Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  For Spassky, it was the opposite, both in lifestyle and in morale. “On the eve of the Petrosian match,” he declared, “I felt magnificent.” Still, it was no walk-over. The match swayed to and fro. Spassky divided it into four parts:

  1. Games 1–9 my sprint and fatigue;

  2. Games 10–13 I am a punch bag;

  3. Games 14–17 the turning point;

  4. Games 18–23 my final offensive.

  After game seventeen, Spassky was relaxing in his apartment when some heavy blows rattled the front door. “An Armenian guy had discovered my refuge and was trying to storm it. He was shouting: ‘Spassky, don’t win against our Petrosian!!’” Spassky ignored the threat. “I shouted back, ‘Don’t you worry, I will beat him.’ The guy then shut up and disappeared.”

  He did win, gaining the title by two points, after six victories, four defeats, and thirteen draws. The chess was not always pretty, although some games—the brilliant fifth, for example, in which Spassky advanced his queen pawn all the way to the seventh rank—came to be viewed as classics. Arguably, Tigran Petrosian was the most difficult player to defeat in the history of chess. Tigr is Russian for “tiger.” Not so much tiger, more snake or cunning fox, commentators thought. He had infinite patience, awaiting exactly the right moment to pounce. Spassky called him “a unique match pugilist. His forte is that he makes it almost impossible to lay a glove on him.” Petrosian put it differently: “I try to avoid chance. Those who rely on chance should play cards or roulette.”

  Moscow 1969: At the microphone, Viktor Ivonin salutes the new world champion, Boris Spassky (fourth from right). VIKTOR IVONIN

  Afterward, a fatigued Spassky condemned the protracted qualifying process: “The system has become worse than ever before.” Anticipating his defense in 1972, he said, “I want to express beforehand my sincerest sympathy to the challenger who succeeds in breaking through all the trials and obstacles.”

  5. THE RUSSIAN FROM LENINGRAD

  Our goal is to make the life of the Soviet people still better, still more beautiful, and still happier.

  — LEONID BREZHNEV, 1971

  In Russia, truth almost always assumes an entirely fantastic character.

  — FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, “SOME OBSERVATIONS ON UNTRUTH”

  Spassky went to Reykjavik to serve—in the eyes of Soviet society—as an icon as well as a player.

  He was a flawed icon, at least in the view of the authorities and many of his peers. He stands out as being a member of the system’s awkward squad. How awkward? That is a question that can be answered only within the wider political and cultural context.

  When imposing its will, the Party did not operate in a historical vacuum. In The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, Archie Brown identifies continuities with the Tsarist era: the tendency to place faith in people, particularly a strong leader, rather than in institutional structures, the dread of chaos, and the high premium placed on loyalty and unity. Added to these are systemic characteristics: the gulf between rulers and ruled and between intelligentsia and the masses, and the perception as normal of such state measures of control as internal passports, secrecy, censorship, surveillance, exile. Fear of anarchy and its correlative, acceptance of order, permeated all classes, providing a widespread distrust of liberalization.

  The Great Terror shaped the mentality of Soviet generations to come, creating a society constantly accommodating to the uncertainties of life and to the injustices and arbitrary use of power. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Khrushchev’s revelatory five-and-a-half-hour speech to the Twentieth Party Congress three years later, the beginning of the so-called thaw, was the most momentous political event of Spassky’s early life. But the opening of the camp gates did not mean rehabilitation for the thousands of former prisoners. Many Soviet citizens remained convinced that “they must have done something.” Suspicion hung in the air like a contagion. And as the historian Catherine Merridale, the author of Night of Stone, has it, “Among Stalin’s many legacies, the habit of vigilance was the most enduring.”

  Khrushchev’s speech began a debate that could have no closure. A democratic movement had emerged that the regime could crush—but only at a cost it was not prepared to pay. A long, hard, never-resolved battle ensued between dogmatists and liberals, while the Party tried to find some middle ground where it could maintain its power over all aspects of life without returning to the barbarism of the Stalinist era.

  Where were the limits of autonomy at any given time? These can be seen only in the reaction of the authorities in the barren volcanic landscape of Soviet cultural life; dissent flared up, was subdued, and flared again. What was expected of chess players was the same as that expected of writers and artists: in the words of the Writers Union, “wholehearted dedication to the ideas of communism and boundless loyalty to the cause of the Party.”

  On the morning of 14 October 1964, Khrushchev was ousted, attacked by his successors, Andrei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev, for “harebrained schemes, half-baked ideas and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality, boasting and empty rhetoric, attraction to rule by fiat, the refusal to take into account all the achievements of science and practical experience.” The twenty-two men who now constituted the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee—the control room of the state—had an average age of sixty-two. Born in 1906, Brezhnev himself had been a communist since 1931. The youngest full Politburo member, Fiodor Kulakov, was born in 1918 and had been a member of the Party since 1940. These were men hardened in the forge of Stalinism, comfortable with the cast-iron language of socialism. The message was that through the efforts of the people, the building of socialism had continued even under Stalin’s “distortions.” Anyone who was in the public eye, including chess players, was expected to display socialist values.

