by Daša Drndic
I’ve wandered somewhat to the east.
While the Nazis are cleansing their territory, somehow at the same time, in April and May 1940, the paranoid NKVD sorts out its own captured territory. Like wild and hungry beasts they decimate Poland simultaneously from left and right, from east and west. In the Katyń forest the NKVD organizes the biggest massacre of Polish officers, but there were in addition many efficacious small executions in various wooded corners and prisons, with some twenty-two thousand liquidated. For decades, right up until its collapse, the USSR falsified the truth about this crime, attributing it to the Nazis, even punishing and pursuing those who tried to speak about it. The strands are slowly unraveling, but there are still secrets, unexplained “coincidences.” It is amazing that Poland has any kind of intelligentsia today, it is amazing that it was able to regenerate, because in 1968 there was another, now authentically Polish period of hysteria (again) of driving Polish Jews out of Poland, which almost suffocated in the vomit of its own anti-Semitism.
Коба, зачем тебе нужна моя смерть? Koba, why do you need my death?
Oh yes, then, at the end of the 1930s, the Soviets too, in the general hysteria about alleged internal enemies, which — that lunacy, that senselessness, that madness, like toxic micro-ampullae — still crouches to this very day encapsulated deep in the brain cells of members of all the secret services of the world (and not only theirs), the Soviets too energetically liquidate chess players (et al.), only the NKVD kills its own chess players, Russians, and for a good length of time after the end of the war. All right, some chess players died of hunger during the siege of Leningrad, such as, for instance Alexey Troitsky (1866–1942), but the NKVD would have liquidated him in any case, because he was concerned with problem chess, that is, he composed modern chess matches which the Russians call études, and for the rigid minds of the USSR, problem chess becomes particularly dangerous, because problem chess is imagination, the negation of rules, the negation of directives, it is art, challenge and autonomy, problem chess is freedom — and beauty. Here the great Botvinnik also plays a dirty game. In 1936, Botvinnik and Spokoyny, editor of the famous journal Шахматы в СССР (Chess in the USSR), otherwise a university professor in the history of philosophy and (for the sake of security in his life) dialectical materialism and, ah, a poor chess player, hopeless, Botvinnik says of him, so, in the journal Chess in the USSR, in an article entitled “Confusion in compositions,” Spokoyny and Botvinnik write that the basis of chess is a practical game and that one must fight mercilessly against abstract composition, just as their homeland fights against abstraction in art, against all formalism, and a great campaign ensues. Five months later the name Spokoyny disappears from the imprint, and the new issue, apart from Botvinnik’s groveling post-Nottingham letter to Stalin, which, for the sake of preserving at least an appearance of the dignity of the human race, it is best not to remember, and of which Botvinnik later maintains that he only signed the letter, he did not write it, so, the next issue of Chess in the USSR also carries an article, which not only freezes the blood of many in their veins, but for many it stops their blood flow altogether. It is entitled: “Beware, you enemies of the people.” The article promises the swift and effective exposure and punishment of all Trotskyists, counterrevolutionaries and those who oppose the triumphant march of socialism (into a bright future). In August 1936, Spokoyny is arrested, in October shot.
Ideas must be eradicated. The great Union of Soviets rejects problem chess and chess compositions as menacing and malign l’artpourl’art-ism, as Western bourgeois nonsense, and determines for chess a strictly defined role — the instruction and strengthening of the masses within given, limited and controlled political rules. No theory, not on your life! Just the practical game, full stop.
Leonid Kubbel (1891–1942), a chemical engineer and one of the greatest composers of chess problems of his time, particularly endgames, for which he obtains international recognition, died in the course of the nine hundred days of the German siege of Leningrad, when temperatures fell to -40°C and when around a million of his fellow citizens quietly expired. Leonid’s brother, Evgeny Kubbel, did not manage to survive even when he dug with his bare hands in the frozen earth into which by some error sugar from a store was melting, and put the hard sticky mess of soil and sugar in his mouth, or when he fed himself on sheep’s innards, small dead birds, rats and the remains of his pet dog.
