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

8. TROUBLE IN PARADISE

On 19 June 1972, the chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Committee for Physical Training and Sport—in short, USSR sports minister Sergei Pavlov—held a farewell reception for Boris Spassky and his team on their departure for Reykjavik. His deputy, Viktor Ivonin, joined them, together with Viktor Baturinskii. Spassky and Pavlov made short speeches.

This was no joyful sendoff, as for smiling troops departing to war with flags waving and families cheering. The atmosphere seemed strained, an air of battles being refought, entrenched positions justified. Spassky told them that his group had gelled and thanked the Sports Committee for its organization. He felt well prepared and well rested. He had lost some weight and even felt younger. He singled out grandmaster Isaac Boleslavskii for his usefulness and mentioned that he had played a sparring game with Anatoli Karpov. Then he justified his decision not to have a head of delegation, a doctor, a cook, or a translator in Reykjavik: “Such people would have had to be compatible with the team.” He also rebutted rumors within the chess community that he had not worked hard enough. The match, he prophesied, would be a celebration of chess.

In reply, Pavlov dwelled on the historic nature of the event that was about to take place. In spite of all the difficulties in the negotiations, the Soviet conditions for the match had been satisfied. Those in the room would have understood that the chairman’s allusion to “difficulties” was not referring only to the Americans or FIDE, but also to the world champion. Then Pavlov uttered two warnings to the team. Firmness was essential. If someone behaved toward them in a “boorish way,” they must be boorish back. Pavlov tried to make this sound like a little joke. But it was clear to the audience that he meant what he said and that the remarks contained an implicit reproach. The word boor had already been used in a personal attack on Fischer in the Soviet chess magazine 64—an attack ordered by Pavlov. The chairman went on to caution the team not to be caught up in the Fischer mystique—the notion that the U.S. grandmaster was bestowed with some kind of transcendent, irresistible power. Then he wished Spassky victory, the assembled party raised their glasses, and the reception was over.

What exactly was Pavlov hinting at? What “difficulties” had Spassky and his team created? Little was known about the Soviet chess machine in the West, except that it was phenomenally successful; but the image was of ruthless efficiency, of a culture and political system that permitted no dissent or internal squabbling. The reality, at least in the buildup to Reykjavik, was the reverse.

Boris Spassky and the chess authorities had been bracing themselves for a duel with Fischer since the spring of 1971, before the American had even taken on Taimanov in the first of the Candidates matches.

Normally, grandmaster arrangements would be managed through the USSR Chess Federation, but because of his position as world champion, Spassky jumped a stage of the administrative hierarchy, discussing his plans directly with the State Sports Committee leadership. A significant first meeting took place on 1 March 1971, when Spassky and his trainer, grandmaster Igor Bondarevskii, met the deputy sports minister, Viktor Ivonin, to discuss the champion’s program for the year ahead. This meant a schedule that would cover both his personal training and the array of commitments incumbent upon him as world champion, the training he would carry out for the trade union chess club, his participation in matches, international tournaments, public chess duties, even rest and recreation. The world champion was ex officio the leader of Soviet chess.

Viktor Ivonin is a central figure in our story. His daily record of the meetings and talks he held offers a unique contemporaneous source for the Soviet side of the championship. Sports Minister Pavlov had taken personal charge of the USSR preparations for the Munich Olympics, so Deputy Minister Ivonin became the senior governmental point of reference for Fischer’s challenge.

Short, shrewd, jolly, and still full of energy in his seventies, Ivonin is evidently a survivor. His career opened on the floor of a Leningrad electric power station, where at fourteen he started as a metal worker during the siege. There he became a Party activist, beginning the ascent that has taken him through all political upheaval to the spacious office he now occupies as the executive director of Russian Lotteries. He progressed steadily through the ranks of the Komsomol, went briefly to the Sports Committee, and then, in 1962, moved to the CPSU Central Committee, working in the sports section (he was a sports enthusiast). In 1968, when Pavlov became chairman of the State Sports Committee, he asked Ivonin to become his deputy: they had known each other well in the Komsomol and the Central Committee. Ivonin thought highly of Pavlov, but he hesitated for a short while because Pavlov was notoriously difficult to work with. They ended up being colleagues for fourteen years.

