Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

21. ADVERSARY PARTNERS

Seen from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, was Fischer’s triumph a cold war victory—at least symbolically—for the United States over its long-term adversary the USSR?

One flaw with a cold war interpretation of the match is immediately apparent. Fischer and Spassky had in common their sheer unsuitability to represent their countries’ political systems. Spassky was not a Soviet patriot—and he made no secret of it. Fischer’s idiosyncratic and asocial behavior marked him as un-American for many of his compatriots.

In the London Sunday Times on 2 July, Arthur Koestler, the author of the terrifying study of Stalinism, Darkness at Noon, understatedly warned, “Bobby is a genius, but as a propagandist for the free world he is rather counter-productive.” The Washington Post ruminated that Fischer’s behavior had caused the match to escalate “from a sport into a revival of the Cold War.” One of the Post’s readers wrote that “Fischer is the only American who can make everyone in the U.S. root for the Russians.” In an article written in late July and passed around the Soviet embassy in Reykjavik, causing much merriment, Washington Post humorist Art Buchwald mused over a presidential dilemma: Would Nixon place a telephone call to Iceland if Fischer won? He foresaw the conversation:

Eventually the president hangs up and calls Richard Helms, the director of the CIA.

Victor Jackovich remembers the qualified rapture in the embassy when the match ended:

However, incontrovertibly, the common view was that the confrontation was an episode of the cold war. The new champion had certainly seen it this way. In April, the London Times noted: “Fischer believes that in some sense he is doing battle for the free world against the Soviet Union, in an atmosphere akin to the Berlin blockade of twenty years ago.” Fischer would have deleted the phrase in some sense. He told a BBC interviewer, James Burke:

The Western public too was convinced of the geopolitical significance of the battle, and there were letters to the local and national press to this effect. Donald Kurtis, from Connecticut, wrote to The New York Times to point out that “chess is far more important to millions of people abroad than in the United States. A victory by Mr. Fischer can be more positively impressive to these people than all the trade, aid, and arms treaties.” A New York Times editorial makes a similar point, referring to the Soviets’ space achievement, with relish: “Unquestionably, Spassky’s loss of the title would be regarded as a major national setback; a Sputnik in reverse.” Just before the first game, The Washington Post claimed, “A Fischer victory would strike at a basic claim of Soviet ideology.” Decades later, many of the characters in our story concurred. For Icelandic cameraman Gissli Gestsson, this was not simply a chess match: “It was a battle for the minds of people all over the world; it was about the superpowers. I think it was a bit sad for chess, that it was used in this way.”

Stereotyped contrasts between “us” and “them” abounded in articles and contemporary books by writers projecting the period through which they lived. The Soviet embassy interpreter Valeri Chamanin was used as an example of the Soviet lack of humanity. Francis Wyndham, coauthor of an instant account of the match, saw Chamanin as dummylike. (How animated should a professional interpreter be? In private life, Chamanin is warmly ebullient.)

According to Brad Darrach, Chamanin was “one of many quasi-official Russian bureaucrats of the island whose faces appeared to have been restored to almost human form after a fatal accident.” The Soviet delegation, he noted, walked in single file, expressionless and uncommunicative, “like finalists in a self-effacement contest.” All except Spassky, that is, and Krogius, who was expressive enough to Westerners to seem sinister and who was accorded the character of a horror movie psychologist plotting the hero’s downfall through his cruel insights. However, to his Soviet contemporaries, let alone to Western reporters, Efim Geller seemed unusually paranoid about the West, and TASS correspondent Aleksandr Yermakov called him “Mr. No” for his unwillingness to share anything even with the Soviet agency. (In Icelandic, “no” was pronounced like “Nei,” so to the local population another Spassky aide was Mr. No.)

The London Sunday Times perception of the two protagonists in Iceland revealed how, seen through the prism of ideological confrontation, reality was distorted: “Both are wonderfully cast for their roles. Fischer the rugged individualist, adventurous and occasionally reckless both in his life-style and chess style; Spassky the more benign type of Soviet bureaucrat, cautious, noncommittal, evasive.”

GosKomSport officials would have greeted with incredulity the idea of Spassky as the benign bureaucrat. But for Moscow and the Soviet bloc, Fischer-Spassky was demonstrably a clash of systems. Naturally, red-clawed capitalism was held responsible for the American’s undesirable obsession with money, though it is not difficult to discern a note of envy over the way in which Fischer grasped riches from the game. But there was worry, too, about how this could transform the financial weather for Soviet players, making them less amenable to state control, diverting them from socialist priorities.

Even so, once the match got under way, ideology vanished from the coverage. The turning point was Spassky’s disastrous third game, when the Soviet press settled down into straightforward chess analysis, with increasing hints that the champion was the author of his own misfortune. The match itself took second place to the Olympics in the use of limited hard currency and journalistic resources. Aleksandr Yermakov’s living expenses were severely restricted; he survived by finding student accommodations and cooking for himself. The TASS man’s task was to send the moves to Moscow. His editors had next to no interest in the anecdotes, drama, and human stories preoccupying Western journalists, though the facts were reported.

