A Chess Players’ "Conspiracy" part II

"... the greatest and most dangerous temptation in sports: it gives people the illusion that they can be innocent as long as they follow the rules!" - Jan Donner, Grandmaster

There is a famous photograph from 1908 taken in Capri (Kingdom of Italy) where Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, revolutionary name Lenin, and Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, better known as Maxim Gorky, surrounded by friends, play chess. The father of the October Revolution is known to have been a strong amateur chess player (equivalent to today's rating of 2000) and was often able to "give a figure for a move" to his opponents. Chess passion obviously found its companion not only in Lenin's revolutionary ideas, as among those who managed to establish the Soviet Union (USSR) is a plethora of players from amateurs to professionals. Some of the most interesting include Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Frunze, Lev Bronstein (revolutionary name Trotsky), Vladimir Kirilov, Vladimir Ovsejenko (revolutionary name Antonov*1), Alexander Fedorovich Ilyin (revolutionary name Genevsky), and Nikolai Vasilyevich Krilenko. The last two deserve special mention as the creators of what is now known as the "Soviet Chess School."

Alexander Fedorovich Ilyin, chess master, born in 1894, brother of Fyodor Fyodorovich Ilyin, revolutionary name Raskolnikov. Expelled from high school due to radical ideas, he left Russia for education and simultaneously devoted himself to chess. At the age of 18 in 1912, he came into contact with Bolshevik emigrants in Geneva, where he had previously won the city's chess championship. There, he officially became a party member and received the revolutionary name Genevsky. He then returned to Russia and, immediately after the outbreak of World War I, was mobilised. An explosion injury caused amnesia, making him forget chess rules, which he later tried to relearn in a military hospital. He quickly recovers and returns to the front. Upon hearing about the preparation for a revolutionary uprising, he goes to Petrograd, where he becomes one of the main revolutionary officers, participating in the capture of the Winter Palace. Immediately after the outbreak of the first riots in late 1917, he is sent to Moscow to suppress counter-revolutionary forces. There, while fulfilling party and state duties, he tries, on his own, to gather the remaining chess players in Moscow and establish a chess club. He learns that chess players occasionally gather in the basement of G.D. Berman, and there, with the twenty-three-year-old math teacher and chess master Nikolai Grigoriev, he organises the first official match in the Soviet Union. The match was played in impossible conditions. As the candles were of poor quality, when darkness fell, they had to carry the board to the stairs. The host's determination to make the match succeed was evident as Berman gave them a whole pack of matches, which were extremely valuable at the time, so that the player not on the move could hold a lit match in his hand to illuminate the board for his opponent. The atmosphere was complemented by the Russian winter, so, as Genevsky himself wrote, they "had to dance the polka and mazurka under the table" to avoid freezing. This match, which Grigoriev won 6.5 to 1.5, may look pathetic to today's people, but it was the foundation on which the "Soviet Chess Machinery" was created. Ilyin-Geneva then founded the monthly "Chess in the USSR," the most significant chess magazine of the twentieth century. He organised the first Soviet Union chess championship in 1920. In the Moscow tournament in 1925, perhaps the strongest in the world that year, he defeated world champion Capablanca and took a quite respectable 10th place; he was a triple champion of Leningrad... He worked on popularizing chess by establishing the Soviet Chess Section and was instrumental in introducing chess into military schools. He died in 1941 during the German siege of Leningrad. "El Presidente," as chess players called him, was a friendly man, fluent in several languages, well-educated, and with good manners, which is why he was appointed consul in Latvia and ambassador to Czechoslovakia.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Krilenko, born in 1885, a member of the Bolshevik party since 1905. One of the most prominent figures of the October Revolution, where at one point, due to his organisational abilities, he was elected Supreme Commander of the army of the "Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic." After the revolution, he became the head of the "Revolutionary Court," and he drew the attention of the world public as the prosecutor in the trial of the high-ranking officials of the Russian Roman Catholic Church in 1923. As an avowed atheist, Krilenko would turn this trial into a trial against all religious movements. (There is some poetic justice in the fact that a chess player accuses church leaders given that since the inception of chess, the situation has always been the opposite.) He demanded death sentences for the accused priests, which were then pronounced. The year 1924 is crucial for Soviet chess, and we can say for chess in general. At that time, Krilenko became the head of the Soviet Chess Section, radically demanding: "We must break with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn the formula 'chess for chess,' as we do 'art for art.' We must organise chess brigades and immediately start implementing the five-year plan for chess." No matter how these words sound like the phrases of enthusiasts today, behind them lay a very deep and far-reaching idea. The October Revolution liberated workers and peasants from centuries of slavery and gave them power, but the people were not educated enough to govern. The greatest social experiment the world has ever seen began to realise the greatest ideals of humanity, led by the avant-garde Bolshevik party and one of the most backward nations in Europe, in a country ravaged by war. The first thing the new authorities did was to make education free and accessible to everyone, because without an educated, thinking person, the ideals of communism are impossible. However, centuries of exploitation, training, convincing that they, as members of the lower class, were of lower intelligence, made the people use the gift of the new authorities - the ability to emerge from the darkness of ignorance - with great reserve. Now chess appears as a tool to build a bridge between the frightened, distrustful peasant and educational institutions. For centuries, chess has been an outlet, an intellectual filter for those who remained illiterate or marginalised, but had the need to show their mental abilities; why not now become the official tool of emancipation? The Soviet Chess Society formulated its intention with these words: "In the hands of the proletariat, chess must be a tool to strengthen the growth of intellectual culture among industrial and peasant masses and bring them closer to the consciousness of the political struggle of the proletariat." This open unity of politics and chess will give chess the status of "national sport" in the USSR and social recognition that it never had before or after. Tournaments are organised for players of all levels of chess knowledge, clubs are opened, books, brochures, magazines are written and printed en masse... Krilenko personally manages to persuade pre-revolutionary chess masters, such as Alexei Seleznev and Boris Verlinsky, to stay in the new state and actively participate in the work of popularising chess. In 1924, the "World Chess Federation" (FIDE) is founded, which immediately sends an official invitation to the Soviet Union to join its work, but the leadership of the Soviet Chess Section unanimously rejects the call, explaining that for them, chess is "a matter of the proletariat's struggle, and therefore, they cannot participate in the work of an organisation that claims neutrality"!

