They would sit us down in front of some official who didn’t know anything about chess. He would walk about the room. Nikitin, Spassky, and I would be sitting there. He would say, “You realize the honor that you have to defend. Do you understand the honor? Do you understand it properly? Do you understand it or not?” We would just sit there quietly. He would say, “Who is playing today? Ah, Bebchuk, you’re a journalist. Do your colleagues realize the honor they have to defend?” “Yes, they understand.” “You had better explain it to them. Do they understand it properly or not?”
In fact, there were high-level doubts before the Rekyjavik match as to whether Spassky did recognize his duty as required. Viktor Baturinskii, the director of the Central Chess Club, was called in for questioning by Aleksandr Yakovlev, the acting head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee and later Mikhail Gorbachev’s right-hand man. “Tell me, does Spassky understand he carries the moral responsibility for the outcome of the match in relation to the entire Soviet people?” Diplomatically, Baturinskii responded, “I hope he does understand.” Thirty years after making that statement, he admitted it had been deliberately disingenuous: he was clear that Spassky did not understand.
A former assistant to the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Baturinskii owed both his interest in chess and his legal training to one of the founders of Soviet chess, Nikolai Krylenko, who had encouraged him to take up each in the years after the revolution. Colonel Baturinskii served in the army for thirty-five years. He had been number two in the team prosecuting the key British-American spy, Colonel Oleg Penkovskii. Baturinskii’s nickname was “the Black Colonel.” After Viktor Korchnoi defected in 1976, he said Baturinskii should be hanged, drawn, and quartered for his role under Stalin.
Blind and hard of hearing, the former senior chess administrator lived out the end of his days at the top of one of the huge, grim, and grimy apartment blocks that encircle Moscow (he died in December 2002). He was still baffled as to how anyone could question why Spassky had a moral duty to demonstrate the primacy of the Soviet system. The answer seemed too obvious to merit discussion: “Of course it was an ideological question.”
Given that Spassky owed so much to the Soviet state, how did he fail to appreciate—in the eyes of the authorities, at least—his reciprocal obligations to it? And if he rejected state nationalism, what did he believe in? Two fundamental facts provide a starting point for comprehending Spassky’s character and the evolution of his convictions: He was an ethnic Russian, and he was a Lenin-grader, a denizen of the former imperial capital, Peter the Great’s window on the west. In Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky’s narrator calls St. Petersburg (as it was and is) “the most abstract and intentional city in the whole round world. (Towns can be either intentional or unintentional.)” In literary terms, it signified a bridge between the low realities of life and the strange, the enigmatic, and the hidden.
In the Western press, Spassky was marked out among Soviet chess players for naming Dostoyevsky as his favorite author. References to the Dostoyevsky-loving player were used to contrast him with the American, who, if he read anything at all beyond chess magazines, read comics. Some Westerners might have assumed that Spassky was taking a risk in his choice of literature. In fact, Spassky’s passion for Dostoyevsky was far from defiant; even Stalin is said to have relished The Devils. And though some of Dostoyevsky’s writings were censored in the 1950s and 1960s, a major new edition of his works was announced in 1971 on the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth.
All the same, the qualities of a Dostoyevsky novel, the realism, the psychological depth of the characters, the stress on the dualism of human nature, on nonrational motivation—these made the author the most subversive of prerevolutionary writers. He embraces life lived for the journey, not for its ending—as seen in his Notes from Underground. There the hero ruminates that “man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself. And who knows (nobody can say with certainty), perhaps man’s sole purpose in this world consists in this uninterrupted process of attainment, or, in other words, in living, and not specifically in the goal….”
This chimed with Spassky’s attitude to chess. Although he was intensely competitive, the process of achieving a result mattered as much to him as the result itself. He also displayed distinct affinities with Dostoyevskian characters. In the novels, there are existentialist choices, constantly faced, choices that will forever mark those who have to make them. A Dostoyevskian character is hard to classify, he or she is incomplete, always with the potential to adapt and evolve. The Dostoyevsky theorist Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “They all acutely sense their own inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within…. Man is not a final and defined quantity upon which firm calculations can be made; man is free, and can therefore violate any regulating norms that might be thrust upon him.”