Back in Moscow, commentaries in the press made clear Soviet grandmasters’ dissatisfaction with Spassky’s standard of play. Although there was little coverage of the Fischer sideshow, an American journalist in Moscow, Robert Kaiser, was struck by the freedom of the coverage of the chess itself.

There was freedom among park bench experts, too. Another American reporter overheard a note of gloom: “Spassky is playing like a shoemaker.”

But some two-thirds into the match, its prominence in the state newspaper Izvestia steadily declined. After game seventeen, the FIDE logo was removed from its place beside the articles (whether as official disapproval of the federation or simply to make the match less prominent—or both—is unclear), and the byline of grandmaster David Bronstein, who had provided the analysis, also disappeared. The final report from TASS was tucked away on the lower-left-hand corner of the sports page, overshadowed by pictures of Soviet athletes and gymnasts. It was one column, eleven lines:

The newspaper Sovietskaia Rossia put the passing of the title from Russian hands in a black-bordered box used for an obituary. But the Munich Olympic games were now the lead story, and for good reason. As Fischer seized the title, a Russian sprinter, Valeri Borzov, took from the United States the crown of world’s fastest man. Just as an American had never before been world chess champion, a Russian had never before won the Olympic 100-meter sprint. (Pavlov had chosen the right event to mastermind.)

A downplaying of the chess match was to be expected. The role of the Soviet press was to reflect official views and priorities, not to satisfy the appetites of readers. With the strength of Fischer’s challenge to Soviet hegemony, the news media’s response became pragmatically low-key.

Significantly, there were neither political allegations nor recriminations against the West. There were no attempts to couch the match in strategic terms. While the loss of the title was a blow, it was to be presented as an internal chess issue, not a matter of direct international or ideological importance.

But then this was not a time for unnecessary dissension toward the United States. Indeed, far from epitomizing East-West conflict, the championship took place in the high blossoming of détente. In Europe, the cockpit of the cold war, a postwar settlement had finally emerged, in effect the long-deferred World War II peace treaty. Though almost all Western accounts of Fischer-Spassky couch the match in geopolitical terms, they are, in this respect, curiously misleading. The encounter might have been seen by the public and written up in the press as a cold war showdown, but in the Kremlin and the White House, East-West showdowns were not on the agenda.

Thus, on the Soviet side, the political level of interest in Spassky’s preparation was high, but not exceptionally so. One of the two secretaries of the Central Committee who ranked just below Brezhnev in authority, Mikhail Suslov was in ultimate charge of ideological matters and therefore chess. He apparently never officially discussed the match. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev does not appear to have involved himself in the match, though the figurehead president of the USSR, Nikolai Podgornii, sent a telegram of good wishes to Spassky. (It would have been unthinkable for Brezhnev himself to put his name to such a message.) When Spassky was plainly in trouble, Lev Abramov, the former head of the Chess Department of the State Sports Committee, wanted a team manager sent to Reykjavik. He went directly to one of Brezhnev’s aides, Konstantin Rusakov, to enlist his help. But Rusakov was abroad; there was no sense of urgency in the Kremlin, and Abramov’s initiative came to nothing.

As for the Americans, we know that Henry Kissinger made two calls to Fischer, but his almost day-by-day record of his time as national security adviser, The White House Years, contains no reference to them. There is no mention of the match in Nixon’s equally detailed Memoirs. The Soviet ambassador to Washington, D.C., Anatoli Dobrynin, told the authors that in his frequent contacts with Kissinger, the match never came up. Neither Fischer nor Spassky is cited in his book, In Confidence, even though Kissinger appears to have rung Fischer when he and the Soviet ambassador were the president’s guests in California, working and relaxing together while Fischer was threatening to fly home to Brooklyn.

In an interview for this book Dr. Kissinger reflected, “It was not the biggest decision I had to make in those days, but I thought it would help create an atmosphere of peaceful competition.” Indeed, what could be more competitive or more peaceful than a World Chess Championship? Yet the former national security adviser insists that, unlike most members of the public, he did not see the match as an aspect of the cold war or democracy versus communism.

By the end of 1971, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), in its Strategic Survey of that year, compared 1971 to 1947 in that it marked a point where “the international system as a whole formed into a visibly new pattern.” One of America’s foremost strategic thinkers, Samuel P. Huntington, summed up geopolitics of the early 1970s: “All in all, the skies were filled with planes bearing diplomats to negotiations, and the air was rich with the promise of détente.” In its Strategic Survey for 1972, the IISS announced that the cold war was dead and buried.

The broad period of the championship saw three successful summits, when Nixon visited Beijing and Moscow in 1972 and when Brezhnev visited Washington in June 1973. A torrent of talks, suggestions for talks, the promise of future agreements, and actual agreements cascaded into the diplomatic desert. These included the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the Interim Agreement on Certain Measures with Respect to Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT I), and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Eventually, 150 agreements were signed and 11 joint commissions established. A handshake in space in 1975 could be seen as the culminating moment.

