On Keres, Prokofiev, and other Ramblings on Soviet/Russian Chess
Ever since I started reading chess books, this noble game was, at least for me, associated with Russian/Soviet players.
(TOLSTOY PLAYS CHESS)
The first chess book I "read" was a collection of Alekhine's best games, and one of my best books was Nimzowitsch's "My System".
Even the 1953 Zurich Candidates' book by Bronstein, loaned to me by a retired ploiceman/chess player who was my neighbor, had many Soviet Masters in it, such as Smyslov, Boleslavsky, Keres, and my favorite player of all time, Bronstein.
In college my Major was in Music Theory, and I was fascinated by the music of the Russian composers! It was different, and it had a flavor that appealed to me!~ Mussogorsky, Borodin, and especially Prokofiev! I could not get enough of his Lieutenant Kije Suite!
But since the age of 15, during the Fischer-Spassky chess fever, chess captured my heart. I wanted to be World Champion! From 1972 to 1978 I played chess intensely, stidying up to 6 hours a day, playing almost a tournament every weekend, and innumerable blitz games with my friends and others.
Chess became my living breath!
Then I discovered music, and felt that it was higher than chess....so the two, music and chess, intertwined, and to this day, 46 years after the Fischer-Spassy match, chess and music remain two of the things I enjoy the most. The third is tennis, but that is another story.....or is it?
A few months ago I learned, by chance, that Paul Keres was a nationally ranked tennis player in his native Estonia!
PAUL KERES PLAYS TENNIS!
Keres.....lately, I am drawn to him like an iron filament to a magnet! These things happen intuitively....I remember the first game of Keres that made a lasting impression on me. It was a win, with the Black pieces, against Boleslavsky, in the 1953 Zurich Candidate's Tournament. In a well known position from the Chigorin system in the Ruy Lopez, Keres played .....Rd8, and proceeded to open up the centre and overwhelm the White pieces. This game made a strong impression! It seemed like magic! Usually, playing the Black side of the Chigorin Ruy meant suffering, from lack of space, for many moves! Yet here Keres made it look so simple!
Keres.....when I look at his games, he reminds me of Prokofiev! Both have this sparkle and brilliance in their Art!
Ahh....Prokofiev! thanks to the writings of Edward Winter, I was able to learn that Prokofiev was a chess player of Master strength!
In an article titled "Sergei Prokofiev and Chess", Winter quotes Botvinnik, writing about Prokofiev one year after the composer's death...
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (27 April 1891 – 5 March 1953)
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The following article by Mikhail Botvinnik was published on pages 281-283 of S. Prokofiev Autobiography Articles Reminiscences (Moscow, 1959). It was dated 1954, the year after Prokofiev’s death.
‘My first introduction to Prokofiev and his music occurred at one of the musical appreciation lessons that were a regular part of the curriculum at school No. 157 in Leningrad which I attended in the early twenties. These lessons were essentially little chamber concerts with explanations by the music teacher. As a rule we were given classical music, but one day our teacher said that she was going to play something rather out of the ordinary.
She told us about a young composer named Sergei Prokofiev and his original style. “It is impossible to be indifferent to his music”, she told us. “Some people believe him to be exceptionally talented, others disapprove of him altogether. When I addressed a gathering of music teachers recently and announced that I was going to play the music of Prokofiev I was given an extremely chill reception. But when I had finished playing, the audience applauded wildly and I had to play an encore. I shall play the same piece to you now.”
If I am not mistaken the name of the piece was Despair. It made a deep impression on all of us. Unfortunately I have never heard it since; if I had I should recognize it at once.
I met Prokofiev in 1936 at the height of the Third International Chess Tournament in Moscow. He was a first-rate chessplayer himself and never missed a match. His position in the tournament was a delicate one and he maintained a strictly neutral attitude throughout, for while his sympathies were naturally with me as the young Soviet champion, he could not wish for the defeat of the ex-world champion Capablanca, who was a personal friend of his.
Several months later Capablanca and I shared first place at the tournament in Nottingham, England. When the tournament was over I received a telegram of congratulations from Sergei Sergeyevich. I was naturally very pleased and, without thinking, I showed the wire to Capablanca, who was with me at the time. At once I saw that I had made a mistake – from the expression on Capablanca’s face I realized he had not received a wire from Prokofiev. Two hours later Capablanca came to me beaming – he had received a telegram too. Of course, Sergei Sergeyevich had sent both wires at the same time, but evidently the Moscow telegraph office clerks had felt that the Soviet champion ought to get his message first.
