The Immortal Game Read online

  As it turns out, the Nazis’ abuse of chess for propaganda purposes was just a warm-up for the real specialists at nationalistic chess: the Soviets.

  ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1945, seventeen days after Japan unconditionally surrendered to the United States, effectively ending World War II, a symbolic new war began. With a thousand American spectators looking on inside a ballroom in Manhattan’s Henry Hudson Hotel, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York played the ceremonial first move in a radio telegraphy chess match between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A few minutes later came the reply from Moscow’s Central Club of Art Masters, five thousand miles away. This was the first international sports match since the conclusion of the war, and the first ever official team sporting event for the USSR. In due course, the cold war would be waged through proxy armies across every continent, would stretch out over nearly five decades, and would threaten the planet with nuclear annihilation. But for now, in its germinal moments, it was fought between a brainy American businessman and an electrical engineer marshaling the Semi-Slav Defense (1. d4 d52. c4 e6 3. Nc3 c6…).

  That first game, between U.S. champion Arnold Denker and USSR champion Mikhail Botvinnik, went to the Soviets in a scant twenty-five moves per player, and it was all downhill for the U.S. team from there. Over four days and twenty games, the Soviets obliterated the Americans with a score of 15 1/2 to 4 1/2 points. Of the ten players on the American team, only two actually won a game. If this high-profile competition was an indicator of each nation’s collective intellectual prowess, the United States was in for some rough times ahead.

  Most people on both sides, though, realized that the trouncing reflected not raw intellect but the Soviets’ far richer chess history and ravenous political ambition with regard to the game. In reality, the outcome of the match was virtually preordained, as the Soviets had long been putting enormous resources toward the goal of an overwhelmingly powerful national chess team. The United States just happened to be the victim of their debut.*25

  Whatever the Nazis made of chess to further their political agenda, it was nothing compared to the Soviet appropriation of the game. Russia had a special relationship with chess, having imported the game directly from the Persians and the Muslims centuries before, in established trade routes along the Caspian Sea and the lower Volga and Don rivers. It seemed to spread everywhere, and to find a special fit with the Russian temperament—long before it was embraced and popularized by such figures as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Lenin.†2

  Deep admiration for the game was practically universal among the Bolshevik revolutionaries (as it had also been a passion of their philosophical hero, Karl Marx).*26 Vladimir Illych Lenin was a serious player who “grew angry when he lost, even sulking rather childishly,” recalled the writer Maxim Gorky. (He also leaned on chess for its metaphorical power, as in 1917 when he referred to the interim Russian prime minister Alexander Kerensky as a pawn shifted around by imperialist forces.) Leon Trotsky was also serious about chess, playing often in Vienna and Paris before the Revolution. Not long after the 1917 takeover, Nikolay Krylenko, Lenin’s supreme commander of the Soviet Army, took on chess as a personal project. Seeing it as “a scientific weapon in the battle on the cultural front,” he enlisted strong government support for the game, including financial assistance for its most promising players. He also organized prominent international tournaments. “Take chess to the workers,” was one of the early slogans of Krylenko’s chess movement.

  “The Bolsheviks’ motives for promoting chess were both ideological and political,” explains British grandmaster Daniel King. “They hoped that this logical and rational game might wean the masses away from belief in the Russian Orthodox church; but they also wanted to prove the intellectual superiority of the Soviet people over the capitalist nations. Put simply, it was a part of world domination.

  “With chess,” King continues, “they hit upon a winner: equipment was cheap to produce; tournaments relatively easy to organise; and they were already building on an existing tradition. Soon there were chess clubs in factories, on farms, in the army…. This vast social experimentquickly bore fruit.”

  In the 1920s the Bolsheviks turned the popular but ragtag nature of public chess play into one of the self-identifying marks of emerging Soviet culture. By 1929, 150,000 serious amateur players were registered with the state chess program. That number swelled to 500,000 by 1934—which meant, by the estimate of American grandmaster and chess author Andy Soltis, that “perhaps half the world’s chessplayers were citizens of the USSR.” The growth was obvious in both quantity and quality, with a whole suite of world-class players quickly coming into view.