The hunger and cold also killed the chess players Abram Rabinovici (1878–1943), Ilya Rabinovich (1891–1942), Samuil Vainshtein (1894–1942) and so on, some died in action, and others by unfortunate accident.
But about Leonid’s other brother, Arvid Kubbel (1889–1938), an internationally famous chess composer, specializing in the self-mate and the auxiliary mate, the Soviet government misleads the public for thirty years, stating that Arvid Kubbel disappeared in one of those apocalyptic Leningrad winters, along with his brothers, although he was already accused by the NKVD as early as 1937 of publishing his own compositions in the famous journal Die Schwalbe, founded in 1924. As a foreign spy, Arvid Kubbel was sentenced to be shot, the sentence was carried out on January 11, 1938, and he was buried in Leningrad.
Куббель Арвид Иванович
Родился в г. 1889, г. Ленинград; латыш;
беспартийный;
бухгалтер спортобщества “Спартак.”
Проживал: г. Ленинград, В. О., 10-я линия,
д. 39, кв. 28.
Арестован 21 ноября 1937 г.
Приговорен: Комиссией НКВД и Прокуратуры
СССР 3 января 1938 г., обв.: по ст. ст. 58-1а-9
УК РСФСР.
Приговор: ВМН Расстрелян 11 января 1938 г.
Место захоронения — г. Ленинград.
Источник: Ленинградский мартиролог:
1937–1938
Botvinnik affirms that Alexander Ilyin-Genevsky (1894–1941) died in the course of the Nazi shelling near Lake Ladoga, in the suburbs of Leningrad, although, according to others, he fell as a victim of the Great Terror.
The Soviet chess master Georgiy Schneideman (1907–41) cheated himself fatally when he exchanged his mother’s surname, Stepanov, for his father’s German one, which was also the name of an SS general. His colleague, the chess player Peter Romanovski, denounced him to the NKVD as a German spy, after which Schneideman speedily received a bullet in the forehead. Romanovski succeeded in surviving Stalin’s terror, that merry-go-round in which those who were up came down, wrote books about chess and died in 1964, one could not say exactly happy, as his wife and three daughters perished in the Leningrad siege of hunger and sickness.
On the other hand, the imaginative and already well-known composer, chemical engineer and, of course, chess player Sergei Kaminer (1908–38) vanished overnight. There is an already threadbare story about the childhood friendship between Kaminer and Botvinnik, three years his junior, which may as well be forgotten, a story with much that is dubious, particularly in view of Botvinnik’s character (autistic), particularly in view of his vanity (vast), in view of his insecurity, his blind allegiance to the Party (communist) and the police (secret, the NKVD). Botvinnik didn’t play a single chess match, just for the sake of it, for the fun of it, he didn’t play a single match with a single friend, because he presumably had no chess player friends, and so, when Kaminer at sixteen beat Botvinnik, then thirteen, three times in a row, Botvinnik never forgot it (until Kaminer was liquidated).
Botvinnik, otherwise a doctor of electronics, prepares for every match in a particular way: among other things, he hangs a photograph on the wall of his impending, not partner, not opponent, but adversary and at first growls at the photogra
ph, then barks. Botvinnik said I don’t remember fury, I record it. He would set a date until which he would not talk to his future chess opponents, and when the time was up, communication would be “normalized.” He had files of players who interested him and he studied their psychological profiles. But psychologists and psychiatrists had probably been making psychological profiles of chess players for centuries, and so, in some file of theirs, in some book of theirs, there is probably a profile of Mikhail Misha Botvinnik.
So, in 1937, in Moscow and Leningrad, at the Chess Championship of the USSR, there is a match between Botvinnik and Levenfish. Into Botvinnik’s room at the famous Moscow National Hotel bursts the 29-year-old Kaminer, in a fury, and says, Misha, they’re going to arrest me.
Botvinnik says, No, they won’t.