Politically, there was more to the story. Pavlov was on his way down. A tough Stalinist who had gained entry to the highest echelons of the Party as head of the Komsomol, he was a professional propagandist and orator, skilled at brutal assaults on those he and the authorities regarded as “enemies of the state.” He was known for his violent temper—though, says Ivonin, “the whip was not his principal weapon.” In the mid-1960s, he backed the hard-line Aleksandr Shelepin, who mounted an unsuccessful challenge to Brezhnev’s leadership. Shelepin was ejected from the Party Secretariat, dispatched to the outer darkness of the trade union movement. Pavlov fell with his mentor, and when, in 1968, he accepted an offer he could not refuse to become head of the State Sports Committee, it was a substantial loss of rank, influence, and authority. As first secretary of the Komsomol, he was a full member of the Central Committee; as chairman of the Sports Committee, he was reduced to being a nonvoting (“candidate”) member. However, he made the best of it, coming to be seen as a fine statesman of sport.

When Spassky and Bondarevskii arrived at Ivonin’s office, the central question was the probable identity of the challenger for the title. Spassky and Bondarevskii said Fischer would certainly be a contender, and they predicted he would reach the final. Forecasting his challenger was vital. Chess players cannot train effectively in a vacuum; the training has to be tailored to the opponent they expect to confront.

Although the world championship cycle still had a long way to run, from this moment, Spassky’s preparation would be focused on the American. Ivonin held a further series of meetings to appraise Fischer’s chess qualities. The tone was one of respect, almost awe. His technique was exemplary. He looked after his physical fitness. The enigma of his personality was discussed with curiosity and apprehension. There was longstanding resentment at Fischer’s earlier claims that Soviet players were dishonest and sold victories to one another for money. But was Fischer a genius, or mad, or both? The question was raised with Sergei Pavlov at the Sports Committee in March.

Old habits die hard. Not long after this committee meeting, an article entitled “The Subject Is Fischer” appeared in the magazine 64. This served up 1,400 words of acidic anti-Fischer vituperation. A non—chess journalist, Anatoli Golobev, wrote the piece under Pavlov’s instructions. This extract gives the flavor: “A difficult childhood predetermined his place in the chess world as well as his ignorance in most spheres of social life, unthinkable for a contemporary cultured person”—presumably a broad hint that Fischer was nekulturnyi, rude and uncouth. “By the way, much of his ‘extravagant behavior’ stems from this—from his mixture of ignorance and childlike spite.”

It may have been their minister’s style, but several other members of the committee regarded this heavy-handed mauling as a hugely embarrassing mistake. When all was said and done, they knew Fischer as an exceptional player. The grandmasters also despised the item as the political journalism of a chess nonentity. Mikhail Beilin was head of the Sports Committee’s Chess Department from 1967 to 1971. He recalls, “Many in the chess world were sympathetic to Fischer: when you look at his games, you’re not interested if he attended school or not.”

The committee members resolved that henceforth only serious and objective articles on Fischer as a chess player should appear in Soviet chess magazines—personal criticism was to be outlawed. It was a decree they stuck to in the face of a number of provocative Fischer outbursts—such as at the time of the Larsen match, when he bragged that he would destroy any Russian he faced. Pavlov had to be restrained from demanding a tough rejoinder in the Soviet press.

Nevertheless, even articles praising Fischer’s chess tended to remind Soviet readers of his less laudable characteristics. He caused genuine umbrage in the Soviet official breast. No doubt bound up with this hostility was the Soviet sense of inferiority. In an internal report, the Director of the Central Chess Club, Viktor Baturinskii, complained angrily and inaccurately: “Fischer is provided with considerable moral and material support, and for these purposes the U.S. Chess Federation has received around $200,000 from various organizations.” He went on, “Appearances by Fischer are organized in the press, on the radio and on television, during which he gives assurances that he will become world champion in 1972 and makes insulting remarks about Soviet chess players.”

