Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  In fact, the message had already gone out from Central Committee secretary Piotr Demichev that Spassky was to be received in a civilized manner. At Sheremet’evo Airport, the welcome party included a representative of the Sports Committee, a journalist, and some close friends. Nikolai Krogius remembers that “on the whole, Spassky’s defeat was received calmly in Moscow. It was a pleasant surprise that the sporting leadership and the press did not seek to punish him and his team.”

  Nevertheless, it was hardly the hero’s reception he would have expected had he been victorious. The Associated Press described it as “anti-VIP” treatment. He had to stand in the long line for passport control, queue up for his bags, fill out the customs forms. A battered gray-and-blue bus awaited them rather than an official Chaika limousine. Larisa was observed chewing gum: a “dirty habit” she had learned “over there,” someone remarked. “Over there” meant outside the USSR. His bus stopped at all the traffic lights: triumphant, he might have sailed through as if he were Brezhnev.

  And knives were out over his defeat. Mikhail Botvinnik commented later that Spassky lost because he overrated himself. The former world champion Vasili Smyslov chastised Spassky. In a creative sense, he said, Spassky went to the match completely empty. And he added that Fischer and Spassky both took home what they thought about: Fischer the crown and money and Spassky only money. Geller gave his views privately to Ivonin: that Spassky loved himself, that this defeat had taught him a big lesson, that he had underestimated the need for preparation and had not played enough, that he was still an idealist who “melted again” when he last talked to Fischer. Spassky was “very soft with his enemies and very ferocious with those trying to help him.”

  These were just the precursors to the official postmortem held on 27 December 1972 at the Sports Committee and chaired by Viktor Ivonin. Apart from Spassky, Geller, and Krogius, the top brass of Soviet chess was represented in the fifteen men gathered around the table. They included five grandmasters, two of them former world champions, as well as the senior officers of the USSR Chess Federation. Their deliberations are recorded in near verbatim minutes.

  The purpose of the meeting was to look ahead, Ivonin declared from the chair: “We must draw up plans for returning the championship to our Soviet family.” But in opening the discussion as the official team leader in Reykjavik, Geller wasted no time in going for Spassky, laying on him all the blame for the lost title. He cited Spassky’s decision “taken on his own” to play in the closed room, constant and incomprehensible departures from agreed tactics, and unbelievable blunders. The most damning accusation related to a psychological failure:

  We were unable to change Spassky’s mind about Fischer’s personal qualities. Spassky believed that Fischer would play honestly. Perhaps Spassky’s views on bourgeois sport were important to his agreement to play in a closed room. He placed a naive trust in the honesty of this sport.

  Geller had set the tone, although Krogius, in a much briefer intervention, couched his opinion more positively: Spassky’s defeat was due to his treating people better than they deserved. He related to Fischer as to a comrade and an unhappy genius, but not a cunning enemy.

  Then it was Spassky’s turn—the speech for the defense. Like many such speeches, its strategy was to direct material guilt elsewhere while confessing to a human, eminently forgivable weakness. Thus he complained that because they had not been given an organizer, the team’s energies had been diverted into everyday affairs. Pre-Reykjavik, “special work on technical matters” had not been satisfactory—a dig at Geller and Krogius. But the main problem was his being a very weak psychologist, “giving rise to a series of mistakes”—in other words, he admitted to being too trusting.

  I knew Fischer as a chess player, but perhaps I idealized him as a man. Bondarevskii’s departure was a strong blow. I found it difficult without him. It is a big minus to be involved in extraneous matters that you are not suited to dealing with. Bondarevskii shielded me from such matters. Our many sleepless nights… because of the mistakes we made were extremely damaging. It seems to me that I should have listened to the advice of my comrades that Viktor Davidovich [Baturinskii] be temporarily removed from the match.