Kaminer says, Take these notebooks, hide them somewhere, then take them to my family. You don’t write problem compositions, Misha, says Kaminer, Krylenko will crucify me.
Botvinnik says, Calm down, Seryozha.
Kaminer says, People are disappearing.
I don’t know . . . , says Botvinnik.
Kaminer wails, Come on, Misha. Otherwise all this will go up in smoke, all my work. Take it.
And so Botvinnik takes Kaminer’s notebooks. Botvinnik is himself afraid, many people are having nightmares now, many people’s backbones are bending, and the police place the naïve in front of a firing squad or pack them off to Siberia. Botvinnik is afraid, and publicly, along with the chess section of the Central Committee, bossed about by Krylenko, then the Soviet Minister of Justice and state public prosecutor (when the time comes, Stalin will liquidate him as well), he continues to condemn problem chess, that decadent phenomenon, that sick, bourgeois formalism, because, see, his star is rising ever higher in the great communist sky and its brilliance must be preserved.
After his meeting with Botvinnik, Kaminer is arrested and disappears forever from reality.
Каминер Сергей Михайлович
Родился в г. 1906, г. Романово-Борисоглебск;
русский; образование высшее; б / п;
начальник технического отдела Главрезины
Наркомата тяжелой промышленности СССР.
Проживал: Москва, ул. 1-я Мещанская, д. 43,
кв. 3.
Арестован 17 августа 1938 г.
Приговорен: ВКВС СССР 27 сентября 1938 г.,
обв.: участии в к.-р. террористической организации.
Расстрелян 27 сентября 1938 г.
Место захоронения — Московская обл,
Коммунарка.
Реабилитирован 11 июля 1956 г. ВКВС СССР
Источник: Москва, расстрельные списки —
Коммунарка
In Leningrad, Botvinnik, Krylenko’s great mainstay, draws with the Soviet champion and grandmaster Levenfish, and loses the title of champion, and is very worked up, as he whispered to someone, humiliated, and that this fuck-up Levenfish was politically, in Party terms, above all in chess terms, completely unexpected, completely unplanned, for the Party was then preparing the 26-year-old Botvinnik for the title of World Champion, and not Levenfish, that contemporary Chigorin, that elegant and refined tactician who beats almost all the top Russian and Soviet players, including the grandmasters Alekhine and Lasker, because for them, for the Party, he, Levenfish, is now an ordinary worn-out chemical engineer, so let him just carry on doing his chemistry in our glass industry, they say (decide); for him, for Levenfish, there are no more stipends, no state support, no traveling to international competitions, let Levenfish freeze in his shabby little Moscow room, let them take out all his teeth, they say, Botvinnik will be our chess Tsar. So said the Party, and so it was.
If Botvinnik gave Kaminer’s notebooks to his family, he must have done so after Stalin’s death (1953), although this will never be known, for Botvinnik is no longer alive either. It was not until 1981 that the chess player and chess problematist Rafael Kofman published a book containing seventeen of Kaminer’s compositions, and in the introduction Botvinnik, three times World Champion, affirms, I don’t remember anything.
As early as the 1920s, Pavel Efimovich Neunyvako (1897–1940) publishes chess studies and, as president of the All-Ukraine Chess Organization, defends “his” composers, only to be shot by the KGB in 1940.
Неунывако Павел Ефимович
Родился в г. 1897, д. Кюньтауган Евпаторийского
уезда Таврической губ.; украинец; образование
высшее; член ВКП (б);
служил в РККА в Центральном Доме Красной
Армии, на момент ареста учетчик асфальто-
ремонтного завода.
Проживал: Алма-Ата.
Арестован 11 апреля 1938 г.
Приговорен: ВКВС СССР 7 февраля 1940 г.,
обв.: подготовке терактов и участии
в к.-р. организации.
Расстрелян 8 февраля 1940 г.
Место захоронения — Москва, Донское
кладбище.
