IM Aleksander S Nikitin

Aleksander Nikitin, a Soviet international master, was best known as Garry Kasparov's lifelong coach and co-author.

Nikitin played in several Moscow city championships and one Soviet championship (1959). In 1973, he quit his job as a radio engineer to become a trainer with the Soviet chess team. In 1976, he started coaching Kasparov, a 12-year-old candidate master, and publicly promised that his student would become Anatoly Karpov's successor. That prophecy was fulfilled nine years later in 1985.

Nikitin wrote Coaching Kasparov, Year by Year and Move by Move, co-authored The Sicilian Sheveningen with Kasparov, and was a member of the group of analysts and authors for preparing Kasparov's My Greatest Predecessors and Modern Chess series.