Certainly, Spassky did not conform to the model of Soviet man; his fame and status afforded him the luxury of a self-determination denied others. Although the state lifted him and his family out of poverty, he always rejected any notion that he owed it a debt. Queried on this, he points out that the Russian Tsar Nicholas II also gave allowances to talented children, paid out of his own pocket.
But if, like a latter-day Dostoyevskian character, he contravened the norms of the Soviet state, and in many ways resisted categorization, he also had much in common with Dostoyevsky himself. Dostoyevsky is a profoundly Christian writer, imbued with a belief in the world of the spirit and in life everlasting; these beliefs, he thought, were the keys to moral health. Spassky, raised amid the religious atmosphere of his mother’s Russian Orthodox beliefs, was intensely proud of his paternal family’s connection with the Orthodox Church. Spassky’s favorite among Dostoyevsky’s novels is The Brothers Karamazov, which carries a heavy dose of theology. The novel also gives a pointer to Spassky’s political stance. In the central episode, the trial of one of the three brothers for parricide, the prosecutor claims that in the three are represented Russian Europeanism, national principles, and the ingenuous spontaneity of the Russian temperament. The stress is on Russian. In the period of official Soviet state nationalism, Spassky was a Russian patriot, the inheritor of Russian Orthodox religious culture.
Spassky’s university experience would have reinforced his nationalism. It came during a period of convulsions in the arts, what the Leningrad poet Yevgeni Rein called “that half-literary, half-bohemian life that was fermenting in Leningrad.” This entailed in part a subversion of Soviet culture. According to Rein, “We started to turn again toward the Western influences, toward contemporary Western culture; we again turned to Russian tradition, saw the nineteenth century, the Age of Silver, in a new light, and again linked up with the ring of tradition.”
In Grand Strategy, Spassky reflects on his university thesis. Significantly, he had returned to the prerevolutionary period for his choice of subject: Shakhmatni Listok 1859–1863, the first Russian chess magazine. He had always had an interest in Russian history, he says. “For this work I had to read journals from the 1860s. I saw the Russian culture of that time. What a beautiful city St. Petersburg was! When I left the National Library, I found myself in the sleepy, dreadful, provincial town of Leningrad. What an abyss when Russia collapsed.”
His yearning for the old Russia also explains Spassky’s disturbing description of himself as “an honorable anti-Semite.” Dostoyevsky was a nationalist Slavophile with a strong streak of anti-Semitism—seen in his crude attacks on what he called “Yidism.” Spassky’s forthright self-characterization stems from his hostility to the takeover of Russia in 1917 by the international Bolshevik movement, several of whose leaders were Jewish. As so many senior Soviet chess grandmasters and administrators were both Jewish by descent and Communist Party members, we must assume that he was able to separate his professional relationships from his historic antipath
y.
Grandmaster Nikolai Krogius remembers Spassky unerringly stressing that he played for Russia and was not glorifying the Soviet Union through his successes. Krogius sniffs, “The authorities tolerated this exposition (possibly, as they say, only for the time being).” “Bourgeois nationalism” was how the authorities would have normally, and critically, described Spassky’s brand of patriotism. The KGB considered such an attitude to be a “pernicious and dangerous survival of the past.” Nevertheless, as a grandmaster of world caliber, Spassky enjoyed the forbearance of the authorities—a forbearance not accorded to lesser mortals or to those with direct impact on the public, such as poets, novelists, theater directors, and historians. It made the difference between liberty to walk the streets of Leningrad or play abroad on the one hand and the enforced stay in the provinces or the psychiatric ward on the other. How far did Spassky test the tolerance of the system?