Реабилитирован 18 апреля 1963 г. ВКВС СССР
The problem composer Lazar Borisovich Zalkind (1886–1945) is arrested by the KGB in 1930, accused of preparing, with the pro-Mensheviks, a conspiracy against the Bolshevik government, and the main prosecutor, Krylenko, condemns him to eight years in prison. Zalkind is released in 1938, but fresh accusations soon follow, and he is sent to five years of “socially useful labor” in some remote gulag, it doesn’t matter which, they were all appalling.
Залкинд Лазарь Борисович
Родился в г. 1886, г. Харьков;
Приговорен: ОС НКВД СССР 23 августа 1938 г.
Приговор: 5 лет лишения свободы.
В заключении находился с 23.08.1938, задержан
до конца войны | умер 06/25/1945 — причина
место смерти — неизвестно.
Источник: Архив НИЦ “Мемориал”
(Санкт-Петербург)
Not absolutely all the composers cover their ears, they are not all silent. When, back in 1936, Botvinnik and Spokoyny launched their attack on “the decadent formalism of chess compositions, which threatens Soviet society with ruin,” Mikhail Barulin takes a stand in defense of his colleagues, oh, what imprudence, what naïveté. Botvinnik and Spokoyny send Barulin that well-known (threatening) response and seek support from Krylenko and the Soviet Chess Organization, and it arrives promptly — officially and unconditionally — at the beginning of 1937. And so Barulin’s fate is sealed. First, one by one, Barulin’s friends and colleagues, who used to get together in his apartment, over pickled gherkins, the occasional hard-boiled egg and vodka, in clouds of tobacco smoke, believing in some stupid personal freedom, conceiving chess poetry, begin to disappear. Finally, in November 1941, they come for Barulin himself. Barulin refuses to admit to anything, Barulin refuses to denounce his friends, and dies in prison in 1943. That’s how it goes.
Until his dying day, Botvinnik does not deny his participation in writing the article that launches, in 1936, the persecution of chess-problem composers, of innocent people, non
e of them with political aspirations, none of them political activists, indeed taciturn people who glide through imaginary worlds, who participate in invented battles; of those who dream. Even fifty years later, when not a hair on Botvinnik’s head would have been harmed had he changed his opinion, he announces, So what, that article still seems completely reasonable and principled to this day.
Comrade Товарищ (Stalin) does not arrest only members of the Soviet Chess Organization; a number of interesting Soviet and internationally famous chess “brands” also come to grief.
Paranoid as he was, Koba imagines that the geophysical engineer and one of the strongest Siberian chess players Pyotr Nikolaevich Izmailov (1906–37) is preparing an attempt on his life, and arrests him in 1936 and, less than a year later, shoots him.
Izmailov worked in Tomsk. Tomsk is in the district of Siberia. Tomsk becomes the most important educational center of Siberia, it came to be called the Siberian Athens. Until the Second World War, every twelfth inhabitant of Tomsk was a student. Even today there are recognized institutes and well-known universities in Tomsk. There are a lot of theaters, interesting museums, philharmonic orchestras, and above them, there are churches which were destroyed or turned into mechanics’ workshops, but then resurrected to become churches once again, so that now there are a lot of churches in Tomsk. In Tomsk there is a culture that stretches far beyond Tomsk. Today in Tomsk there is also a Museum of Oppression, or torture and tyranny, a former secret prison, in whose dark underground rooms the NKVD settled its scores with thousands of “internal enemies,” out of which in the 1930s six hundred thousand (600,000) “kulaks” were driven into the swampy regions to the north, of whom 120,000 died in their first year of exile. Then, in the following years, new ones arrived. Thousands and thousands of new enemies.
Tomsk today has around 500,000 inhabitants, in other words fewer than, for instance, a Zagreb. People know little, very little, about Tomsk, because Tomsk seems far away to them, while they are nearby. Since 1997 Tomsk has hosted a traditional chess tournament, famous even outside the Russian borders. That tournament is called the “Peter Izmailov Memorial.” In other words, in Tomsk there is also memory.