Chess will enter the curriculum of Soviet elementary schools, and the "Pioneer Palace" will be established... All of this represents only a logical sequence of events initiated by Krilenko and Ilyin-Geneva. True, the last years of his life will cast a shadow on his work. Krilenko will support Stalin's idea of ​​restoring criminalisation of homosexuality, which he and his comrades abolished after the revolution. He will be shot in Stalin's purge in 1938 after confessing to the crime of sabotage under torture. He is one of the first to be rehabilitated after Stalin's fall.

The "Soviet Chess Machinery" will continue to thrive and develop after the death of its creators, resulting in over half a century of Soviet chess dominance on the world chess stage. In 1924, the number of registered chess players in the USSR reaches 24,000, which then increases incredibly in the following years, so by 1928, that number is 140,000, and during the thirties, it will grow to an incredible one million. In 1950, the Soviet Union has three million registered players, representing half the number of chess players in the world. The number of players with a chess title or category is over 500,000. In 1935, the Trade Union Championship had 700,000 participants. Although chess was not promoted for "top sports results," the Soviet Chess quickly gets its first star of professional arenas - Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik.

Botvinnik, born in 1911 in a Jewish family registered in the Repino hamlet near Leningrad. A convinced communist and atheist, an engineer, a scientist who will participate in the development of power plants and chess computers, he will be a central figure and the biggest star of the Soviet "golden age" of chess. In 1931, he attracts attention by winning the Soviet Union championship. He becomes world champion in 1948 and twice manages to regain the lost title during his career. His studious approach to preparations (physically and mentally), systematic play, and analytical spirit will change the face of chess. He will be active as an organiser and coach. Several Soviet players have won the title of world champion, but none have carried such a feature of the system from which he came as Botvinnik. Too young to participate in the October Revolution, his maturation will coincide with the chess revolution of Krilenko and Ilyin-Genevsky, but his death will also come shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the post-Soviet years, as an eighty-year-old, he will rise to defend the values ​​he lived and fought for, openly condemning Boris Yeltsin's policies in the media. But in the times that were coming, heroes were no longer needed but millionaires, nor did anyone have an ear for old communists next to loud tycoons. Misha, as his wife, the ballerina Gana, called him, died in 1995.

Another name deserves to be mentioned among eminent chess players-revolutionaries. When Jose Raul Capablanca played a tournament in Buenos Aires, among the spectators was Ernesto Guevara Lynch, who specifically brought his son Ernesto Guevara Jr. to see the world champion. The boy was fascinated by chess even before that, but the atmosphere of the tournament and that beautiful man with proud posture, whom everyone respected, forever tied him to the game with black and white figures. His father then tells him that Capablanca comes from the island of Cuba, which will be the first place young Ernesto wants to visit from now on. "Che" will become a decent chess player, win the first category, and in simultaneous games, he will manage to draw with some leading world grandmasters.

In 1962 he will initiate the holding of a memorial tournament dedicated to Capablanca, and that tournament, which is held every year, while I am writing this has not yet ended its tradition.

In 1950, in Moscow, Botvinnik and Bronstein played a match for the world champion, and the prize fund for the winner was a "Laika" brand camera, and for the loser, a "Zenit" brand. But the USSR provided many chess workers and players with permanent income until the end of their lives, through salaries or scholarships, something that today's chess players, precarious workers, sound like a dream. Of course, as the policy of the USSR changed, so did the attitude towards chess, so it was not always identical, nor was the answer to the question "What role should chess and chess players have in society?" One interesting thing happened in December 1987 when Stalin's image appeared on the cover of the chess monthly "Chess in the USSR," only to be withdrawn from sale after just a few days, replaced by a new December edition (without Stalin) containing an excerpt from Nabokov's novel "Luzhin's Defense" - the works of a writer whose works had previously been banned in the USSR. Also, under the title of the magazine, the slogan "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" that had been there since its founding was erased, clearly depicting the new path that Soviet society is taking.

The role of chess in the struggles of the disenfranchised will be underlined by Vatroslav Mimica in his movie "Peasant uprising 1573", where in the first scene where we meet the main character, leader of the peasants Matej Gubac, we find him playing chess in a tavern (although historically inaccurate, but ideologically quite justified)!

No matter how we look at chess, as a hobby, game, wasted time (and intellect), art, science, sport, business, profession, gambling... there is one thing that all chess players learn during the game, worth spending money, time, and intelligence - the knowledge that all people are the same. Wherever I arrived, both Christians and Muslims were thrilled with the Jew from Riga, his brilliant combinations, and imitated "Tal's style." The greatest American haters take their hats off to Morphy's games, and one of the greatest chess players ever, Bobby Fischer, openly admired the Soviet chess school and its results. There are no openings characteristic of certain races and nations, there are no styles determined by the region, strategies determined by ideologies. There is only one universal chess rule "Gens una sumus" - We are one race.

1 "Meanwhile, a man with a narrow face and long hair, a former officer of the imperial army, then a revolutionary and exile, some Ovseyenko, whom everyone called Antonov, a mathematician and chess player, sat in one of the upper rooms; he was making detailed plans for taking over the capital." John Reed – Ten days that shook the world