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

5. THE RUSSIAN FROM LENINGRAD

Spassky went to Reykjavik to serve—in the eyes of Soviet society—as an icon as well as a player.

He was a flawed icon, at least in the view of the authorities and many of his peers. He stands out as being a member of the system’s awkward squad. How awkward? That is a question that can be answered only within the wider political and cultural context.

When imposing its will, the Party did not operate in a historical vacuum. In The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, Archie Brown identifies continuities with the Tsarist era: the tendency to place faith in people, particularly a strong leader, rather than in institutional structures, the dread of chaos, and the high premium placed on loyalty and unity. Added to these are systemic characteristics: the gulf between rulers and ruled and between intelligentsia and the masses, and the perception as normal of such state measures of control as internal passports, secrecy, censorship, surveillance, exile. Fear of anarchy and its correlative, acceptance of order, permeated all classes, providing a widespread distrust of liberalization.

The Great Terror shaped the mentality of Soviet generations to come, creating a society constantly accommodating to the uncertainties of life and to the injustices and arbitrary use of power. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Khrushchev’s revelatory five-and-a-half-hour speech to the Twentieth Party Congress three years later, the beginning of the so-called thaw, was the most momentous political event of Spassky’s early life. But the opening of the camp gates did not mean rehabilitation for the thousands of former prisoners. Many Soviet citizens remained convinced that “they must have done something.” Suspicion hung in the air like a contagion. And as the historian Catherine Merridale, the author of Night of Stone, has it, “Among Stalin’s many legacies, the habit of vigilance was the most enduring.”

Khrushchev’s speech began a debate that could have no closure. A democratic movement had emerged that the regime could crush—but only at a cost it was not prepared to pay. A long, hard, never-resolved battle ensued between dogmatists and liberals, while the Party tried to find some middle ground where it could maintain its power over all aspects of life without returning to the barbarism of the Stalinist era.

Where were the limits of autonomy at any given time? These can be seen only in the reaction of the authorities in the barren volcanic landscape of Soviet cultural life; dissent flared up, was subdued, and flared again. What was expected of chess players was the same as that expected of writers and artists: in the words of the Writers Union, “wholehearted dedication to the ideas of communism and boundless loyalty to the cause of the Party.”

On the morning of 14 October 1964, Khrushchev was ousted, attacked by his successors, Andrei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev, for “harebrained schemes, half-baked ideas and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality, boasting and empty rhetoric, attraction to rule by fiat, the refusal to take into account all the achievements of science and practical experience.” The twenty-two men who now constituted the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee—the control room of the state—had an average age of sixty-two. Born in 1906, Brezhnev himself had been a communist since 1931. The youngest full Politburo member, Fiodor Kulakov, was born in 1918 and had been a member of the Party since 1940. These were men hardened in the forge of Stalinism, comfortable with the cast-iron language of socialism. The message was that through the efforts of the people, the building of socialism had continued even under Stalin’s “distortions.” Anyone who was in the public eye, including chess players, was expected to display socialist values.

In Pravda, the then Komsomol leader Sergei Pavlov wrote that the regime faced the task of “combating evidence of nihilism, thoughtless and presumptuous rejection of authority, and scornful or ignorant attitudes toward the historical experience of the older generation of Soviet people.” He might not have been thinking of chess at that moment, but as chairman of the State Sports Committee, he would play a central part in Spassky’s Reykjavik saga.

However, Archie Brown points out that although cultural freedom under Brezhnev was curbed, there was no blanket prohibition on free intellectual activity; instead, the authorities took a pragmatic approach, recognizing the necessity for more openness in natural sciences and, to a limited extent, in the social sciences if the economy was to be modernized. There were also diplomatic considerations, such as the need for better relations with the West as tensions grew with China. But these opposing pressures did not stop Brezhnev from warning that intellectuals who failed to serve the cause of building communism would get what they deserved.