As is widely reported, Spassky was not a Communist Party member. But too much is made of that. Some of the characters in this story—grandmasters Averbakh, Taimanov, and Stein and apparatchiks Baturinskii, Abramov, and Ivonin—were members. Others—grandmasters Tal, Geller, Krogius, and Smyslov—were not. The father of the Soviet H-bomb, Andrei Sakharov, declined powerful “offers” to become a member long before he became known as a dissident, though he was in receipt of a massive income and other privileges from the state. Spassky insists he was never under any pressure to join: perhaps he was considered a lost cause.
The absence of a Party card did not excuse Spassky from political responsibility or from demonstrating the approved political consciousness. While he saw himself as “politically independent,” his was a country where the phrase had no meaning. And from the beginning of his career, in certain non-chess circles he was being spoken of as someone who should be watched as potentially “politically unreliable.”
A thoughtless remark during a championship in Antwerp in 1955, when he was still a teenager, led to an inquiry by the Sports Committee. All innocence, no doubt, Spassky had asked the team commissar, “Did Comrade Lenin suffer from syphilis?” Spassky recollects “the eyes of my apparatchik glittered dangerously.” Why risk such a question? “Lenin had been made into an icon, and I was curious about the reality.” Only action by the deputy sports minister, Postnikov, prevented the case from being taken up by the Komsomol, which would have threatened Spassky’s future.
Genius at work. Spassky (left) and Tal, world champion 1960–1961 (right). MOSCOW CHESS CLUB MUSEUM
Officers of the Leningrad KGB were now among those following the career of the chess highflier. Doubtless the organization’s plentiful supply of informers kept them in touch with his every word and deed. His independence of spirit was beginning to be observed by some of his colleagues. In 1960, after they had flown to Argentina for the Mar del Plata international tournament, grandmaster David Bronstein told Spassky that they should report in to the embassy. Spassky had better things to do: “David Ionovich, you go, but I won’t. I belong to a different generation, to which these rules don’t apply.”
By the mid-1960s, the non-chess interest in Spassky was such that Bondarevskii urged him to move from Leningrad to the Moscow area. “The KGB is too curious about you,” he told Boris. In a studio flat shaken by passing express trains, forty kilometers from the capital, twenty-seven-year-old Spassky lived on his own for the first time.
Being in the international spotlight did nothing to curb his independence. At the 1970 Chess Olympiad in the West German city of Siegen, two years after the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and by now world champion, Spassky took care to shake hands with the entire Czechoslovak team. Even though the Czech authorities must have considered their team members politically reliable enough to travel to the West, Spassky’s gesture can still be seen as an intended, if restrained, display of sympathy for that country.
Then, famously and dangerously, in January 1971 he refused to sign a collective letter in support of the black American communist Angela Davis, who had been arrested in the United States. He believed that the world championship should not be used for politics. This refusal was no small matter for the world champion. Leading Soviet representatives of science, sport, music, ballet, and literature had added their names. Botvinnik had signed and had solicited Spassky’s signature. The world champion still declined. The chess apparatchik Mikhail Beilin feels generally warm toward Spassky as a person: “He was nice, sympathetic, and most people felt well disposed toward him. I think people liked him for his human qualities but disliked him if they judged him on the upholding of Party values.” Yet Beilin disapproves strongly of Spassky’s decision. “This letter was signed by different cultural leaders—Spassky was asked to sign on behalf of our chess federation—and it was regarded as a great honor to be asked, a very special honor. So Spassky was being honored by the Central Committee, and he didn’t value this honor.” To an old communist like Lev Abramov, it was distasteful: “He was a product of the system. The Soviet system provided him with everything he needed for his chess; yet when it came to areas beyond chess, he didn’t want to be part of it.”