The pattern of approbation followed by condemnation was repeated in an article by international master Vasili Panov. Comparing Fischer and Spassky, the author noted: “Both are masters of the art of fine maneuvering and of combinational attack, both have the ability to squeeze out the smallest positional advantages, and both have perfect endgame technique… the creativity of Spassky and Fischer represents the culmination of all the achievements of the second half of the twentieth century.” But in the same article, he homed in on another aspect of Fischer’s character, quoting the American: “‘Chess provides me with happiness and money…. I follow what happens to my capital closely. I want to have a magnificent villa and an expensive car of my own….’” Panov seemed horrified. “American patrons of the arts, now paying generously for Fischer’s appearances, do not know much about chess. But they understand success! For them there are only winners and losers. And only success pays!”

Evaluating Fischer as both a man and a player became a high priority. In June, after Taimanov’s defeat, a bruised Taimanov and his now abject team manager, Aleksandr Kotov, gave an assessment of Fischer to the Sports Committee. What was remarkable about Fischer, they said, was his “demonic influence over his opponent when he sits at the table.” The long-held view of Soviet grandmasters that Fischer was a tournament player, not a match player, was inaccurate. Kotov and Taimanov blamed themselves for underestimating Fischer. They were struck by his habit of continuing to study chess even over dinner.

It was not all gloom. They thought their experience showed that Fischer was slow to get into a match; in the first three games he was sweating. A potential Achilles heel for the American was his narrow opening repertoire. Finally, said Taimanov, there was only one player who could beat him: Boris Spassky.

Together with a note from several other Soviet grandmasters, this review of Fischer was passed on to Spassky, though Fischer’s matches against Larsen and Petrosian were still to be played. At the beginning of June, Spassky’s team was assembled. It consisted of three grandmasters: his longtime coach, “Father” Igor Bondarevskii; Nikolai Krogius, a psychologist; and Efim Geller. Krogius had been part of Spassky’s training team, with Bondarevskii, since the autumn of 1967 and was to continue working with him until 1974.

Each had a specific task. Bondarevskii’s job was to study in minute detail 500 of Fischer’s games in an attempt to identify deficiencies and weaknesses. Krogius had developed a technique for appraising players’ psychology and was now applying it to Fischer. He aimed to find the critical positions in his games and assess Fischer’s thought processes, studying also his reaction to defeat. He would carry out the same process on Spassky and compare the two. Geller would concentrate on the openings.

Later, Krogius complained that Spassky had ignored the results of his toil, just as Geller grumbled that Spassky had not followed his openings advice. Ivonin recorded in his diary that Spassky had paid little attention to the notes on Fischer commissioned from other leading Soviet grandmasters such as Tal, Smyslov, and Petrosian, nor had he taken the opportunity to discuss Fischer with them in person. The champion had his reasons, some less respectful than others. “We don’t need general advice from old men,” he opined to Ivonin. And he was determined that these “old men” should not discover any of the new weapons he was developing for use against Fischer. “The most important thing is we won’t be able to tell them anything; we’re scared information may leak.”

It was and remains quite normal for grandmasters to fear that their ingeniously worked-through ideas might seep out to the wider world, but Mikhail Beilin describes this as a Spassky obsession and claims that the champion had been suspicious of others since childhood: “He would keep quiet; it was his nature, and he wouldn’t trust or believe anyone.” The world champion also believed that some grandmasters, Petrosian for one, actively disliked him. He had grounds to be wary. Because foreign travel and the other rewards for success were so dependent on the favor of the authorities, Moscow chess was a wasps’ nest of rivalry, intrigues, and plots.

So for Spassky the formation of a tight, loyal team was vital. To Bondarevskii, Geller, and Krogius, an Estonian player was added. Ivo Nei had captured the USSR Junior Chess Championship in 1948. He was only an international master, a lack of foreign tournament play having cost him the chance of the grandmaster title. Baffled by the choice, some put it down to Nei’s being a close friend of his fellow Estonian Paul Keres, whom Spassky was said to have idolized. Certainly Spassky was an admirer of Keres. But talent with a tennis racket was the primary reason for Nei’s selection. A former Estonian tennis champion, his major role was to keep Spassky physically fit. He was likable and ebullient, and according to Nei, he and Spassky enjoyed a freedom of conversation the champion did not share with the others. Looking back, Spassky says he trusted Nei, and it is probable that he felt more at ease with the unpretentious non-Muscovite than with the other denizens of the Central Chess Club.