Sergei Sergeyevich was passionately fond of chess. He took part in the chess activity of the Central Art Workers’ Club. Moscow chessplayers still remember his rather unique match with David Oistrakh – the winner was awarded the Art Workers’ Club prize and the loser had to give a concert for the club members.
I played chess with Prokofiev several times. He played a very vigorous, forthright game. His usual method was to launch an attack which he conducted cleverly and ingeniously. He obviously did not care for defence tactics. His illness did not lessen his interest in chess. In May 1949 the well-known chessplayer J.G. Rokhlin and I paid a visit to Prokofiev at his country place at Nikolina Gora. Sergei Sergeyevich was ill in bed and looked very poorly, but as soon as he saw Rokhlin he livened up. “Where is that volume of the 1894 Steinitz and Lasker chess match you promised me?”, he demanded. Poor Rokhlin, who had clearly forgotten all about it, was much embarrassed.
In the summer of 1951 Sergei Sergeyevich entered as one of the participants in a demonstration of simultaneous play I was to give at Nikolina Gora. His doctors, however, forbade it, but that did not prevent Prokofiev from following the games with his usual avid interest. I believe that was the last chess contest he ever attended.’
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Again, from Winter's article:
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Chess also features extensively in Prokofiev From Russia to the West 1891-1935 by David Nice (New Haven and London, 2003). The plates section has a photograph of Prokofiev ‘playing chess with former neighbour Morolev at Nikopol, 1909’. From page 292 (concerning the early 1930s):
‘There was a good chess companion in Mischa Elman, though it would have been better still to have had the company of Capablanca, whose participation in the Paris congress he had been following with interest – “congratulations for the games you won, but you’re too lazy and you must win more.” [Page 354 states that this comes from a letter from Prokofiev to Capablanca dated 26 July 1931.] Capablanca duly obliged by losing not a single match.’
For ‘Paris congress’ read, presumably, ‘match with Euwe in the Netherlands’, although that contest had ended on 10 July 1931.
Pages 311-312 of the biography have the following information regarding Prokofiev in 1933:
‘As for chess, which he was still enjoying regularly at Napoleon’s old haunt of the Café de la Régence, he played two games with the famous Saviely Tartakower, winning the first and drawing the second. There seemed no reason why he should not exploit his triumph for publicity purposes in America. “Tartakower is one of the strongest players in the world”, he told Gottlieb in an extended version of the news he had already passed on to Haensel, “and has the title of ‘Grossmeister’ – so you can imagine how proud I was to win. When, after the game was over, I asked Tartakower to show me what mistake he made to lose it, he answered: ‘I made no mistake; simply you played well’.”’
We add that Tartakower annotated the finish on pages 426-427 of L’Echiquier, 17 February 1934:
Keres, a brilliant man, a gentle soul, whom Spassky admired greatly! He suffered so much! Here is a brief example:
From the article titled:
Paul Keres IV: The War Years (from the chess24 website)
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"During the battles between the Germans and the Soviets, Keres remained in Tartu and was subjected to the horrors of the Battle of Tartu. A famous composer and a close friend of Keres, Eduard Tubin, recalls:
We witnessed a very foul war. At very close range. They shot people. With machine guns. People were lined up for that. And curiously, Paul Keres had been part of one such line-up, as he later told me. They went to shelter from the bombings, into a large house. (…) The Russians were bombing heavily and there were numerous people hiding in the basement. And then one bomb got to the German commandant, who had gone up to the pantry and had started eating from the shelves, such a vermin he was. The bomb hit the door and the door hit the commandant, along with the shattered plaster. And then they claimed that this bomb was a guided one, that it had been guided, so somewhere someone had to have guided it. So a command was given: find such a man! So the soldiers ran and ran until they found the people in the basement. They took them out of the basement, and we looked on from the window. People were lined up and then Paul later told me that luckily a man from Omakaitse, an Estonian, had gone past them and recognized Paul and asked:
“What are you doing here?”
“I was told to stand here.”
“Come away, quickly!”