The general reaction was sufficiently negative for the deputy sports minister, Viktor Ivonin, to call a special meeting at the Sports Ministry. Spassky himself was not invited to what bore a strong resemblance to a trial in absentia. The participants included the leader of the Trade Union Sports Committee (of which Spassky was a member), representatives from the State Sports Committee, the Komsomol Central Committee, and the Central Chess Club, as well as the journalist from the news agency Novosti who had drafted the protest letter. As the participants evaluated Spassky’s attitude and tried to decide what to do about his refusal, a more general dissatisfaction with him emerged. There was broad agreement that he could not be forced to sign. But Botvinnik’s influence, Spassky’s desire for a new apartment, and unfounded gossip about improper behavior in the presidium of the USSR Chess Federation were all discussed as means of bringing pressure to bear. In the end, it was decided that Ivonin would simply talk to him again, though this proved futile: Spassky’s mind was made up. He could not be brought round even by another call, this time from the KGB.
In discussing the preparations for Fischer, Viktor Baturinskii, the director of the Central Chess Club, instanced Spassky’s refusal to put his name to the Davis letter as an indication of his immaturity. Mikhail Beilin says that it was in Spassky’s nature to delight in outraging others, even at the risk of offending them. This meant saying what nobody else would dare to say. “For example, he was lecturing to a large chess audience in Nizhny Novgorod. He was talking about Estonia as a very nice little country with a very difficult destiny. Such a view didn’t appeal to me: there were people who thought it had an extremely happy destiny. His allowing himself to say such a thing is not very agreeable.” If as a good Soviet you believed that the USSR’s annexation of Estonia was a stroke of good fortune for the country and its people, you might well find Spassky’s indirect censure upsetting.
Perhaps there was even a hint of cruelty when Spassky forced unsafe political opinions on a listener. Nikolai Krogius remembers how “in public he often displayed bravado with his paradoxical declarations: ‘The communists have destroyed nature,’ ‘Keres lives in an occupied country [that is, in Estonia],’ and so on. Of course, if such statements had been made not by a famous chess player but by an ordinary citizen, then harsh punitive measures would have been taken against that citizen—possibly even a prison sentence.”
Obviously, the authorities were fully apprised of Spassky’s idiosyncratic outlook. At least when he was at the top, he did not bother to confine his views to his inner circle—though even there he would have known that someone was noting it all for the KGB. Baturinskii complained of “his thoughtlessness” during public appearances, and cited as typical a speech Spassky made to an audience of chess lovers in the city of Shakhty in the Rostov region on 26 September 1971. The speech had been the subject of an outraged
letter from the secretary of the Shakhty City Committee of the CPSU, one Comrade Kazantsev:
B. Spassky spoke without prompting about his financial position. He noted that his salary was 300 roubles, which he received in payment for his post as trainer in the Lokomotiv club, without carrying out any training duties.
Comrade Spassky stressed that insufficient attention is paid to chess players in the Soviet Union, and their labors were poorly compensated. Explaining the reasons for his nonparticipation in the USSR championship, he cited the small sum awarded for the first prize (250 roubles). B. Spassky noted in his speech that the biggest prize he had received abroad was the sum of $5,000, while in his native land it was only 2,000 roubles.
Spassky’s salary had been raised from 250 roubles a month to 300 on his becoming world champion. It may not have seemed much to Spassky, but Mikhail Beilin, who signed the necessary document authorizing this increase, recalls the envy Spassky’s relative wealth provoked among colleagues: “I remember when the young Spassky received $5,000 in Santa Monica, a lot of people suffered over this as though experiencing a personal loss.” To put Spassky’s earnings in context, in the late 1960s (after the currency reform) the average monthly wage for a skilled or white-collar worker was 122 roubles.
Spassky did more than just complain about money. At this Shakhty meeting, he startled his listeners by saying, “Basically I am descended from a priest’s family. And if I had not made it as a chess player, I would happily have become a priest.”
The speech went all the way to the secretaries of the Central Committee, ending up with the acting head of the Central Committee Propaganda and Agitation Department, Aleksandr Yakovlev, who was told that the audience had expressed “bewilderment and indignation” at its contents.
Bobby Fischer Goes to War Page 7