How did the authorities impose their views? In the case of the professional class, it was done primarily through their state organizations. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn complained bitterly that the leadership of the Writers Union conceived its duty as representing the Party to the writer rather than vice versa. Lev Abramov was in charge of the Chess Department of the Sports Committee for more than eleven years from the mid-1950s: he saw himself as having a two-way role. “I was expressing the opinion of the players to the authorities, and at the same time I was trying to support the general policy of our party and state.” He had come to manage chess from a position of high state responsibility and trust. A building engineer by profession, at the end of his professional career he had been chief engineer in construction for the All-Union defense plants. His experience with the Party and government meant that the Sports Committee could generally rely on him to understand what policy should be without being explicitly told.

Officials had an assortment of sticks and carrots with which to keep the elite players in check. The Party’s role as gatekeeper to travel was one of its most potent control mechanisms. The Soviet Union’s borders were closed to its own people, who had no legal right to travel abroad. There were two classes of Soviet citizen, went a bitter Soviet quip: those who obtained foreign travel passports and those who did not.

To be granted a foreign travel passport, the would-be traveler had to submit an exhaustive personal dossier that included a Party reference on moral and political maturity. Even when all the hoops had been jumped through, a passport could be withheld at the last moment or “lost” in the Foreign Ministry. The would-be traveler was instructed to excuse himself to his hosts on grounds of work, illness, or family commitments. The grandmasters David Bronstein and Edouard Gufeld could testify to lost passports at the last moment making travel to international tournaments impossible. Even Latvian ex—world champion Mikhail Tal was not immune. During the Olympiad in Cuba in 1966, he was involved in an altercation in a nightclub. Hit on the head with a bottle (it is said by an envious boyfriend of the woman with whom he was dancing), he was sent to hospital and was ruled out of chess action for several days. The next Olympiad took place two years later in Lugano. Tal was at the airport with all the other grandmasters when the vice chairman of the Sports Committee approached him and said, “And you, Mikhail Nekhemievich, can return to Riga.”

Chess officials of the period all adamantly deny that restrictions were placed on travel as a form of punishment. Their line is that trips had to be limited because of a shortage of funds. Thus, all the cases of restrictions cited to them can be explained by priorities —who was on form, who was already abroad, who had been abroad recently and should give way to another contender equally qualified.

Although Spassky had tasted the authorities’ displeasure, his brilliance as a player probably saved him from later restrictions. According to Mikhail Beilin, “Spassky without doubt did things no one else was allowed to do. The higher you reached in chess, master, international master, grandmaster, the more you were allowed to get up to mischief. Others would never have been permitted to go abroad if they acted in the same way as Spassky. He had a very independent character.”

As countless Soviet citizens discovered to their cost, independence of character did not amuse the authorities. Spassky could not be free of the Soviet system. Nonetheless, he demanded and enjoyed a rare measure of personal autonomy in belief and expression, an autonomy that he carried into Reykjavik. To comprehend what set him apart, we must return to the war he survived and the city in which he was raised.

“The struggle against Nazism was the greatest test the Soviet people ever endured; perhaps the greatest in the whole history of Russia,” writes Catherine Merridale. “The effort of will, the tenacity and stoicism that it demanded were beyond the range of previous experience, more terrible and more prolonged than anything most of the Soviet people, veterans of so many emergencies already, had ever seen.”

That was without doubt true of the defense of Leningrad. Nevertheless, there was a substantial element of myth making in the official accounts of the siege, a myth that spoke of the wholly selfless Soviet patriotism of citizens and stressed the heroic role of the Party in sustaining the city and its people. The myth contradicted the reality of panic among the authorities and the continuance of political control by terror, even at the darkest moments during the German attack.

The myth ignored the brutalization of the people. In his Europe: A History, Norman Davies comments, “Descriptions of carousing in the Party House, alongside corpses in the street and scientific workers dead at their laboratory benches, only add to the tally of inhumanity.”