And the man went to the Germans and told them who Keres was and assured them that he was innocent. He managed to get Keres away from them, but everyone else stayed and they were all mowed down with machine gun fire. Yes, they were shot, the bodies were then covered with petrol and burned, so that only a heap of ash remained."
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For me, Keres is a synthesis of Alekhine, Lasker and Capablanca, all in one. From Alekhine, the vision to fight on both sides of the board, from Lasker, the fighting spirit and dynamism, and from Capablanca, the fine positional understanding and endgame technique.
In this game from 1950, he surprises Geller from the Black side of a Steinitz Defense in the Ruy Lopez. Geller tries some murky tactics, but Keres has everything covered!
Fittingly, the last game Keres ever played was a victory, from the Black side of a Ruy, against Walter Browne!
And Bronstein, what can I say? What a tragic life! Ahhhh....such a nice human being, mistreated and misunderstood by many!
Here is a small excerpt from an article written in The Independent shortly after Bronstein's passing (2006)
"David Ionovich Bronstein was born in the small town of Belaya Tserkov in Ukraine in 1924 but soon moved with his family to Kiev, where he joined the local chess club after good results in tournaments at school. Coming from a Jewish family and related to the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, the Bronsteins were viewed with suspicion by the Soviet authorities and in 1937 David's father, Iohonon Boruch Bronstein, was arrested as an "enemy of the people". He was not seen again until freed seven years later on the grounds of ill-health. In those seven years, David had established himself as one of the most gifted chess players of his generation."
Now, one thing I did not know until recently: Bronstein's father was sent to the Gulag for the "crime" of complaining about a corrupt officer in his province....that I knew. What I did not know is that his health was so broken, he died in 1952, one year after Bronstein played his match against Botvinnik.
Many so-called "chess fans" pass very harsh judgement on Bronstein. This is, in my view, highly unfair!
In the book "Secret Notes", Bronstein indicates that, during his match with Botvinnik, the press did not ask him ANY questions- not even one! Basically, they treated him like a "non-person". Furthermore, at the end of the match, Botvinnik "forgot" to invite Bronstein to the pres conference....interesting!
Also, before the match, Bronstein decided that his parents would live with him in Moscow. But, at that time, this was illegal, because his father was officially an "Enemy of the State", and was forbidden from living within 50Km from Moscow!
Furthermore, during the match, Bronstein would have his father seated in the front row, four seats away from the head of the KGB! Love it! Bronstein had guts, and liked to challenge an unfair situation in the most powerful way he could!
Another quote from the article mentioned above...Bronstein talks about his WC match....
"I have been asked many, many times if I was obliged to lose the 23rd game and if there was a conspiracy to stop me from taking Botvinnik's title," Bronstein wrote many years later:
The only thing that I am prepared to say is that I was subjected to strong psychological pressure from various sources . . . I had reasons not to become the World Champion as in those times such a title meant that you were entering an official world of chess bureaucracy with many formal obligations. Such a position is not compatible with my character."
Another thing that he mentions is that, if he had won the WC match, he would have had to shake the hands of the man who put his father in jail! Yes, a very complicated situation!
There are many more incidents like this in his life, but that would be another article.
However, you cannot hide the sun with your hands! Genius shines on its own! And Bronstein is such a genius!
His games abound with original ideas and study-like themes that reach an artistic perfection of great height!
Like the final move in the following game!
Another quote from the article:
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David Ionovich Bronstein, chess player: born Belaya Tserkov, Soviet Union 19 February 1924; three times married (one son); died Minsk, Belarus 5 December 2006.
Some great chess players take a scientific approach to the game, delving into the intricacies of each position in a search for mathematical precision; others see it as an intellectual sport, with each player straining to overcome the opponent by force of will; but, among all the top grandmasters of the second half of the 20th century, David Bronstein was perhaps the one true chess artist.
In the opinion of many, he was the finest player who never won the world championship (though he came very close when he tied a match 12-12 with Mikhail Botvinnik in 1951); in the opinion of others, he was quite simply the most creative player of all.
He also wrote a number of highly individualistic chess books, of which his Mezhdunarodny Turnir Grossmeisterov account of the 1953 candidates' tournament in Zurich (published in 1956 and translated into English as The Chess Struggle in Practice, 1978) stands out as maybe the finest tournament book ever.