However, the Sports Committee felt Nei to be an extremely poor choice. After all, he had little to offer in terms of chess analysis; he was not in the same class as the others, and if Spassky required a physical trainer, then a real expert should have been found. The KGB also objected to the non-Party member Estonian; during the match, doubts about him would take a more menacing turn.

By August 1971, as Petrosian prepared to meet Fischer in the last of the Candidates matches, Spassky discussed the details of his preparation with the Sports Committee. Baturinskii had already informed Ivonin that the world champion had not worked much in the previous year. Ivonin told Spassky he should be playing more in the Soviet Union, where the competitors were stronger and fought more fiercely.

Since becoming world champion, Spassky had played ninety-two games, eighty-eight of them abroad. Ivonin suspected that Spassky did not want tough competition. He appeared to be suffering from post—world championship loss-of-form syndrome.

In July 1971, in a small tournament in the Swedish city of Göteborg, Spassky had managed eight points out of eleven (five wins, six draws). In the Alekhine Memorial tournament in Moscow in November/December 1971, he was placed only joint sixth, below the new prodigy, Anatoli Karpov, and ex-champions Smyslov and Petrosian. He had agreed a series of unimpressive short draws. But he was not the only champion to have avoided tough competition. In a later article in the chess magazine 64, Vasili Panov commented: “Not one of our world champions, with the exception of Botvinnik, played even once in the Championship of the USSR—the strongest contemporary tournament—while they held the title. That is why they lost their feel for hard-fought battles. Even in the competitions in which the world champions were magnanimous enough to appear, they didn’t throw themselves fully into it, didn’t crave first place, and often—oh, how often!—instead of passionately searching for paths to victory were satisfied with modest ‘grandmaster’ draws and now and then conceded first place to a braver and more ambitious competitor.”

If he were minded to make excuses, Spassky could point to personal preoccupations—private troubles that the Sports Committee tried to help him resolve. He was unsettled by the obligations that fell to him as the leader of Soviet chess. He had to ensure that Bondarevskii and Krogius had permits to live in Moscow and that Bondarevskii gained a much needed pay increase. He wanted to change his Moscow flat in Prospekt Mira; he described the Stalin-era apartment as noisy and claustrophobic, with nowhere to put his books or work. He wanted more money. He had to pay alimony to his first wife and provide for his mother. His second wife, Larisa, had come to Moscow with their child, and they too had to be taken care of—a suitable kindergarten found for the little boy, Vasili. With all these expenses, 300 roubles a month was not enough, he told Ivonin.

As a senior politician, a deputy minister, Ivonin also received 300 roubles a month. He initially told Spassky that the Sports Committee did not have sufficient money for chess as well as for other sports in the Soviet Union. Privately he thought that compared to other people, Spassky had a privileged enough life already; the real problem was that Spassky knew how sports stars lived abroad. However, Spassky’s demands could not be ignored, and when they met again in late November, Ivonin capitulated. Spassky was awarded an increase to 500 roubles a month—the same as a Soviet minister and the first Soviet sportsman to be remunerated at this level. The Council of Ministers—the government—had to approve the increase as an “exceptional personal salary.”

On 16 November, Viktor Baturinskii, director of the Central Chess Club, wrote a report to the Sports Committee on Spassky’s training, expressing the authorities’ disquiet at the champion’s attitude to the defense of his title. Clearly exasperated, he explained Spassky’s unsuitability to carry the Soviet flag and gave a merciless review of the world champion’s general readiness for the mission ahead:

The very next day, the Sports Committee lost control of Spassky’s preparation.