The myth making that came out of triumph over Germany would affect Boris Spassky in a number of ways. According to the contemporary Soviet journalist and author Vasili Grossman, the hardships of the Great Patriotic War (as World War II was named) had a decisive influence on Russian self-consciousness. With victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, a victory that cost a million lives, Soviet Russians began to differentiate themselves from other nationalities, and the word Russian acquired a positive meaning. It is a historical commonplace that Stalin chose to revive Russian patriotism to fuel the Herculean war effort, but he also used the war to proclaim state nationalism. State nationalism was differentiated from the nationalism of modern European countries. It had nothing to do with love of country. The Soviet nationalist had a profound, respectful, and loving attachment to the socialist state that in turn protected and cherished its loyal citizens. State nationalism was to become the sole form of patriotism acceptable to a socialist country. It was state nationalism that Spassky was expected to express in his playing. Soviet chess players must never forget they played in red shirts.

A second source of influence emanating from the mythology of the war was the belief summed up in the phrase Nashe Luchshe—“Ours (Means) Better,” that the system must necessarily triumph. Its correlative was a constant fear of public belittling, of having the shortcomings of the system exposed. The long-serving Soviet ambassador to Washington, D.C., Anatoli Dobrynin, records wryly in his memoirs that when Brezhnev visited Nixon in 1973, Brezhnev himself instructed the Soviet security service to organize his trip so that “he would in no way appear to the Americans inferior to the president of the United States.”

A self-imposed barrier stood in the way of attempts to make a reality of “Ours (Means) Better”: the culture of secrecy and isolation that condemned people to live in an astonishing state of ignorance. This was not something that affected only ordinary citizens. Remarkably, in 1959, when Khrushchev was invited to stay with President Eisenhower at the presidential retreat, Camp David, no one around the Soviet leader knew what or where it was. In his memoirs, Khrushchev remembered, “I couldn’t for the life of me find out what Camp David was. I began to make inquiries from our Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They said they didn’t know, either.” Khrushchev worried that the American authorities were slighting him by proposing Camp David, that somehow he was being discriminated against, put into quarantine. Eventually he discovered that it was considered an honor to be entertained in the equivalent of the presidential dacha. “I can laugh about it now, but I’m a bit ashamed. It shows how ignorant we were in some respects.”

The chess world was no better informed. A startling lack of knowledge about Fischer’s recent history was revealed at a meeting of the chess authorities with Spassky and his team on 13 August 1971 to review the champion’s preparation. The report of the outcome by Viktor Baturinskii, the director of the Central Chess Club, records: “A request was made to determine (through Soviet correspondents in the U.S. or by other means) the reasons why Fischer did not take part in any competitions for around a year and a half (1968–1970), where he was during this period and what he was doing, and also to gather information about Fischer’s behavior and statements in the future.” In the same month, Spassky’s “Training Plan” also sought permission to select, purchase, and translate into Russian, foreign theoretical journals so that all relevant data and analysis could be gathered. Censorship and shortage of hard currency entailed seeking official sanction for this basic resource.

Through the 1960s, as Boris Spassky climbed toward the world title, state nationalism became more important in spite of the passing of the war generation. Soviet leaders saw the necessity of trumpeting the very real technological achievements of the Soviet state, in science, in high-tech weapons, in sending a dog into space and then a man. They needed consumer achievements, too, Soviet blue jeans, new apartment buildings. And they needed sporting triumphs. In his study of the Russian mentality, The Russian Mind, Ronald Hingley reflects on the Russians’ historic capacity and requirement for what he calls “prestige projects.” “Gifted in areas as varied as chess, rocketry and athletics, Russians are often successful when they turn their combined efforts to prestige projects, many of which are functionally effective as well as impressively decorated. One important secondary aim is to capture the imagination of foreign observers in the hope that some may be sufficiently dazzled to overlook the poor living conditions endured by the average citizen.”

Soviet citizens saw Spassky’s role as defending the outstanding example of “Ours (Means) Better,” the USSR’s grip on the World Chess Championship. In fighting the American, he became the symbol of the fallen. Before Reykjavik, he received countless letters from Soviet citizens, reminding him of his patriotic duty to turn back the imperialist American who was invading the Soviet chess citadel.