  He also owned up to a failure to foresee that someone was required in Reykjavik specifically to handle “the prematch fever” and what he described as “a real war.” He also offered his version of “the culminating moment,” game three, after which, he said, everything turned against him. Through faintheartedness, he had met Fischer halfway, rather than forcing him to play in the hall or withdraw. Thus he had opened the way to Fischer’s “colossal domination” up to game nine. Only from game ten did he begin to control his emotions.

  There was no recognition of his own role in setting up the training routine and the other arrangements for Reykjavik. And the rifts with Baturinskii and Bondarevskii were scarcely as he described them.

  Little wonder, then, that there is a note of suppressed wrath in Baturinskii’s point-by-point reply. It covered Spassky’s rejection of the grandmasters’ counsel (Yuri Averbakh noted dryly that “when a person does not wish to listen, it is difficult to give him advice”), his passive attitude to the maneuverings of Fischer and Euwe in the run-up to the match, his failure to prepare effectively, and his refusal to accept the full team on offer. It did not escape Baturinskii that although Spassky complained about the absence of a delegation leader in Reykjavik, he had not consulted Ivonin over the move to the closed room. Finally, he protested that he had done everything asked of him to ensure victory for Spassky, and would always do all he could for the common cause of chess and chess players.

  As the discussion went on, the question marks over Spassky’s preparation and his inability to take advice were raised again and again—“superficial,” “unsatisfactory.” Mikhail Tal was particularly cutting: “It is not an embarrassment to have lost to a chess player like Fischer, but Spassky’s game was simply shocking.”

  Spassky’s politics and personality were also attacked. The president of the Leningrad Chess Federation, A. P. Tupikin, told the meeting that the Leningraders’ love affair with Spassky was at an end, blaming what he called Spassky’s arrogance, his alien views, and his failure to understand the political significance of the match.

  A deputy president of the USSR Chess Federation and FIDE vice president, B. I. Rodionov was even more brutally direct. In effect, the world champion had ignored the fact that he was wearing a red shirt and was guilty of damaging the prestige of the state. It was incomprehensible how Spassky had given in to his opponent—to what Rodionov called “the completely groundless demands made by that scum.”

  At the end, Ivonin delivered judgment. He was unsparing about Spassky, castigating his attitude both to work and to ideology:

  All his requests and wishes were fulfilled. Today we can only regret that these possibilities were not exploited in full and to the end…. Spassky’s words—that the match was a holiday and that there must be an honest fight—can be called idealism. This was not a holiday, but a very fierce struggle. And it is no coincidence that Marshall, Fischer’s lawyer, said that victory for Fischer was a question of national and personal pride. Unfortunately, Comrade Spassky did not make such declarations.

  A sense of disillusionment pervaded the meeting. The defeat had been a warning. Like so much else in the USSR, the Soviet chess machine appeared to be rusting away. The first problem was the new champion. Baturinskii thought that “the struggle which we must wage for the world championship will be very difficult. If Fischer made so many demands when he was a challenger, then how will he behave now that he has won the world championship?” So the comrades must work harder and more systematically, and trainers must realize that they were in the service of the state, not independent actors.

  Petrosian weighed in on the slothfulness of the elite players: “Our grandmasters have begun to work less.” Ivonin had tough words for the disunity among chess players, putting it down to the long monopoly
of the world title. “It seems to me that in the past few years, several people have been attacked by the worm of parasitism in chess and a refusal to undertake a lot of research work.” There were problems of excessive secrecy and internal struggles that weakened the Soviet Union’s external performance.

  The Sports Committee itself did not escape censure. In words of foreboding, another deputy president of the USSR Chess Federation, V. I. Boikov, pointed to a decline in the game’s predominance:

  Why is it that the committee can build complexes, swimming pools, covered stadiums? What do chess players get? Old cellars. Big cities such as Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, do not have a chess club, and a club is a place where qualified cadres are developed. All the work of the leading masters has been set adrift…. Russia has over 200 sporting schools, of which only seven have a chess department, and those are run by candidate masters instead of grandmasters. The Physical Training and Sport publishing house is only planning to bring out three books this year.