Within the structure of government, the Sports Committee was answerable to the Council of Ministers. But the Soviet Union had two (unequal) sources of governing authority. Operating alongside the government, at this time led by Andrei Kosygin, was the real center of power, the Communist Party. At the top of the Party was the Central Committee. It had a cabinet, the Politburo, the pinnacle of the power structure. The Central Committee and its secretaries were at the heart of the political system, and the general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, was the true leader of the country. (This caused puzzled head scratching in diplomatic circles: how could Brezhnev pay state visits abroad when he had no official governmental position?) Any issue with major ideological implications went to the Central Committee for discussion and decision. If the response was positive, the government ministry would act; if not, not.

Without informing the Sports Committee (in other words, the deputy minister, Viktor Ivonin, and the bureaucrats who would have to make all the practical arrangements and find the money for them), Spassky initiated a meeting with a senior functionary in the Central Committee and handed over his outline “Training Plan.” The unnamed functionary conveyed it to Piotr Demichev, the Central Committee secretary whose beat covered chess. Chess fell under “ideology,” and Demichev had been the secretary responsible for ideology since 1961—he was also a candidate, or nonvoting member, of the Politburo. Spassky himself says that he never met Demichev.

Why did Spassky take this radical step and give his schedule to the Central Committee, the control room of the Party? He says it was because of his growing friction with Baturinskii; he wanted to bypass him—and with him, presumably, the other Sports Committee apparatchiks.

Although this was a world championship, the Central Committee would not normally have intervened; usually such matters would have been left to the Sports Committee. Asked if he resented Spassky’s gambit, Ivonin simply says that such a move by a top sportsman with Party connections was not unknown (“a world champion is a world champion”), but that in this case Spassky had no need to go to Demichev. The Sports Committee, says Ivonin, was already implementing his wishes. Ivonin assumed that Spassky just wanted the Central Committee to put its authority behind his personal demands, including finding a new apartment.

In any case, two days later, the chairman of the Sports Committee, Sergei Pavlov, a man utterly familiar with Soviet ways of power, had his first sight of the world champion’s program to retain the title. As he read the cover letter, with at least surprise, and probably anger, he realized that Spassky now outgunned the chess bureaucrats. The initiative concerning Spassky was out of the ordinary, and the champion had generated it. This in itself would have irritated Pavlov, but perhaps his response would also have been tinged with personal bitterness and envy. He had been a Party boss. He had helped Brezhnev dispose of Khrushchev. Now here was a Central Committee secretary going over his head to meddle in his bailiwick.

Attached was Spassky’s plan, now circulated to them via the second most powerful body in the country:

Many of these points had already been raised with the Sports Committee, though two of Spassky’s demands—that everyone involved in his training should be sworn to secrecy and that the location of the match should be for him to decide—were new. The last worried the committee: they wanted Spassky to concentrate on chess and leave the rest to them.

Demichev’s one line was enough. His request to be kept informed raised the stakes for the Sports Committee. In Soviet culture, it stated “the Party views this match as ideologically important.” In other words, “Watch out!” Or, as Spassky expresses it in English, he had succeeded “in jumping through Pavlov’s head.”

After receiving it, the Sports Committee was, or at least saw itself as being, unusually complaisant toward Spassky, even when it became plain that he lacked faith in them. For example, the committee wanted to send a doctor, a translator, and its choice of journalist to Reykjavik. Spassky insisted that they send a grand master, Isaac Boleslavskii, rather than a professional chess writer. And he rejected a doctor and a translator, telling Ivonin, “We don’t need a translator, we can do everything ourselves. It’s a matter of trust.” Decoded—and of course Ivonin understood the code—that meant Spassky thought the translator would be a KGB officer, there to observe him. The committee would have had to approve these staff and arrange their passports. Ivonin’s note of the conversation gives Spassky’s remark three exclamation marks.

The balance of power had shifted to the chess champion. “Heads down” became the rule in the Sports Committee. “Why risk intervention?” muses Beilin. “Pavlov was no idiot. This was now Demichev’s and Spassky’s responsibility. Okay, so you guys take responsibility.”