The essential difference between détente and the previous era, Dr. Kissinger argues, is that Nixon believed that negotiations were still possible and desirable with the Soviet regime as it was. Previous U.S. administrations held that any meaningful dialogue with the Soviets would have to await a fundamental transformation in the Soviet political system. Nixon turned this thinking on its head. He maintained that if international stability could be created over a long enough period, the monolithic Soviet system would be unable to resist change.

What was Brezhnev’s view of détente? Essentially that it was a mechanism for dealing with problems between governments and that this foreign policy was distinct from and not applicable to domestic affairs. Or, if there was a connection, it was a matter of preserving the Soviet system, not liberalizing it. Indeed, in the Soviet Union, repression stiffened in the détente years.

For the Kremlin, importantly, détente also meant America’s acknowledgment that the USSR was a military superpower and a political equal. As the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko said in 1971: “There is no question of any significance that can be decided without the Soviet Union or in opposition to it.” To Brezhnev, recognition of equality was of greater consequence than SALT. The Soviet leader could reassure himself and the Soviet people that the so-called correlation of forces in the world was tilting toward communism; the Soviet Union was riding the wave of history that would wash capitalism away. An article in Komsomolskaia Pravda justifying the policy was entitled “A Triumph of Realism.” Détente did not mark the end of global political competition. On the contrary, now was the time to step up the struggle; at this juncture in history, the circumstances were exceptionally favorable to the onward march of socialism. (Kissinger saw Brezhnev’s sensitivity on political equality as showing his psychological insecurity: “What a more secure leader might have regarded as a cliché or condescension, he treated as a welcome sign of our seriousness.”)

Détente also offered immediate practical and material payoffs for the adversarial superpowers. The Soviets wanted trade to avoid root-and-branch economic reform. The United States hoped détente would give the Soviets a stake in stability and temper their adventurousness abroad.

Thus, there was necessarily a contradiction at the heart of détente—between cooperation and competition. Rivalry between the two superpowers remained intense—as seen in the long list of Nixon’s reactive measures against perceived Soviet threats. The administration took action to counter the construction of a Soviet naval base in Cuba (U.S. spy planes had photographed a football field being set out when the Cuban national game was baseball), the movement of Soviet surface-to-air missiles to the Suez Canal, the Soviet role in the Indo-Pakistan war, and Brezhnev’s aggressiveness and apparent readiness for military intervention in the Arab-Israeli war.

Both sides worked on improving their weaponry and extending their influence. And both sides had problems with allies and client states whose interests did not align with theirs, or who felt their interests were subordinated to those of the superpower. For example, during the first days of Fischer-Spassky, the Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, expelled the 20,000 Soviet advisers and technicians based in his country, together with Soviet combat and reconnaissance aircraft. Angered by Moscow’s refusal to give him advanced weapons, Sadat initiated secret contacts with the Americans.

When the match was over, some of the press picked up these opposing themes—suspicious antagonism against peaceful competition. On the one hand, Fischer and Spassky represented their countries, and the match, according to the broadsheets, embodied East-West confrontation, particularly given the Soviet claim that its chess supremacy was the outcome of its superior ideology. On the other hand, no nationalist rivalry had been sparked off. Many Americans had supported Spassky, and many Russians had quietly rooted for Fischer. All in all, concluded The New York Times, the match had a unique political importance in terms of improved U.S.-USSR relations.

So Reykjavik was a cold war confrontation in this sense: It illustrated the tension within détente and the strains that led to the policy’s breakdown within three years. Fischer-Spassky smacked of both the continuing divide in politics and society and the suspicion and enmity that infused relations across the Iron Curtain. The separate territory kept to by the Soviet team, with all their customary watchfulness and suspicions, their lack of experience in dealing with the press, the go-go aggression of the Fischer staff, the tendency of the Western officials and Americans to make unilateral decisions and then to present them to the Soviets, the stereotyping by Western journalists of the Soviet team—all these reflected the cold war and directly affected the match.

Our two heroes also dramatized the contradictions of the era. For Spassky, Reykjavik was supposed to be a feast of chess, a celebration to be shared with friendly rivals. As for Fischer, in victory he had no doubt about the implications of his win. He said he could crush anyone the Soviets threw at him: “The Russians are wiped out.” He was delighted to have seized the title from the Soviet Union. “They probably now feel sorry they ever started playing chess,” he told the BBC. “They had it all for the last twenty years. They talked of their military might and their intellectual might. Now the intellectual thing… it’s given me great pleasure… as a free person… to have smashed this thing.”

Of course, as it turned out, news of the cold war’s death was greatly exaggerated. But if Fischer had not been so anti-Soviet and mercurial, if he had been as convivial as Spassky, the match might even have gone down in history as symbolizing détente.