifts, and he competed in his last tournament in 1963. Spassky describes him as sharp, lively, and inquisitive, presenting himself as dignified and modest. He adds that an explosive temperament combined with “ambition and vanity made it impossible [for Bondarevskii] to forgive the sins of others.” Nevertheless, Spassky, who revealingly dubbed him “Father,” avows that their years together from 1961 to 1969 were “the best of my life.” (Bondarevskii remained his trainer until 1972.) “[He] became my friend, clever adviser, excellent coach, good psychologist, and, to a certain extent, my father.” Endurance, discipline, the will to fight to the last pawn—these were the qualities the new coach aimed to develop in his pupil.

  Under the influence of Bondarevskii, Spassky’s results improved steadily, rather than dramatically. At the end of 1961, he won the USSR championship outright, with ten wins, nine draws, and only one defeat. He was runner-up in a tournament in Havana the following year and tied for first place in the USSR championship of 1963, coming second in the playoffs behind grandmaster Leonid Stein. He began to take seriously the prospect of capturing the world title, telling his trainer in 1964, “I will be world champion.” He meant he would take the crown from his fellow Soviet, the Armenian Tigran Petrosian.

  The Interzonal tournament of 1964 was in Amsterdam, and a first-place tie with Tal, Smyslov, and Larsen saw Spassky into the Candidates, the culminating stage in the world championship cycle. As the result of Fischer’s accusing the Soviets of collusion, the Candidates round was held as a series of head-to-head matches. There was also a condition that only three Soviets could qualify for the Candidates, so competition between Soviets at the Interzonal stage was even fiercer than between candidates of different nationalities. To qualify, a Soviet had to finish in third place, while a non-Soviet could qualify by finishing eighth. Spassky thought that unfair.

  Tournaments, featuring many players, were the usual form of competition. Spassky had never participated in a lengthy match before—a series of games against a single opponent—and found them physically and mentally draining. Nonetheless, 1965 was his annus mirabilis. He defeated first Paul Keres in an exciting, tightly fought contest, then Efim Geller, then the former world champion Mikhail Tal. So only Tigran Petrosian remained between Spassky and the title. Spassky was not among the Armenian’s greatest admirers, characterizing him as the king who “reigned but did not rule”; world champion, but not the strongest in the world. He also felt sorry for himself, a poor student facing the socially and politically well-protected national hero of Armenia.

  The 1966 final was held in Moscow, and outside chess circles was virtually ignored in the West. Spassky performed more than creditably, losing by only one point. His and Petrosian’s styles were diametrically opposed. Spassky’s direct, open, attacking game, often described as “universal,” had no systemic weaknesses: He was strong in attack, doughty in defense, exceptional in the midd
le game, outstanding in the endgame; he was capable of marathon slogs and of stunning miniatures. Petrosian’s approach was strategic, slow, and, to those spectators not attuned to its infinite subtlety, soporific. Most chess players have a style, a chess fingerprint—but rarely one as distinctive as Petrosian’s. It required an opponent to adapt or die. Asked later why Petrosian had won, Botvinnik said Spassky did not manage “to program himself for Petrosian.”

  Two months later, in Santa Monica, Spassky won what he describes as the tournament of his life (Fischer finished second). It brought him real money: $5,000. There followed a minor low that some ascribe to the personal contentment brought by his marriage to Larisa and the birth of his son, Vasili, in 1967. (That is not easy to reconcile with his complaint that when he lived alone, too much of his time went into domestic chores, such as ironing his shirts.) Reflecting on 1967, Spassky remembers, “I was a good Soviet citizen. I was traveling, playing, and enjoying life.” Back in the Candidates in 1968, he again sailed through against Efim Geller (5.5 to 2.5), Bent Larsen (5.5 to 2.5), and Viktor Korchnoi (6.5 to 3.5), losing only two games of the twenty-six in total. For the win over Larsen, he received the Soviet Badge of Merit. (In 1955, he had been awarded a medal for Valorous Labor, a comparatively run-of-the-mill Soviet decoration, and comments wryly in Grand Strategy, “That’s all I got.”)

  Once again he faced Tigran Petrosian for the world title. The opening ceremony of the contest took place at the Moscow Television Theatre so that TV audiences could watch. However, once again, Petrosian vs. Spassky failed to ignite the interest of a wider Western audience. Unsurprisingly, the proceedings were conducted in a civilized manner; there were no major rows or controversies.

  Most thought that the forty-year-old champion had little chance against the thirty-two-year-old contender. The Armenian’s chess had hit a ceiling, though we should remember that he was the only world champion since 1934 to have defended his throne successfully. He was not comfortable with the title or the adulation it brought him from the Armenian community worldwide. In one dazzling game, there was deafening applause in the hall, and a group of Petrosian fans tried to march onto the dais. The British chess official and writer Harry Golombek was there: “Only one aged Armenian succeeded in escaping the attendants and reaching the stage, where he clasped Petrosian by the hand.” Petrosian was quoted as saying before his second championship encounter with Spassky, “I never wanted to become world champion. I only wanted to play good chess. For six years now I have not taken a drop of alcohol, nor have I smoked. My doctor told me not to get excited at hockey or soccer matches because I had to have very strong nerves to play chess. But what do I have from life?”