A Century of Chess: Ossip Bernstein (from 1910-1919)
It’s the most famous, most iconic chess story ever. In the midst of the Russian Civil War, a group of prisoners are brought before a firing squad. The captain of the squad recognizes the name of one of the prisoners and asks if he is a famous chess player. The prisoner’s identity has to be tested — a board is brought out, the captain and the prisoner settle down for a game. The captain is an avid player, the prisoner isn’t necessarily in the best frame of mind. But he really is a great chess player, and, face ashen, hands shaking, he wins the game. He’s released; the rest of the prisoners are led off in the other direction.
It’s such a great story that at some point it was ‘promoted’ to Alekhine, as a world-famous player, but the story was originally told by Ossip Bernstein, who was caught by the Cheka during the Civil War.
The trouble with the story is that Bernstein was a raconteur and practical joker, but, Arnold Denker, who heard the story from him later in his life, recalls how “absolutely convincing" Bernstein was as he described the way his hands shook while he played.
Nowadays, Bernstein is remembered (when he’s remembered) for that story, but he was a great player and a missing link in the evolution of chess. Tartakower remembered him as having "inaugurated" for the sturm und drang generation that took over the chess world by around 1910. In terms of style, I think of him as having a ‘skirmishing,’ ‘strafing’ style — engaging in tactics all over the board. Of anybody in the classical era, he seemed most closely to pick up on Lasker’s inimitable style — searching always for imbalances and points of conflict — and his pugnacity helped to break through the sleepier classical precepts and usher in the aggression of the generation that followed him.
I was really stunned, when I was doing my series on chess in the 1900s, to realize just how successful of a tournament player Bernstein was. He very nearly won the master title in the very first tournament he played in, in 1901, was fourth at Coburg 1904, Barmen 1905, and Ostend 1906 — all impressive accomplishments — and then won at Stockholm 1906 and Ostend-B 1907. In 1906, though, he started on a legal career and played very little over the next years. He was still a dangerous opponent in any tournament he participated in. He finished right in the middle of the pack at San Sebastián 1911, nearly won the Vilnius 1912 tournament, spoiling Rubinstein’s magical year, and he nearly qualified for the finals at St Petersburg 1914 — he defeated Lasker during the preliminary round but lost a must-win game against Tarrasch.
Bernstein was, Arnold Denker wrote, "ever a capitalist at heart." He liked to joke later in life that he made three fortunes and then lost them all. He was an international financial lawyer in Russia — with his wealth then wiped out in the Russian Revolution. After the firing squad incident, he fled with his family and settled in Paris in 1920 with enough money to survive only a month. He was able to turn that amount into a second fortune — which he then lost in the Depression. And then had to abandon his third fortune with the fall of France — although, before fleeing Paris, his wife managed to successfully hide a number of Marc Chagall paintings from the approaching Germans. In all of that, there was little time to play chess, but Bernstein materialized in various tournaments and was able to hold his own in an international tournament as late as 1946. At his death in 1962, his friend Edward Lasker wrote that he was the "last of the golden age of chess."
Skirmishing is the word that comes to mind most with Bernstein. He is always looking to drive tactical complications but not necessarily in an attack against the enemy king. Bernstein is a good player to pay attention to for people who are of an iconoclastic or contrarian temperament. He seemed to believe that chess was just a game and should be treated as such. That meant no fancy-shmancy theoretical exercises — just sharp tactics and the spirit of play — and he was able to get amazingly far with just that philosophy.
In the opening, Bernstein was an avid proponent of 1.e4, forcing the action, and found himself in complicated tactical duels in the Ruy Lopez and Sicilian.
Sources: Arnold Denker's story of Bernstein can be found here; and Edward Lasker's obituary here. Genna Sosonko has a loving portrait of him as an old man. There's a Chessbase profile of him here.