David Ionovich Bronstein was born in the small town of Belaya Tserkov in Ukraine in 1924 but soon moved with his family to Kiev, where he joined the local chess club after good results in tournaments at school. Coming from a Jewish family and related to the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, the Bronsteins were viewed with suspicion by the Soviet authorities and in 1937 David's father, Iohonon Boruch Bronstein, was arrested as an "enemy of the people". He was not seen again until freed seven years later on the grounds of ill-health. In those seven years, David had established himself as one of the most gifted chess players of his generation.
Exempted from military service because of his poor eyesight, David Bronstein worked in a military hospital in the Caucasus during the Second World War, which apparently gave him enough time off to indulge his love of chess. His first appearance in the finals of the Soviet Championship was in 1944 when he finished 15th, but the following year he ended in third place and was already established among the top rank of Soviet players.
Stalin, by that time, had already initiated his Five Year Plan for Chess, with the aim of capturing the world championship from the bourgeois masters of the West. This aim was achieved when Mikhail Botvinnik won the world title in 1948, an achievement that was hailed as an example of the superiority of the Soviet system. The apparatchiks of Soviet chess, however, became nervous when David Bronstein won through to become Botvinnik's challenger in 1951.
Botvinnik had been a perfect flag-bearer for Communism: a firm believer in the system, he had even sent a telegram of thanks to Stalin after winning one tournament in England, for the Great Leader's inspiration. How would it look if he was defeated by a Jewish son of an enemy of the people?
The match was very tense with both men making uncharacteristic errors. In the sixth game, in a drawn position, Bronstein thought for 45 minutes on one move, then played an appalling blunder, losing immediately. In the ninth game, a complete miscalculation left Bronstein a rook behind for almost nothing, but his inventiveness was enough to bamboozle the world champion and escape with a draw.
After 22 of the 24 games had been played, however, Bronstein was one up and looked set to capture the title, but a loss and a draw in the last two games left the match tied, and Botvinnik retained his title.
"I have been asked many, many times if I was obliged to lose the 23rd game and if there was a conspiracy to stop me from taking Botvinnik's title," Bronstein wrote many years later:
The only thing that I am prepared to say is that I was subjected to strong psychological pressure from various sources . . . I had reasons not to become the World Champion as in those times such a title meant that you were entering an official world of chess bureaucracy with many formal obligations. Such a position is not compatible with my character."
Bronstein announced himself satisfied that he had achieved his goals in the 1951 match: to show that his style of fluid, creative chess was fully up to the task of coping with Botvinnik's rigorous scientific approach. In later years he often said that he never missed holding the title of World Champion, which only lasts a few years anyway. What he regretted, he said, was not having the lifelong title of ex-World Champion.
Indeed, as ex-World Champion Bronstein might not have had to endure the indignities heaped on him by the Soviet chess establishment, limiting his freedom to travel to international events.
In subsequent qualifying events for the world championship, Bronstein kept coming up against a rule limiting the number of qualifiers from one nation. He frequently finished in a high place in the Interzonal tournaments, but there always seemed to be too many Russians ahead of him. His nerves also tended to get the better of him at crucial moments. In the Interzonal at Portoroz, Yugoslavia, in 1958, a last-round defeat by an unknown Filipino lost him the coveted qualifying place. In 1964, it was a brilliant loss to the Dane Bent Larsen. On both occasions Bronstein is said to have been in tears after the game.
In 1976, Viktor Korchnoi defected from the Soviet Union during a tournament in Amsterdam and David Bronstein was one of the few top Soviet grandmasters who did not sign an official letter condemning him. For this sin, Bronstein was banned from travelling to tournaments in the West. The ban was only lifted with the advent of perestroika in the mid-Eighties.
Even before these restrictions were imposed, his international appearances had been limited, but Bronstein made two trips to Britain in 1975-76. Both his eccentricity and brilliance were in evidence in his very first game at Teesside against the English grandmaster Raymond Keene. Bronstein thought for some 15 minutes over his first move, then played 1.c4, the English opening, out of respect, as he later explained, to his hosts. He seemed to obtain no advantage whatsoever, but after another long think sacrificed a pawn. Some of the world's finest players, seeing this, shook their heads in sad disbelief, but Bronstein had seen more than any of them. A few moves later his attack crashed home and a new generation suddenly realised that the old man had lost none of his imaginative faculties."
Here is the game!
The next game by Chigorin is spectacular! from the first few moves White is hanging on for dear life!