Justifying the Soviet state was what was important to the Party, not the game of chess for its own sake. Of course, says a former president of the Chess Federation of the Russian Federation, journalist Yevgeni Bebchuk: “The party bigwigs felt like that. You should die for the homeland and the Party. As for the games themselves, only chess players were interested. What really matters is that at the board you’re a Soviet person.” Today he smiles at the memory of the morale-boosting exercises undergone by contestants in student tournaments, with the whole team gathered in the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee.

In fact, there were high-level doubts before the Rekyjavik match as to whether Spassky did recognize his duty as required. Viktor Baturinskii, the director of the Central Chess Club, was called in for questioning by Aleksandr Yakovlev, the acting head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee and later Mikhail Gorbachev’s right-hand man. “Tell me, does Spassky understand he carries the moral responsibility for the outcome of the match in relation to the entire Soviet people?” Diplomatically, Baturinskii responded, “I hope he does understand.” Thirty years after making that statement, he admitted it had been deliberately disingenuous: he was clear that Spassky did not understand.

A former assistant to the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Baturinskii owed both his interest in chess and his legal training to one of the founders of Soviet chess, Nikolai Krylenko, who had encouraged him to take up each in the years after the revolution. Colonel Baturinskii served in the army for thirty-five years. He had been number two in the team prosecuting the key British-American spy, Colonel Oleg Penkovskii. Baturinskii’s nickname was “the Black Colonel.” After Viktor Korchnoi defected in 1976, he said Baturinskii should be hanged, drawn, and quartered for his role under Stalin.

Blind and hard of hearing, the former senior chess administrator lived out the end of his days at the top of one of the huge, grim, and grimy apartment blocks that encircle Moscow (he died in December 2002). He was still baffled as to how anyone could question why Spassky had a moral duty to demonstrate the primacy of the Soviet system. The answer seemed too obvious to merit discussion: “Of course it was an ideological question.”

Given that Spassky owed so much to the Soviet state, how did he fail to appreciate—in the eyes of the authorities, at least—his reciprocal obligations to it? And if he rejected state nationalism, what did he believe in? Two fundamental facts provide a starting point for comprehending Spassky’s character and the evolution of his convictions: He was an ethnic Russian, and he was a Lenin-grader, a denizen of the former imperial capital, Peter the Great’s window on the west. In Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky’s narrator calls St. Petersburg (as it was and is) “the most abstract and intentional city in the whole round world. (Towns can be either intentional or unintentional.)” In literary terms, it signified a bridge between the low realities of life and the strange, the enigmatic, and the hidden.

In the Western press, Spassky was marked out among Soviet chess players for naming Dostoyevsky as his favorite author. References to the Dostoyevsky-loving player were used to contrast him with the American, who, if he read anything at all beyond chess magazines, read comics. Some Westerners might have assumed that Spassky was taking a risk in his choice of literature. In fact, Spassky’s passion for Dostoyevsky was far from defiant; even Stalin is said to have relished The Devils. And though some of Dostoyevsky’s writings were censored in the 1950s and 1960s, a major new edition of his works was announced in 1971 on the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth.

All the same, the qualities of a Dostoyevsky novel, the realism, the psychological depth of the characters, the stress on the dualism of human nature, on nonrational motivation—these made the author the most subversive of prerevolutionary writers. He embraces life lived for the journey, not for its ending—as seen in his Notes from Underground. There the hero ruminates that “man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself. And who knows (nobody can say with certainty), perhaps man’s sole purpose in this world consists in this uninterrupted process of attainment, or, in other words, in living, and not specifically in the goal….”

This chimed with Spassky’s attitude to chess. Although he was intensely competitive, the process of achieving a result mattered as much to him as the result itself. He also displayed distinct affinities with Dostoyevskian characters. In the novels, there are existentialist choices, constantly faced, choices that will forever mark those who have to make them. A Dostoyevskian character is hard to classify, he or she is incomplete, always with the potential to adapt and evolve. The Dostoyevsky theorist Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “They all acutely sense their own inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within…. Man is not a final and defined quantity upon which firm calculations can be made; man is free, and can therefore violate any regulating norms that might be thrust upon him.”