  In Pravda, the then Komsomol leader Sergei Pavlov wrote that the regime faced the task of “combating evidence of nihilism, thoughtless and presumptuous rejection of authority, and scornful or ignorant attitudes toward the historical experience of the older generation of Soviet people.” He might not have been thinking of chess at that moment, but as chairman of the State Sports Committee, he would play a central part in Spassky’s Reykjavik saga.

  However, Archie Brown points out that although cultural freedom under Brezhnev was curbed, there was no blanket prohibition on free intellectual activity; instead, the authorities took a pragmatic approach, recognizing the necessity for more openness in natural sciences and, to a limited extent, in the social sciences if the economy was to be modernized. There were also diplomatic considerations, such as the need for better relations with the West as tensions grew with China. But these opposing pressures did not stop Brezhnev from warning that intellectuals who failed to serve the cause of building communism would get what they deserved.

  How did the authorities impose their views? In the case of the professional class, it was done primarily through their state organizations. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn complained bitterly that the leadership of the Writers Union conceived its duty as representing the Party to the writer rather than vice versa. Lev Abramov was in charge of the Chess Department of the Sports Committee for more than eleven years from the mid-1950s: he saw himself as having a two-way role. “I was expressing the opinion of the players to the authorities, and at the same time I was trying to support the general policy of our party and state.” He had come to manage chess from a position of high state responsibility and trust. A building engineer by profession, at the end of his professional career he had been chief engineer in construction for the All-Union defense plants. His experience with the Party and government meant that the Sports Committee could generally rely on him to understand what policy should be without being explicitly told.

  Officials had an assortment of sticks and carrots with which to keep the elite players in check. The Party’s role as gatekeeper to travel was one of its most potent control mechanisms. The Soviet Union’s borders were closed to its own people, who had no
legal right to travel abroad. There were two classes of Soviet citizen, went a bitter Soviet quip: those who obtained foreign travel passports and those who did not.

  To be granted a foreign travel passport, the would-be traveler had to submit an exhaustive personal dossier that included a Party reference on moral and political maturity. Even when all the hoops had been jumped through, a passport could be withheld at the last moment or “lost” in the Foreign Ministry. The would-be traveler was instructed to excuse himself to his hosts on grounds of work, illness, or family commitments. The grandmasters David Bronstein and Edouard Gufeld could testify to lost passports at the last moment making travel to international tournaments impossible. Even Latvian ex—world champion Mikhail Tal was not immune. During the Olympiad in Cuba in 1966, he was involved in an altercation in a nightclub. Hit on the head with a bottle (it is said by an envious boyfriend of the woman with whom he was dancing), he was sent to hospital and was ruled out of chess action for several days. The next Olympiad took place two years later in Lugano. Tal was at the airport with all the other grandmasters when the vice chairman of the Sports Committee approached him and said, “And you, Mikhail Nekhemievich, can return to Riga.”

  Chess officials of the period all adamantly deny that restrictions were placed on travel as a form of punishment. Their line is that trips had to be limited because of a shortage of funds. Thus, all the cases of restrictions cited to them can be explained by priorities —who was on form, who was already abroad, who had been abroad recently and should give way to another contender equally qualified.

  Although Spassky had tasted the authorities’ displeasure, his brilliance as a player probably saved him from later restrictions. According to Mikhail Beilin, “Spassky without doubt did things no one else was allowed to do. The higher you reached in chess, master, international master, grandmaster, the more you were allowed to get up to mischief. Others would never have been permitted to go abroad if they acted in the same way as Spassky. He had a very independent character.”

  As countless Soviet citizens discovered to their cost, independence of character did not amuse the authorities. Spassky could not be free of the Soviet system. Nonetheless, he demanded and enjoyed a rare measure of personal autonomy in belief and expression, an autonomy that he carried into Reykjavik. To comprehend what set him apart, we must return to the war he survived and the city in which he was raised.

  “The struggle against Nazism was the greatest test the Soviet people ever endured; perhaps the greatest in the whole history of Russia,” writes Catherine Merridale. “The effort of will, the tenacity and stoicism that it demanded were beyond the range of previous experience, more terrible and more prolonged than anything most of the Soviet people, veterans of so many emergencies already, had ever seen.”

  That was without doubt true of the defense of Leningrad. Nevertheless, there was a substantial element of myth making in the official accounts of the siege, a myth that spoke of the wholly selfless Soviet patriotism of citizens and stressed the heroic role of the Party in sustaining the city and its people. The myth contradicted the reality of panic among the authorities and the continuance of political control by terror, even at the darkest moments during the German attack.

