A Century of Chess: Leningrad 1934
If there’s a moment when the Soviet era in chess really started — the dominant theme for the next fifty years of chess — it would be this tournament, a USSR event with two foreign masters, Euwe and Kmoch, invited and memorialized in Soviet chess circles as 'the Euwe and Kmoch tournament.' Kmoch was at best a second-tier player but Euwe was a year away from the world championship and would have been expected to tear through the field. Instead, he finished sixth and Kmoch seventh and the USSR convincingly demonstrated the depth of its talent.
Botvinnik was something of a known quantity having drawn his match with Flohr the previous year. He won impressively here with 7.5/11 and while fighting a fever of 102. "Botvinnik sees everything and also a little more," Kmoch remarked.
But the bigger story was the Soviet field that followed him, with Riumin and Rabinovich both taking games from the challenger-designate.
Apart from Botvinnik, this whole generation would never have its day in the sun. Of the second through fifth place finishers here, none would ever play abroad and many would suffer immensely during the war. Euwe was very generous in his appreciation of the masters who had bested him, commenting that just about all of them could be placed in the international ranks alongside players like Stahlberg and Eliskases while Botvinnik was in the world's top ten.
It's possible to imagine Soviet chess as headed by Nikolai Riumin, which has a more pleasant aspect than with the Patriarch. Riumin was a great tactician with a winning personality. The question is how far he could have gone if he had had international opportunities and hadn't started suffering from ill health around this time — the answer, based on this tournament, seems to be pretty far.
Pyotr Romanovsky has a case for being the most underrated player in chess history. He kept the torch burning for Soviet chess during a key bridge period and could keep up with the best in the world.
Euwe was also perceptive enough to identify a Soviet approach to the game, which he characterized as: 1.emphasis on the initiative; 2.fighting spirit; 3.counterattack in defense; 4.deep opening preparation; 5.absence of superficial judgment, and in particular an openness to playing with material imbalances.
Sources: Andrew Soltis covers this tournament twice, in Soviet Chess and Mikhail Botvinnik. The Linders discuss the tournament from Euwe's perspective in their Euwe biography.