  To no one’s surprise, the Soviets put their own philosophical and stylistic imprint on chess play. Not all of their great players played exactly the same, of course, but there was a distinctive Soviet approach that put a high degree of emphasis on pregame preparation and on gaining the initiative, even at the expense of weak Pawn structures.

  After a few setbacks—including the defections of two champions, Alexander Alekhine and Yefim Bogolyubov, and an embarrassingly strong showing by Western players at the 1925 tournament in Moscow—the Soviet program started to gain steam in the late 1920s and early ’30s. The greater their individual achievements, of course, the more Soviet players were required to reinforce their allegiance and collective goals. “During the 1930s,” write Larry Parr and Lev Alburt, coauthors of Secrets of the Russian Chess Masters, “successful Soviet grandmasters spent much of their time dispatching telegrams to the ‘Dear beloved teacher and leader’ who made their various victories possible. ‘I sensed behind me the support of my whole country,’ wrote one grandmaster, ‘the care of our government and our party and above all that daily care which you, our great leader, have taken and still take.’”

  That “great leader,” Joseph Stalin, took a personal interest in chess. Not a strong chess player in reality, Stalin was nevertheless transformed into a chess virtuoso in public: his aides publicized at least one fake game, a thirty-seven-move contest from 1926 in which Stalin allegedly defeated the ruthless party functionary Nikolay Yezhov (later chief of the secret police and director of the Great Purge). Commentaries accompanying the fabricated game praised Stalin for his strategic vision.

  Chess was a good philosophical fit for the Soviet empire. Army chief Nikolay Krylenko called it “a dialectical game illustrating…Marxist modes of thought.” This piece of Soviet propaganda did contain some truth. “Dialectic,” as tendered by Hegel and then Marx in the nineteenth century, refers to a back-and-forth volley of opposing truths or assertions, resulting in a more complete understanding—a “synthesis.” Marxist ideology was built on the idea that Communism is the natural, inevitable synthesis of previous political systems.

  Chess, with its move/countermove dynamic, is inherently dialectical, resonating with a tension that builds and builds as the game proceeds. Each move is its own bold assertion. Black counters White, which then counters Black, which then counters White. Individual moves are, in turn, a part of each side’s larger strategic assertions which evolve and steadily counter one another: White protects his Kingside; Black attacks the Queenside; White “fianchettos” his King’s Bishop (moves it to the central g2–a8 diagonal); Black reinforces his Pawn center.

  Move by move, combination by combination, the game evolves and the implications of the opposing pieces are increasingly better understood. A larger truth—Hegel’s synthesis—evolves out of the clash of opposing interests. “Following every move,” write Larry Parr and Lev Alburt, “a new situation arises. Call it a thesis. The requirement is to find the correct antithesis so as to create a victorious synthesis….Dialectical struggle. Negation of negation. That’s chess.”

  Unfortunately, the Soviets not only reveled in chess’s ideological purity. They also contaminated the game and its players. Observers called the national team the “Soviet chess machine,” in part because it was a juggernaut that made it
s own rules. “In 1946,” recalls American master Arnold Denker, “I had an adjourned game with Mikhail Botvinnik in which I was ahead. During the break I saw Botvinnik eating dinner and relaxing. I didn’t have dinner. I went to my room and studied. When the game resumed, Botvinnik remarkably found the only move to draw the game. I said, ‘How is that possible?’ Someone told me, ‘Listen, young man, all of these people were analysing for him while he was having his dinner.’ I was naive in those days.”

  Another useful Soviet tactic was to prearrange the outcome of games between Soviet players in the early rounds of international tournaments, giving the winning players a free pass to the next round. In the all-exhausting environment of a world-class tournament, helping a player easily pass through several rounds is like driving a climber most of the way up Mt. Everest. The end is still monumentally difficult, but an advantage will go to the skilled player who hasn’t already had to expend valuable energy in earlier competition.

  In 1962 an ambitious young American player named Bobby Fischer publicly accused the Soviets of just such maneuvers in a major tournament on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. “I’ll never play in one of those rigged tournaments again,” Fischer declared after losing to the major Soviet contender Tigran Petrosian. “[The Soviets] clobber us easy in team play. But man to man, I’d take Petrosian on any time.”

  Fischer, already a world-class player, was also known as a hothead, and his comments were taken by many as evidence of his being a sore loser. But it later became clear that Fischer’s charges were dead on. “There were some agreed draws at Curaçao,” admitted the Soviet grandmaster Nikolai Krogius after he moved to the United States.

  Amazingly, Fischer went on to become a one-man counterweight to the Soviet chess juggernaut. Raised in Brooklyn, he had burst onto the scene in 1956, at age thirteen, when he became the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Championship. “[It] wasn’t simply that a gawky 13-year-old kid in blue jeans was suddenly winning tournaments,” journalist Rene Chun writes in the Atlantic Monthly. “It was the way he was winning. He didn’t just beat people—he humiliated them.” Two years later, at age fifteen, he became the youngest-ever grandmaster.*27 Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fischer continued to play remarkable chess and to draw wide public admiration for his abilities. After a tournament in Yugoslavia in 1970, he was able to recall instantly every move from each of his twenty-two games—totaling more than a thousand.

  He also drew attention to his eccentric behavior. A devoted chess player from a young age, Fischer had never developed any social skills or knowledge (or curiosity) outside of chess. “If you were out to dinner with Bobby in the Sixties, he wouldn’t be able to follow the conversation,” recalled an old friend. “He would have his little pocket set out and he’d play chess at the table. He had a one-dimensional outlook on life.” He devoted his every waking hour to the game, rotating between stations in his apartment to play game after game against himself. (One cannot help but recall Stefan Zweig’s warning of a subsequent “complete cleavage of the conscious [mind].”)

  In September 1971, Fischer defeated his archrival, former world champion Tigran Petrosian, thus winning the right to directly challenge the reigning champion, the Russian Boris Spassky. For the first time since World War II, an American would have a shot at the top chess title. This “Match of the Century” immediately took on colossal significance. As most of the planet was by now entrenched in cold war politics, a head-to-head Soviet–American contest of wits couldn’t help but symbolize the underlying clash of political ideologies, economic systems, and fundamental philosophic differences regarding property, loyalty, and freedom. Like the game itself, the Spassky–Fischer chess championship had no direct relevance to any real-world matter. And yet it seemed to stand for almost everything.

  The opening ceremony was set for July 1, 1972, in Reykjavik, Iceland—politically neutral territory. But on that day Fischer was still home in New York issuing demands for more money and control. A British businessman stepped forward to double the prize purse to $250,000. All seemed resolved, but Fischer quickly came up with new peeves, new reasons to stay home. At one point, Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s secretary of state, reportedly phoned Fischer and urged him to go ahead with the match. (“I told Fischer to get his butt over to Iceland,” Kissinger recalled. It is, however, still a matter of dispute whether Fischer actually took Kissinger’s call.)

  Finally, Fischer did fly to Reykjavik. On July 11, in front of TV cameras and a live audience in the Laugardalshoell Sports Exhibition Palace, the match began. Game 1 opened with a Queen’s Gambit. On the twenty-ninth move, Spassky, playing White, lured Fischer into capturing a “poisoned Pawn”—a trick in which the Pawn is sacrificed in order to trap the capturing piece; Fischer’s Bishop was cornered and he eventually resigned. Analysts were floored by Fischer’s defensive blunder. Many had considered his prematch antics part of a careful strategy to gain the psychological upper hand; but from the looks of things in Game 1, Fischer seemed to have psyched himself out.

  Things got even worse for him in Game 2. Fischer demanded that the TV cameras be removed before the game, and there was a lengthy standoff over the issue. Eventually, the cameras were taken out, but not before the referee had started the official game clock. Fischer demanded that the clock be reset to zero. When it was not, he refused to play, and the game was eventually forfeited to Spassky without a single Fischer move. In a blink, Spassky was leading the world championship match two games to none. The United States seemed headed straight for another chess humiliation.

  Fischer was undeniably superb at chess and had proven his greatness over and over again. But could he actually beat Spassky? He never had before. Of the five games the two had played together in previous tournaments, Spassky had won three and they had drawn the other two. Spassky was world champion for a reason. In a nation crammed with dynamic, cunning, fierce players, he stood out for his ruthless pragmatism. He was so highly adaptable that he could resist and work around fierce tacticians like Mikhail Tal but also poke holes in the painstaking caution of Tigran Petrosian. On top of this, Spassky had a particular systemic advantage over Fischer: a team of thirty-five grandmaster assistants standing by to suggest special anti-Fischer moves, analyze every ongoing position, and feed Spassky intelligence during breaks. By contrast, Fischer had one grandmaster assistant, the American William Lombardy, whom he was reluctant to use. Fischer liked to keep all the play inside his own head.

  In this way, each player signified his home nation’s creed. Spassky and his team stood for the socialist ideal, all working together to seize collective glory. Thirty-six grandmasters versus two was not exactly the most honorable way to win a chess game, but a win was a win, and proving superiority any way possible was a central goal of the Soviet regime.

  Fischer’s bravado, by contrast, was seen as quintessentially American. He was unwilling to compromise his individuality. He was a loner, a renegade, an entrepreneur. Americans fell in love with their Brooklyn chess maverick, and as he rose to the championship, chess itself became popular in the United States as never before.*28 PBS’s broadcast of the Fischer–Spassky contest—“there just isn’t enough televised chess,” David Letterman would later joke—became the highest-rated PBS show to date.

  After the fiascoes of Game 1 and Game 2, many expected that the temperamental Fischer would simply pack up and fly home. Instead, after a three-day break, he turned a corner: he won Game 3, drew Game 4, won Game 5—evening the score—and then won Game 6 in spectacular fashion. “[When] he won Game 6, which was the best game of the match,” recalled Larry Evans, coauthor of the definitive chess-analysis book on the match, “Spassky stood on stage applauding him with the audience. It was an amazing moment. This never happened before. I had never seen a player lose and then start applauding his opponent.”

  Fischer’s momentum continued. He drew Game 7, won Game 8, drew Game 9, and won Game 10. Now all of a sudden it was Spassky who couldn’t win a
game off Fischer, prompting the Soviets to accuse the Americans of using chemicals or electronic devices to interfere with Spassky’s thoughts. (Spassky, to this day, will not discount this possibility.) The stage was swept for electronics, the chairs tested and x-rayed, the air analyzed. No mind-zapping devices were found. Fischer was just playing breathtaking chess. “Fischer played into the match, and learned how to beat Spassky,” said Fischer biographer Frank Brady. “Each game he got better.” He was also doing what he publicly had said he most relished: he was breaking Spassky’s ego; he was watching Spassky squirm.

  Of the next ten games, eight were drawn, but the momentum never left Fischer’s side of the table. At such a stratospheric level of chess play, it’s reasonably easy for one side to force a draw—and that’s what an exhausted Spassky often resorted to as the games wound on. (Fischer, with the lead, may have been complicit in this strategy, knowing that victory would soon be his.) Psychologically, Spassky was already beaten. Finally, after nearly two months of grueling competition and endless mind games, Fischer wore Spassky down, forcing his resignation in Game 21 and winning the world championship.

  Fischer was an American hero. He had predicted he would become champion of the world, and he did. He had boasted he would single-handedly break the Russian machine, and he did. All of his quirks could be forgiven, even cherished, as a part of his rugged American spirit. He came back to televised celebrations, lucrative endorsement offers, interviews with Dick Cavett and Bob Hope, and a country that suddenly seemed to genuinely care about chess.

  Then he dropped out. He turned down the millions of endorsement dollars, turned away from the media, and even turned away from chess itself. The man who had said playing chess was all he ever wanted to do with his life ceased playing publicly. After once suggesting that his world championship reign would be the most accessible in history, giving ordinary players a crack at his title on a monthly basis, he in fact refused to defend his title against anyone—including the legitimate challenger Anatoly Karpov in 1975. In the face of Fischer’s total refusal, his title was stripped that year and awarded to Karpov.