  The issues so agonizingly raked over at this meeting were followed by action. Ivonin produced a fourteen-point plan, affirmed in a committee decree. The plan included more chess education, a chess library that would include foreign publications, reform of the USSR championship, and proposals to improve the professional players’ physical training and nutrition.

  Nikolai Krogius, who became head of the USSR Chess Organization, says that in the long run the impact of Spassky’s defeat was beneficial: “The authorities sought to assist young chess players and to develop chess in the country as a whole. Many children’s chess schools were opened, the publication of chess literature was increased, the system for staging USSR championships was reorganized, greater attention was paid to the leading young chess players headed by Karpov. It sounds paradoxical, but Fischer’s victory in reality had a markedly positive influence in raising the status of chess in the USSR.”

  As for Spassky, he was not allowed to play abroad, he says, for nine months—a bad thing, “as after a defeat you need to play, since you have a lot of energy that needs releasing.” The extra 200 roubles a month he had been granted when preparing his title defense was cut, but he was still comparatively well off on his grandmaster’s stipend.

  It could so easily have been worse for him. Early in the cold war, when the Soviet Union was newly taking part in international competitions, the Politburo’s impatience with poor performances led to their moving a General Appolonov from the Interior Ministry to the Sports Committee. Failure abroad brought a telegram from the general to the offender ordering an immediate improvement. Somehow, the athletes then found extra strength. And in 1974, the then interior minister Nikolai Shchelokov, promoted to the rank of general by Brezhnev, visited the Karpov-Korchnoi match (the winner to meet Fischer in the world championship). According to Baturinskii, he asked, “Who went with Spassky to Reykjavik?” On being told, he commented, “If it were up to me, I would put them all in jail.”

  No matter how wounding the postmortem, Spassky’s career at the top was far from over. He had returned from his defeat with his basic will to compete undiminished, though he told Ivonin that he wanted to consider his position now that he was an ordinary grandmaster. He had decided not to enter the USSR championship, but he intended to play in a big tournament the next year. And indeed, the next year he recaptured the Soviet title. In 1974, in the Candidates round, he beat American grandmaster Robert Byrne without losing a single game, though he failed to reach the Candidates final for the chance to settle scores with Fischer.

  He was still motivated in part by a desire to surprise and tease. On one occasion, this threatened to cost him his passport when an application to go abroad took him in front of the Foreign Travel Commission of Party worthies. Assessing his political reliability, they asked about the situation in Angola. At the time, Portuguese forces were battling with Marxist rebels. Soviet newspapers gave the war many column inches, celebrating the victory of the people over the “colonizers.” Perhaps to shock, Spassky replied that he did not have the time to follow developments in Angola. The commission was duly shocked and refused him a passport. The Sports Committee had to step in to reverse the decision.

  After his loss of the world title, professional crisis and divorce had coincided again, and in September 1975, Spassky married for the third time. He met Marina Shcherbacheva—a French citizen—at the apartment of a French diplomat; she worked in the commercial section of the French embassy in Moscow. Her grandfather was General Shcherbachev, who had commanded the Tsar’s armies on the Romanian front in 1916–1917. Later, the general emigrated to France.

  Spassky might have been a king in Russia (or an ex-king), but like every other Soviet citizen who wanted to marry a Westerner and live abroad, he faced obstruction from the authorities. Marina came under pressure to leave the country but refused. After Spassky moved into her Moscow apartment, the two of them were put under surveillance, and in August 1975, Spassky’s own apartment was mysteriously robbed and all his personal possessions disappeared (including the camera Fischer had given him). From around this time, his Western visitors were liable to be searched on leaving the country.