Certainly, Spassky did not conform to the model of Soviet man; his fame and status afforded him the luxury of a self-determination denied others. Although the state lifted him and his family out of poverty, he always rejected any notion that he owed it a debt. Queried on this, he points out that the Russian Tsar Nicholas II also gave allowances to talented children, paid out of his own pocket.

But if, like a latter-day Dostoyevskian character, he contravened the norms of the Soviet state, and in many ways resisted categorization, he also had much in common with Dostoyevsky himself. Dostoyevsky is a profoundly Christian writer, imbued with a belief in the world of the spirit and in life everlasting; these beliefs, he thought, were the keys to moral health. Spassky, raised amid the religious atmosphere of his mother’s Russian Orthodox beliefs, was intensely proud of his paternal family’s connection with the Orthodox Church. Spassky’s favorite among Dostoyevsky’s novels is The Brothers Karamazov, which carries a heavy dose of theology. The novel also gives a pointer to Spassky’s political stance. In the central episode, the trial of one of the three brothers for parricide, the prosecutor claims that in the three are represented Russian Europeanism, national principles, and the ingenuous spontaneity of the Russian temperament. The stress is on Russian. In the period of official Soviet state nationalism, Spassky was a Russian patriot, the inheritor of Russian Orthodox religious culture.

Spassky’s university experience would have reinforced his nationalism. It came during a period of convulsions in the arts, what the Leningrad poet Yevgeni Rein called “that half-literary, half-bohemian life that was fermenting in Leningrad.” This entailed in part a subversion of Soviet culture. According to Rein, “We started to turn again toward the Western influences, toward contemporary Western culture; we again turned to Russian tradition, saw the nineteenth century, the Age of Silver, in a new light, and again linked up with the ring of tradition.”

In Grand Strategy, Spassky reflects on his university thesis. Significantly, he had returned to the prerevolutionary period for his choice of subject: Shakhmatni Listok 1859–1863, the first Russian chess magazine. He had always had an interest in Russian history, he says. “For this work I had to read journals from the 1860s. I saw the Russian culture of that time. What a beautiful city St. Petersburg was! When I left the National Library, I found myself in the sleepy, dreadful, provincial town of Leningrad. What an abyss when Russia collapsed.”

His yearning for the old Russia also explains Spassky’s disturbing description of himself as “an honorable anti-Semite.” Dostoyevsky was a nationalist Slavophile with a strong streak of anti-Semitism—seen in his crude attacks on what he called “Yidism.” Spassky’s forthright self-characterization stems from his hostility to the takeover of Russia in 1917 by the international Bolshevik movement, several of whose leaders were Jewish. As so many senior Soviet chess grandmasters and administrators were both Jewish by descent and Communist Party members, we must assume that he was able to separate his professional relationships from his historic antipathy.

Grandmaster Nikolai Krogius remembers Spassky unerringly stressing that he played for Russia and was not glorifying the Soviet Union through his successes. Krogius sniffs, “The authorities tolerated this exposition (possibly, as they say, only for the time being).” “Bourgeois nationalism” was how the authorities would have normally, and critically, described Spassky’s brand of patriotism. The KGB considered such an attitude to be a “pernicious and dangerous survival of the past.” Nevertheless, as a grandmaster of world caliber, Spassky enjoyed the forbearance of the authorities—a forbearance not accorded to lesser mortals or to those with direct impact on the public, such as poets, novelists, theater directors, and historians. It made the difference between liberty to walk the streets of Leningrad or play abroad on the one hand and the enforced stay in the provinces or the psychiatric ward on the other. How far did Spassky test the tolerance of the system?

