At the end of World War II, much to Stalin’s pleasure (he telegraphed them, “Well done lads”), a Soviet team twice beat one from the United States, but the ultimate prize—the world championship—still awaited capture. In the interwar years, the Soviet Union had fought shy of such international competitions. In 1945, the title was held by the Russian exile Alexander Alekhine. He was not someone the Soviets wanted to claim as their own, having (in their eyes) the temerity to rail continuously against the Bolshevik takeover.
During the war, Alekhine (then living in France) had been discredited by allowing himself to be used by the Nazis to propagate their racialist worldview. With his reputation in tatters, this peerless champion died alone in a hotel in the Portuguese resort of Estoril. A picture taken after his death shows him still in his overcoat, slumped over a desk. There in front of him is a chessboard.
In 1948, the International Chess Federation arranged a tournament to decide Alekhine’s successor. It involved five of the top players in the world—Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasili Smyslov, and Paul Keres from the USSR, Samuel Reshevsky from the United States, and, from Holland, the former world champion Max Euwe.
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.