Today, Spassky remembers that he was not given the team he wanted and denied the interpreter and cook of his choice—Karpov in 1978 had a squad of forty, he complains. He is also disdainful about his lineup: “Krogius was not much of a psychologist…. In Reykjavik, 1972, he was useless. Nei was a tennis partner, not much of a chess player. Geller was the only one who helped me.” But the truth is that the committee did its best to convince Spassky that a head of delegation and the other assistants were necessary. The limited chess team in Iceland was the team Spassky himself had assembled.

On 4 January 1972, in a secret memo to Demichev covering every aspect of Spassky’s training, including his diet, Pavlov tried to reassure the Central Committee that everything was in hand.

In the ensuing months, with the world champion’s family finally settled into a newly built, plush four-room apartment in Vesnin Street in the elite diplomatic quarter, Spassky and his team moved from handpicked dacha to handpicked dacha—Krasnaia Pakhra thirty-five kilometers from Moscow (where he was billeted during his championship match with Petrosian), Arkhys in the North Caucasus, Sochi on the Black Sea, and finally Ozera near Moscow. In Ozera they lived in a sanatorium where defeated German field marshal Friedrich von Paulus had been held after the war. The Sports Committee kept an eye on the facilities and living conditions—and tried, as discretely as it could, to establish how hard Spassky was working.

Unhappily, the training paradise now created contained a number of serpents.

By the time he arrived in Reykjavik, Spassky was feeling the strain caused by the breakdown of two key relationships during his training period, one with the director of the Central Chess Club, Viktor Baturinskii, the other with the champion’s personal coach, Igor Bondarevskii. There was also a quarrel with Mikhail Botvinnik, opening a rift sufficiently wide for Botvinnik to refuse to sign a petition to save the struggling magazine Moscow Chess from closure simply because Spassky’s signature was also on it.

The consequences of the breach with Baturinskii, in particular, were to be serious. Spassky put at arm’s length the man who had direct responsibility for chess and chess players, who led the negotiations with the Americans and with FIDE over the location of the match, and who might have been a highly effective team leader in Iceland.

The immediate cause of this dispute appears trivial. Spassky wanted to lend his car to a friend. To do this, he needed a duly notarized letter of authority (as is still the case in Russia today). In late November 1971, Spassky drafted such a letter and asked Baturinskii to affix the Central Chess Club seal and countersign it. Baturinskii refused. He was not qualified to sign, he told Spassky. (Actually, he thought there was something suspect about the document and believed Spassky would do better to take it to a lawyer.) The champion took this as a personal slight and made it plain that as far as he was concerned, Baturinskii was no longer to be trusted. From this point on, Baturinskii was effectively excluded from close contact with the preparations.

Even in his final years, as a blind, hard of hearing, apartment-bound pensioner, Baturinskii’s memory of Spassky’s attitude revived an indignant anger. As a Soviet, he desperately wanted Spassky to triumph. Equally, as a Stalinist by upbringing, he had little time for the free-spirited Spassky, who felt that when the world champion spoke, the chess world should follow.

In terms of personality and politics, there was an inevitability about his break with the champion. Some surmise that Spassky created the car issue to confront Baturinskii and distance him from the match.

Spassky informed the authorities that he objected to Baturinskii representing him at FIDE in negotiations over the match conditions. Ivonin tried dissuading Spassky. Strictly speaking, he said, Baturinskii had been correct not to sign the letter of authorization. But Spassky’s mind had been made up. In any case, at that point, Baturinskii drew the line. “I told Ivonin that I refused to go. He said that my passport and all the documents were ready. I said that’s not important—if someone who ought to trust me doesn’t trust me, I just won’t go.”

The row undoubtedly upset Spassky and drained his energy. In practical terms, the negotiations for the match were left in the hands of Geller, who understood chess, and Aleksandra Ivushkina, the deputy head of the Sports Committee’s International Department, whose work covered relations with international sports federations. She spoke excellent English, had wide experience in working with other federations, and knew the Sports Committee’s position. In terms of legal acumen, though, it was hardly the sharpest team.