As is widely reported, Spassky was not a Communist Party member. But too much is made of that. Some of the characters in this story—grandmasters Averbakh, Taimanov, and Stein and apparatchiks Baturinskii, Abramov, and Ivonin—were members. Others—grandmasters Tal, Geller, Krogius, and Smyslov—were not. The father of the Soviet H-bomb, Andrei Sakharov, declined powerful “offers” to become a member long before he became known as a dissident, though he was in receipt of a massive income and other privileges from the state. Spassky insists he was never under any pressure to join: perhaps he was considered a lost cause.

The absence of a Party card did not excuse Spassky from political responsibility or from demonstrating the approved political consciousness. While he saw himself as “politically independent,” his was a country where the phrase had no meaning. And from the beginning of his career, in certain non-chess circles he was being spoken of as someone who should be watched as potentially “politically unreliable.”

A thoughtless remark during a championship in Antwerp in 1955, when he was still a teenager, led to an inquiry by the Sports Committee. All innocence, no doubt, Spassky had asked the team commissar, “Did Comrade Lenin suffer from syphilis?” Spassky recollects “the eyes of my apparatchik glittered dangerously.” Why risk such a question? “Lenin had been made into an icon, and I was curious about the reality.” Only action by the deputy sports minister, Postnikov, prevented the case from being taken up by the Komsomol, which would have threatened Spassky’s future.

Officers of the Leningrad KGB were now among those following the career of the chess highflier. Doubtless the organization’s plentiful supply of informers kept them in touch with his every word and deed. His independence of spirit was beginning to be observed by some of his colleagues. In 1960, after they had flown to Argentina for the Mar del Plata international tournament, grandmaster David Bronstein told Spassky that they should report in to the embassy. Spassky had better things to do: “David Ionovich, you go, but I won’t. I belong to a different generation, to which these rules don’t apply.”

By the mid-1960s, the non-chess interest in Spassky was such that Bondarevskii urged him to move from Leningrad to the Moscow area. “The KGB is too curious about you,” he told Boris. In a studio flat shaken by passing express trains, forty kilometers from the capital, twenty-seven-year-old Spassky lived on his own for the first time.

Being in the international spotlight did nothing to curb his independence. At the 1970 Chess Olympiad in the West German city of Siegen, two years after the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and by now world champion, Spassky took care to shake hands with the entire Czechoslovak team. Even though the Czech authorities must have considered their team members politically reliable enough to travel to the West, Spassky’s gesture can still be seen as an intended, if restrained, display of sympathy for that country.

Then, famously and dangerously, in January 1971 he refused to sign a collective letter in support of the black American communist Angela Davis, who had been arrested in the United States. He believed that the world championship should not be used for politics. This refusal was no small matter for the world champion. Leading Soviet representatives of science, sport, music, ballet, and literature had added their names. Botvinnik had signed and had solicited Spassky’s signature. The world champion still declined. The chess apparatchik Mikhail Beilin feels generally warm toward Spassky as a person: “He was nice, sympathetic, and most people felt well disposed toward him. I think people liked him for his human qualities but disliked him if they judged him on the upholding of Party values.” Yet Beilin disapproves strongly of Spassky’s decision. “This letter was signed by different cultural leaders—Spassky was asked to sign on behalf of our chess federation—and it was regarded as a great honor to be asked, a very special honor. So Spassky was being honored by the Central Committee, and he didn’t value this honor.” To an old communist like Lev Abramov, it was distasteful: “He was a product of the system. The Soviet system provided him with everything he needed for his chess; yet when it came to areas beyond chess, he didn’t want to be part of it.”

The general reaction was sufficiently negative for the deputy sports minister, Viktor Ivonin, to call a special meeting at the Sports Ministry. Spassky himself was not invited to what bore a strong resemblance to a trial in absentia. The participants included the leader of the Trade Union Sports Committee (of which Spassky was a member), representatives from the State Sports Committee, the Komsomol Central Committee, and the Central Chess Club, as well as the journalist from the news agency Novosti who had drafted the protest letter. As the participants evaluated Spassky’s attitude and tried to decide what to do about his refusal, a more general dissatisfaction with him emerged. There was broad agreement that he could not be forced to sign. But Botvinnik’s influence, Spassky’s desire for a new apartment, and unfounded gossip about improper behavior in the presidium of the USSR Chess Federation were all discussed as means of bringing pressure to bear. In the end, it was decided that Ivonin would simply talk to him again, though this proved futile: Spassky’s mind was made up. He could not be brought round even by another call, this time from the KGB.