  The story has a happy ending. A Franco-Soviet summit was scheduled, and the Soviets wanted to avoid bad publicity. Spassky also profited from Brezhnev’s signing of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement: its sections on human rights encouraged the free movement of peoples and contained provisions on facilitating binational marriages. The chess establishment saw that the exchampion was determined to go, but they wanted to keep their ties to him; he certainly did not want a clean break from them. So with some help from Ivonin, says the former deputy minister, and some publicity in the Western press, Spassky and the authorities came to an arrangement. He left the Soviet Union with Marina in September 1976, moving to Paris on a visitor’s visa, regularly renewed, while he kept his Soviet passport. Among his peers in Moscow, Spassky’s departure reinforced the view that he saw himself as set apart from Soviet society. His son, Vasili, felt it prudent to change his surname to his mother’s maiden name, Soloviev, to safeguard his application to become a student of journalism.

  The year 1977 saw Spassky again in the Candidates round. Back in Reykjavik, to the delight of the Icelanders, he beat the Czechoslovak grandmaster Vlastimil Hort, and he followed this up with a win over the Hungarian grandmaster Lajos Portisch in Switzerland. In a profound irony, he then represented the Soviet Union against the despised Viktor Korchnoi, who had defected from the USSR in 1976 by walking into a police station in Amsterdam to claim political asylum. From his self-exile, Spassky accepted the Sports Committee’s offer of full support. At his request, the committee sent Bondarevskii to join him in Belgrade, and Ivonin even went to give moral support. Spassky lost, 10.5 to 7.5. But in spite of the result, his waging a form of psychological war showed that he might have learned something from Fischer.

  Korchnoi was already under strain: he was subjected to a sustained campaign of vitriol in the Soviet press, while Soviet players boycotted tournaments in which he appeared. His family was still in the Soviet Union. After game nine, and 6.5 to 2.5 down, Spassky appeared on the stage only to make his move, darting back behind the scenes. Korchnoi complained that it was like playing a ghost.

  Spassky also put on a silver sun visor, swinging it as he came and went. In this poisonous atmosphere, with notes of protest and recrimination going back and forth, Spassky addressed an open letter to “chess players,” defending his actions and claiming anarchy had broken out. The match had passed into a phase in which, “expressed by the words of Fedor Dostoyevsky, ‘Everything is allowed.’” Spassky had refused to put his name to a letter condemning Korchnoi’s defection, but after the match he felt it right to attack him in terms of which Pavlov would have approved. Korchnoi “had lost his moral principles, and thus his future both morally and in chess is insignificant.”

  Spassky’s defeat did not signal the end of his involvement in world-class chess. He again played in the Candidates round in
1980; this time Portisch had his revenge, beating Spassky on a tie break. Spassky’s last appearance in the world championship cycle was in 1985, and he continued to participate in the Olympiads and the World Cup until 1989.

  Settled in France, Spassky seems to have had the best of all his worlds, a happy marriage, as much competitive chess as he desires, and freedom in his daily life from the Soviet system.

  Today, he lives among other Russian émigrés in the tranquil eighteenth-century town of Meudon, on the edge of the French capital and famous as the home of the sculptor Rodin. Often asked to serve as an “ambassador” for chess, he travels extensively in Russia as well as other parts of the world. In his apartment, the chessboard is set up, but the tennis racket too is close to hand.

  He bears no malice toward Fischer, telling the Irish Times in 2000, “Ever since my youth at about twenty-two, twenty-three years of age, I had a good impression of Bobby. He was always very honest and said exactly what he thought.”

  After becoming champion, Fischer stayed put in Iceland for another two weeks, whiling away the days with Palsson, swimming, bowling, and, of course, absorbed in his chessboard. On 15 September, he exchanged the calm of Iceland for the commotion of New York. The following week, there was a lavish reception at City Hall hosted by Republican mayor John Lindsay, who saluted Fischer as “the Grandest Master of them all,” while Sebastian Leone, the president of the borough of Brooklyn, hailed his fellow resident as the world champion of “a truly Brooklyn sport—the sport of intellectuals.” A large poster read WELCOME, BOBBY FISCHER, WORLD CHESS CHAMPION. Displayed among the official plaudits was evidence of local government frugality—the sign’s reverse side greeted earlier conquering heroes, the crew of Apollo 16, who had returned to earth on 27 April, six days after landing on the moon.