A Century of Chess: Alexander Alekhine (1920-29)
As far as the European chess scene was concerned, Alexander Alekhine had died somewhere in the tumult surrounding the Russian Revolution and Civil War — a rumor that would at some point get folded into the story (which may actually have happened to Osip Bernstein) that he had to play chess for his life with the captain of a firing squad. In fact, he served with distinction during the war, receiving three medals for battlefield heroics carried out with the Red Cross. In post-war Russia, he briefly attempted careers as a police detective (!) and as a film actor (!). He played in the 1920 USSR Championship and came first. In 1921, he emigrated — a momentous decision that would shape the rest of his life. He stayed apolitical for most of the 1920s, but after his world championship victory was intemperate enough to say "let the myth of invincible Bolshevism be blown away, just as has been the myth of an invincible Capablanca," which led to the Soviet Union declaring Alekhine an "enemy" and, in a nasty touch, compelling his brother Alexei to write in a newspaper, "I am finished with Alexander Alekhine forever."
The volatility of Alekhine’s now-precarious existence is reflected in his play in the early part of the decade. He won at Budapest and The Hague, but an indifferent performance at Vienna 1922 seems to have provoked a suicide attempt if Edmond Lancel‘s account of seeing Alekhine suddenly stab himself with a knife is to be believed. For much of the ‘20s there seemed to be two Alekhines. There was the terror of the tournament scene — taking shared first at Carlsbad 1923, decisive first at Baden-Baden 1925, strong second at Semmering and Dresden in 1926, first at Kecskemet 1927 — and then there was Alekhine as the skulking challenger to Capablanca. At the tournaments where he appeared with Capablanca — at New York 1924 and New York 1927 — he often seemed oddly shy, taking a high number of draws and fading uncharacteristically into the background.
As chess lore has it — and, as far as I can tell, as seems to be the case — Alekhine dedicated himself almost entirely to breaking down Capablanca’s play and then vaulting past him. The famous story has the two of them attending a music hall revue in 1922 and Capablanca never taking his eyes off the dancing girls while Alekhine never took his off his pocket chess set. In the tournament book for New York 1927 — one of Capablanca’s greatest triumphs — he subjected Capablanca’s play to merciless scrutiny and found him to be most vulnerable where everybody assumed him to be invincible: in fairly simple positions and in the transition from the middlegame to the ending.
Alekhine’s victory over Capablanca in 1927 was an epochal event, something like the overcoming of naturalness and genius by applied discipline. It’s very tempting to make it the comparison between Beethoven and Mozart, or Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci — an art at its highest form moving past pure classicism into something more complicated and baroque. Alekhine was of course a great talent but he won the match by in some way playing ‘against himself,’ avoiding the dynamic positions that were his greatest strength and where he feared Capablanca’s defensive skills and opting instead for the thickets of the Queen’s Gambit Declined and for positional games where Capablanca was universally believed to be superior but where, in fact, there was a certain superficiality in his play. After the match the vanquished Capablanca would say, "Dr. Alekhine is worthy of any man's steel. If you don't believe it, try it."
After his victory, Alekhine took a year to earn his doctor of law degree. Then he held the title with a match victory over Bogoljubow. This was a closer and better match than tends to be remembered. Bogoljubow was a ferocious competitor and just as strong as Alekhine with the initiative, but there was a greater steadiness at the heart of Alekhine’s play and he prevailed in the end by six points.
That set up the next chapter of Alekhine’s career when he went from being a charter member of the elite to having one of the most dominant five-year periods in the history of chess.
Alekhine's Style
1.Dynamism. Chess up until the advent of Alekhine had been dominated by a fundamentally static conception of the game. Even if top players — Lasker, Marshall, Janowski, etc — in fact made extensive use of sacrifices and of the initiative there was a lingering sense that that was somehow incorrect, and the platonic ideal of chess, as it seemed to manifest in the play of Rubinstein and Capablanca, was all about positional play and maneuvering against weaknesses. Alekhine’s triumphs in the late ‘20s marked the end of that era. If we want to use a tennis metaphor we could say it was the switch from an all-court game to a big-serve game. The idea became to develop an initiative out of the opening, usually with some innovation, and then to turn that into a crushing advantage in the middlegame. As Fischer wrote, “Once you've seen one Alekhine game you've seen them all. He maneuvered his pieces towards the kingside and around the 25th move he started to mate his opponent." Other grandmasters would marvel that they could find all of Alekhine’s tactics but never seemed to reach the position that would enable them, and what that seems to be attributable to above all was his sense of dynamism and of pushing the agenda from as early in the game as possible.
2.Play across the board. In Alekhine’s games there is often the striking sense that he is acting everywhere all at once. This is connected to the idea that, to win, it is usually necessary to create two weaknesses — a defense can be organized around one weak point, but two tends to be fatal. In practice, this often means attacking on both sides of the board at once — which gives many of Alekhine’s games a unique aesthetic effect, largely missing from the more frontal assaults of classical chess, where he seems to just overwhelm an opponent from all sides.
3.Integration of phases. The standard answer of what separated Soviet chess from the chess that preceded it is that the Soviets learned how to connect the phases of a game so that a game unfolded like a single harmonious idea. This is kind of a complicated idea, but it’s traceable to Alekhine, to a sense in his games that the opening wasn’t just a prelude but a venue for deep discovery in developing a plan for the middlegame, and the ending was to be carried out with a great deal of the energy of the middlegame.
Sources: Alekhine's books on his Best Games and on the two New York tournaments are chess classics. The Linders' biography of Alekhine has hard-to-find information on his World War I service and time in the USSR. Edward Winter has sourcing on the Alekhine suicide attempt story and on the music hall revue story.