In discussing the preparations for Fischer, Viktor Baturinskii, the director of the Central Chess Club, instanced Spassky’s refusal to put his name to the Davis letter as an indication of his immaturity. Mikhail Beilin says that it was in Spassky’s nature to delight in outraging others, even at the risk of offending them. This meant saying what nobody else would dare to say. “For example, he was lecturing to a large chess audience in Nizhny Novgorod. He was talking about Estonia as a very nice little country with a very difficult destiny. Such a view didn’t appeal to me: there were people who thought it had an extremely happy destiny. His allowing himself to say such a thing is not very agreeable.” If as a good Soviet you believed that the USSR’s annexation of Estonia was a stroke of good fortune for the country and its people, you might well find Spassky’s indirect censure upsetting.

Perhaps there was even a hint of cruelty when Spassky forced unsafe political opinions on a listener. Nikolai Krogius remembers how “in public he often displayed bravado with his paradoxical declarations: ‘The communists have destroyed nature,’ ‘Keres lives in an occupied country [that is, in Estonia],’ and so on. Of course, if such statements had been made not by a famous chess player but by an ordinary citizen, then harsh punitive measures would have been taken against that citizen—possibly even a prison sentence.”

Obviously, the authorities were fully apprised of Spassky’s idiosyncratic outlook. At least when he was at the top, he did not bother to confine his views to his inner circle—though even there he would have known that someone was noting it all for the KGB. Baturinskii complained of “his thoughtlessness” during public appearances, and cited as typical a speech Spassky made to an audience of chess lovers in the city of Shakhty in the Rostov region on 26 September 1971. The speech had been the subject of an outraged letter from the secretary of the Shakhty City Committee of the CPSU, one Comrade Kazantsev:

Spassky’s salary had been raised from 250 roubles a month to 300 on his becoming world champion. It may not have seemed much to Spassky, but Mikhail Beilin, who signed the necessary document authorizing this increase, recalls the envy Spassky’s relative wealth provoked among colleagues: “I remember when the young Spassky received $5,000 in Santa Monica, a lot of people suffered over this as though experiencing a personal loss.” To put Spassky’s earnings in context, in the late 1960s (after the currency reform) the average monthly wage for a skilled or white-collar worker was 122 roubles.

Spassky did more than just complain about money. At this Shakhty meeting, he startled his listeners by saying, “Basically I am descended from a priest’s family. And if I had not made it as a chess player, I would happily have become a priest.”

The speech went all the way to the secretaries of the Central Committee, ending up with the acting head of the Central Committee Propaganda and Agitation Department, Aleksandr Yakovlev, who was told that the audience had expressed “bewilderment and indignation” at its contents.

Harsher and potentially more threatening judgments were made of Spassky. Baturinskii accused him of being under the sway of “objectivist views” over the location of the match with Fischer. At a preliminary discussion with the USSR Chess Federation leadership, Spassky had declared: “I consider it inadvisable to hold the match in the USSR, since this would give a certain advantage to one of the participants, and the match should be held on equal terms….”

Broadly, “objectivism” meant expressing views not based on a Marxist-Leninist analysis. The official Soviet reference book, The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, defined this sin as “A worldview [based on] sociopolitical ‘neutrality’ and [refraining] from Party-based conclusions…. In reality it… masks a social and class-based subjectivism… objectivism is orientated toward serving, albeit not openly, the dominant conservative or reactionary force of the social ‘order of things.’” In other words, Spassky was demonstrating an incorrect political consciousness.

Spassky gave off dangerous political vibrations, but should we call him a dissident? Such he seemed to some contemporary university students. Viktor Korchnoi gives a qualified appraisal: “When I defected, I considered myself a dissident on two legs, while Spassky was a one-legged dissident.”

