A Century of Chess: Pyotr Romanovsky (1920-29)

There is a case to be made that Pyotr Romanovsky was actually the most significant chess player of the 20th century. The argument would run that, clearly, the most important development in top-flight chess was the creation of the Soviet chess machine. Chief credit for that goes to the murderous Communist Party functionary Nikolai Krylenko, but it wouldn’t have been possible if master-level chess weren’t being kept alive in the Soviet Union even in the aftermath of the Revolution, and much of the credit for that goes to Romanovsky, the leading figure of Soviet chess of that era. 

There is a lovely tribute to Romanovsky both in simaginfan's two posts on him and in Andy Soltis' Soviet Chess 1917-1991. "The heart of chess always seemed to be wherever Romanovsky was playing," Soltis writes. "The hawk-faced Romanovsky seemed somewhat unearthly and distant, always addressing people, even children, with the Russian formal of ‘you.’ But to his students Romanovsky was a deity and his influence was measured in decades." Romanovsky held court at the Leningrad's workers' club and turned both his home and dacha into a makeshift club where he served as the guiding light for a whole generation of Soviet talent — with Ravinsky, Chekhover, Lisitsin, Ostrovsky, Alatortsev, and Tolush among the many pupils who studied at the master's knee. 

Like so many Russians of his generation, Romanovsky suffered unimaginably from the horrors of the 20th century. He was caught in the Siege of Leningrad and witnessed the deaths from starvation of his wife and all four of his daughters. Romanovsky alone survived and his diary entries from this period are heart-rending. "In the space of twenty days, the harsh reality has killed my entire family," he wrote in January 1942. "Why must I live on, why has fate spared me, and is it for long? The only way to live on for me is to work. And so, until death grabs me by the throat, I will work on my new book, Selected Games." 

What seems to have sustained Romanovsky was both his belief in the Revolution and his indestructible love for chess. In a diary entry from September 1941, he recorded his determination to continue his chess studies in the face of all obstacles. "After a deep think, however, I came to the conclusion that the slogan “Everything for the Frontlines!” should further the development of all areas of the Soviet people’s activity, not hinder them. And so, gathering all my willpower, I return to my writing," he wrote. His manuscript was destroyed somewhere in the chaos, but he managed to reconstruct it and publish later in life. 

In terms of style, Romanovsky was an interesting hybrid of hypermodernism and dynamic play. Hypermodern ideas had showed up in the Soviet Union both through rumor and then through the Moscow 1925 tournament. It's obvious playing through his games the extent to which he was attempting through hypermodern openings to fulfill his lifelong mission in chess — to create viable long-term strategic plans from the very first moves of a game. But if Western hypermodern play tended towards a defense-first approach, Romanovsky was determined to use his flexible setups to create attacking possibilities — the synthesis that Soviet players (Boleslavsky, Geller, Spassky, etc) would use to shake up the chess world in the '40s and '50s. 

Sources: I strongly recommend reading both of simaginfin's posts on Romanovsky.