  The myth ignored the brutalization of the people. In his Europe: A History, Norman Davies comments, “Descriptions of carousing in the Party House, alongside corpses in the street and scientific workers dead at their laboratory benches, only add to the tally of inhumanity.”

  The myth making that came out of triumph over Germany would affect Boris Spassky in a number of ways. According to the contemporary Soviet journalist and author Vasili Grossman, the hardships of the Great Patriotic War (as World War II was named) had a decisive influence on Russian self-consciousness. With victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, a victory that cost a million lives, Soviet Russians began to differentiate themselves from other nationalities, and the word Russian acquired a positive meaning. It is a historical commonplace that Stalin chose to revive Russian patriotism to fuel the Herculean war effort, but he also used the war to proclaim state nationalism. State nationalism was differentiated from the nationalism of modern European countries. It had nothing to do with love of country. The Soviet nationalist had a profound, respectful, and loving attachment to the socialist state that in turn protected and cherished its loyal citizens. State nationalism was to become the sole form of patriotism acceptable to a socialist country. It was state nationalism that Spassky was expected to express in his playing. Soviet chess players must never forget they played in red shirts.

  A second source of influence emanating from the mythology of the war was the belief summed up in the phrase Nashe Luchshe—“Ours (Means) Better,” that the system must necessarily triumph. Its correlative was a constant fear of public belittling, of having the shortcomings of the system exposed. The long-serving Soviet ambassador to Washington, D.C., Anatoli Dobrynin, records wryly in his memoirs that when Brezhnev visited Nixon in 1973, Brezhnev himself instructed the Soviet security service to organize his trip so that “he would in no way appear to the Americans inferior to the president of the United States.”

  A self-imposed barrier stood in the way of attempts to make a reality of “Ours (Means) Better”: the culture of secrecy and isolation that condemned people to live in an astonishing state of ignorance. This was not something that affected only ordinary citizens. Remarkably, in 1959, when Khrushchev was invited to stay with President Eisenhower at the presidential retreat, Camp David, no one around the Soviet leader knew what or where it was. In his memoirs, Khrushchev remembered, “I couldn’t for the life of me find out what Camp David was. I began to make inquiries from our Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They said they didn’t know, either.” Khrushchev worried that the American authorities were slighting him by proposing Camp David, that somehow he was being discriminated against, put into quarantine. Eventually he discovered that it was considered an honor to be entertained in the equivalent of the presidential dacha. “I can laugh about it now, but I’m a bit ashamed. It shows how ignorant we were in some respects.”

  The chess world was no better informed. A startling lack of knowledge about Fischer’s recent history was revealed at a meeting of the chess authorities with Spassky and his team on 13 August 1971 to review the champion’s preparation. The report of the outcome by Viktor Baturinskii, the director of the Central Chess Club, records: “A request was made to determine (through Soviet correspondents in the U.S. or by other means) the reasons why Fischer did not take part in any competitions for around a year and a half (1968–1970), where he was during this period and what he was doing, and also to gather information about Fischer’s behavior and statements in the future.” In the same month, Spassky’s “Training Plan” also sought permission to select, purchase, and translate into Russian, foreign theoretical journals so that all relevant data and analysis could be gathered. Censorship and shortage of hard currency entailed seeking official sanction for this basic resource.

  Through the 1960s, as Boris Spassky climbed toward the world title, state nationalism became more important in spite of the passing of the war generation. Soviet leaders saw the necessity of trumpeting the very real technological achievements of the Soviet state, in science, in high-tech weapons, in sending a dog into space and then a man. They needed consumer achievements, too, Soviet blue jeans, new apartment buildings. And they needed sporting triumphs. In his study of the Russian mentality, The Russian Mind, Ronald Hingley reflects on the Russians’ historic capacity and requirement for what he calls “prestige projects.” “Gifted in areas as varied as chess, rocketry and athletics, Russians are often successful when they turn their combined efforts to prestige projects, many of which are functionally effective as well as impressively decorated. One important secondary aim is to capture the imagination of foreign observers in the hope that some may be sufficiently dazzled to overlook the poor living conditions endured by the average citizen.”

  Soviet citizens
saw Spassky’s role as defending the outstanding example of “Ours (Means) Better,” the USSR’s grip on the World Chess Championship. In fighting the American, he became the symbol of the fallen. Before Reykjavik, he received countless letters from Soviet citizens, reminding him of his patriotic duty to turn back the imperialist American who was invading the Soviet chess citadel.

  Justifying the Soviet state was what was important to the Party, not the game of chess for its own sake. Of course, says a former president of the Chess Federation of the Russian Federation, journalist Yevgeni Bebchuk: “The party bigwigs felt like that. You should die for the homeland and the Party. As for the games themselves, only chess players were interested. What really matters is that at the board you’re a Soviet person.” Today he smiles at the memory of the morale-boosting exercises undergone by contestants in student tournaments, with the whole team gathered in the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee.