MAYBE NOT:

Cold war chess: The rise and fall of chess in the 20th century was intimately linked with the cold war and the Soviet Union's giant investment in the game. But deprived of the atmosphere of menace that characterised that era, chess has dissipated much of the capital it built up over more than a century (Daniel Johnson, June 2005, Prospect uk)

Chess has always been a simulacrum for political and military confrontation, with its gambits and endgames, stalemate and checkmate. We imagine diplomats or generals facing each other across a board. The game has been internationally popular for more than two centuries, but, like the literary genre of the spy thriller, it came into its own in the cold war. To take one of many examples: the opening scene of one of the first James Bond films, From Russia with Love, is a chess match between two grandmasters. And in real life, it was the Fischer-Spassky match of 1972—when an eccentric American genius smashed 25 years of Soviet chess hegemony—that marked the beginning of the end of the cold war.

Chess provided a mega-metaphor for this psychological war, one that derived added significance from the game's important role in Soviet communist society. The Russians might have lagged behind in military technology or economic competition, but over the chessboard they reigned supreme. A battlefield that for the first time in history was genuinely global could be metaphorically translated on to the 64 squares.

Chess provided one of the safety valves that kept the lid on the cold war. But how did chess come to play this role: both symbol of the war and its antithesis? And how does chess illuminate the process by which the west triumphed over communism? [...]

Communist supremacy had both an ideological ("theoretical") and practical basis. The "Soviet school of chess" was supposed to have raised the theory of the game, in strategy and tactics, to a much higher level than had been possible in the bourgeois culture of the west: "If a culture is declining then chess too will go downhill," Botvinnik wrote. There was a nationalistic strain in this ideology: openings were renamed after Russian masters, and non-Russian masters denigrated or written out of the script.

But the real basis of the Soviet school was its colossal infrastructure, creating a pool of millions. As the huge Soviet training campaign bore fruit, and literally hundreds of players achieved master or grandmaster strength between the 1940s and 1960s, a vast system of rewards and punishments was built up, with endless in-fighting and denunciations. The life of a chess professional was a privileged one: stipends were much higher than average wages, and foreign travel allowed. Botvinnik and his successor Vassily Smyslov were awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest civilian Soviet honour—no British professional has received so much as a knighthood.

But the pressure to conform was intolerable for some, and a steady stream of chess refugees fled to the west, the most prominent being Viktor Korchnoi, who twice played matches for the world championship in 1978 and 1981 against Anatoly Karpov. Korchnoi, now a Swiss citizen, claimed that his Soviet opponents used dirty tricks to defeat him. Although Korchnoi lost both matches, he is still, in his mid-70s, playing chess at the highest level. Boris Spassky, too, went into voluntary exile in France after his defeat by Bobby Fischer. Another dissident was the Czech grandmaster Ludek Pachman, who was imprisoned for his part in the 1968 Prague spring. This Marxist turned anti-communist almost died in the torture cellar to which he was dragged in the middle of the night. To escape further torture he tried to kill himself, and his wife was told he would not survive. I remember playing against him in a simultaneous display at the same time as about 20 other juniors in 1972, just after he was allowed to go into exile. Pachman actually lost this hard-fought game, but was gracious in praising the gawky teenager before him. He looked far older than his 48 years: under a noble domed forehead, his face still bore the unmistakable marks of the mental as well as physical torment he had endured.

Just as chess reflected the cold war, so it also marked the fall of communism. In 1972, Bobby Fischer, the American wunderkind, became the first westerner to challenge a Soviet world champion, Boris Spassky. The match took place in Reykjavik (like their Viking ancestors, Icelanders are chess fanatics). The story of that extraordinary match has been told many times : how Fischer's demands kept threatening to abort the event before it had started; how Henry Kissinger phoned Fischer—"This is the worst player in the world calling the best player in the world"—to persuade him to play; how the British capitalist Jim Slater doubled the prize money; how Fischer finally appeared, lost the first game, forfeited the second, kept everyone guessing, won the third game (the first time he had ever beaten Spassky), and never looked back. With hindsight, it is clear that détente had already taken the sting out of the cold war, and that the new electronic technologies, civilian and military, that were beginning to transform the west had already doomed communism. At the time, however, this was not yet obvious, and Fischer's victory over Spassky struck a psychological blow. Fischer himself saw the match as "the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russian… It's given me great pleasure as a free person… to have smashed this thing."

Mr. Johnson has a book coming out on the topic so it's understandable if he exaggerates a bit, but by the end of the '70s, eight years after Fischer's win, many (including three presidents and their secretaries of state) thought the Soviets had won or were winning the Cold War. Perhaps the 1980 Olympic hockey game marks a more significant turning point? As for chess, it was the 1984 Karpov-Kasparov match and the need of the Soviets to step in and save their hero that really showed the writing on the wall.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 20, 2005 10:09 PM