From his post as second in command of the State Sports Committee, and in charge of ten sports including chess, Viktor Ivonin regarded him with a possibly sinister tolerance: “We accepted him as he was, knowing that it was too late to change him. He is a nihilist. We could have helped him in certain ways, to talk and act ‘more correctly.’ And we tried to do that. But you can’t remake a person. So when he said certain things—perhaps in jest—we decided not to react. But he wasn’t a dissident.”

Yevgeni Bebchuk, the former president of the Chess Federation of the Russian Federation (a republic of the USSR), agrees: “On the other hand, Spassky never accepted the Soviet regime: he wouldn’t say that out loud, but he would say it among friends. From the very beginning, he pretended to play the fool, pretended not to know anything. I would often be called to official meetings in my administrative role, and colleagues on the committees would say, ‘Well, he’s a talented chess player, but he’s a little bit strange in the head,’ and I would say, ‘Well, yes.’ He protected himself. It’s a kind of survival technique, because in Russian culture they take well to fools; they forgive them a great many things.”

Here, Bebchuk is making a peculiarly Russian cultural reference. An established feature of Tsarist Russia, the “Holy Fool,” or yurodivyi (one of “God’s folk”), was a wandering monklike figure, venerated for his or her self-imposed suffering in the cause of humility and intense religiosity. The Holy Fool was credited with mystical powers. But most relevant here, like the king’s jester, the Holy Fool also enjoyed a license to poke fun at rulers, expose evils, and tell unpalatable truths. And when some of his contemporaries try to explain Spassky, they express a tolerance of his “eccentricities and unorthodox opinions” in a tone of voice that might be used of such a figure.

Spassky’s trainer Nikolai Krogius, the psychologist, says the world champion’s politics were the consequence of his complex character—an aspect of which was his hostility to discipline. “He’s like an independent artist, a very blithe person, a bohemian type. And as he was the world champion at that time, he thought everyone had to listen to what he said and take his opinion into consideration—though, to be frank, his opinion was not always the last opinion on a subject and not the most considered.”

Being opinionated was as much about entertaining as scandalizing. Spassky was certainly that risky type—a joker. Grandmaster Yuri Averbakh has a dramatic analysis of Spassky’s approach to life: “Spassky was an actor.” In other words, he wanted to be the focus of attention. Averbakh remembers going to Keres’s funeral with Spassky, “and everyone was dressed in black, except for Spassky, who came in a red suit. It was very funny because there were a thousand people on the streets and he was the only one who stood out. I wasn’t sure whether he simply neglected the usual formalities or whether this was his way of expressing himself. Such exhibitionism was very sad.”

Spassky was also highly convivial. Several of his friends and colleagues claim that once he became champion, he shed any former reticence. Then he wanted to be the life and soul of the party and broaden his social life. There was no shortage of invitations. As well as his strongly expressed remarks, he had a fund of amusing stories and was an excellent mimic. Baturinskii and Averbakh were two of his chess victims. Politicians did not escape: Brezhnev was a favorite. He even dared a (passable) Lenin.

Thus, the views of his chess contemporaries offer no single picture of the world champion other than that he was out of the ordinary, of independent character. They remember Spassky the artist, Spassky the buccaneer, Spassky the joker, Spassky the actor, Spassky the nihilist. Spassky the free spirit, vol’nodumets. Spassky the frivolous, Spassky the un-Soviet man. Even Spassky the Holy Fool.

However we categorize him, there seems to have been an acceptance by the authorities of Spassky’s determination to be his own man and of his distancing himself from the regime. The official answer to their rogue champion was simply to dismiss his views as inconsequential, irritating but not worth taking seriously.

Until, that is, Fischer challenged Soviet ownership of the world title. Then the authorities could no longer escape the tensions between the political role of the world champion and Spassky’s obdurate rejection of that role, and between their distaste for his attitudes and admiration for his incontestable greatness as a chess player.