Spassky’s breakup with Baturinskii affected the conduct of the match. The other breakup—with Bondarevskii, his longtime coach—affected his preparation. Bondarevskii and Spassky had begun to work together in 1961, as the future champion’s career and personal life ran aground. Intriguingly, he was later to part from Bondarevskii as his second marriage was also foundering. Spassky’s winning the title had changed both relationships. Bondarevskii had not been trainer to the world champion. Suddenly he was. Similarly, Larisa had not married a world champion. She complained that when Boris took the title, he began to dominate all aspects of life—he even gave her advice on how to cook soup.

For several years, there had been hints of trouble to come. According to Spassky’s autobiographical section of Grand Strategy, during the 1969 title match with Petrosian, the Bondarevskii-Spassky relationship had broken down over the living arrangements Bondarevskii had made (too far out of town, Spassky thought). However, they eventually made up. Spassky respected Bondarevskii and acknowledged that he had to accept him as he was. Looking back at the dawn of his relationship with his third and last trainer, Spassky remembered, “He knew how to stimulate me and make me work. That was his secret.”

That was his perspective in 2002. Thirty years earlier, things looked rather different. On the morning of 2 February 1972, Bondarevskii told Ivonin that he and Spassky could no longer work together and they had come to an amicable agreement to part. There was no real communication between them, said Bondarevskii, so they accomplished little. Since he became champion, Spassky had practically ceased to listen to his recommendations. Nor was Bondarevskii satisfied with Spassky’s work rate. Before he saw Ivonin, he visited Baturinskii. Baturinskii remembered the conversation thus: “‘Viktor Davidovich, I’m stepping down from this job’—How can you refuse to work only three or four months before the beginning of the match? You are his chief trainer—you’re putting him in a very difficult situation. ‘It’s impossible to work with him, impossible. I am standing down. He doesn’t follow my instructions: he gets on with all sorts of other things. With so little time before the match he can’t concentrate.’”

Nikolai Krogius draws a distinction between the old Spassky and the new, between the aspiring world champion and the title holder. “Previously (for example, during the preparations for his 1969 match against Petrosian), Boris might initially disagree with a proposal, but later, having thought about it, he would often (usually on the following day) admit that it was sound. Bondarevskii and I would joke that Spassky must be persuaded in two stages: first a refusal, then a yes. But now, having said no, Boris stubbornly maintained his position—frequently without foundation.”

Some believe that Bondarevskii abandoned the team because he feared his trainee was heading for defeat and was apprehensive of being associated with failure.

The same reason may explain the simultaneous resignation of V. I. Postnikov, then president of the USSR Chess Federation and a friend of Bondarevskii’s. Postnikov was succeeded by his deputy, Yuri Averbakh—no one else, according to Averbakh, was willing to take on the risk. Averbakh says that from this moment on, he grew pessimistic about Boris’s prospects. Only Bondarevskii’s force of personality could induce Spassky to keep slogging away—to work up the necessary mental sweat. Yes, Spassky labored, “but in a light style, let’s say.”

But plenty of people are inclined to side with Spassky in the dispute. According to Yevgeni Bebchuk, the former president of the Chess Federation of the Russian Federation, the coach was a very difficult person. “He was an ingenious coach, a prince among coaches, but his rudeness was quite impossible. When he became Spassky’s coach several years earlier, Spassky had needed his skills as a trainer, irrespective of his character. But when Spassky was at the height of his profession and Bondarevskii swore at him—he had always sworn at him—Spassky would no longer put up with it.”

Vera Tikhomirova also knew Bondarevskii from their hometown, Rostov on Don. An expansive, formidable woman, she had survived Stalin’s famine and terror to become the Russian Federation’s women’s chess champion, though at this point she taught chess for the Federation’s sports committee. Vera retains a maternal love for Spassky. In return, he loves her as would a son. Her verdict on Bondarevskii: “He was said to be strong-willed. But he wasn’t. He definitely didn’t like taking responsibility.”

The day of Bondarevskii’s departure, Spassky, Geller, and Krogius arrived in Ivonin’s office to give their side of the story. Bondarevskii did not believe in their success; he was not completely committed. Spassky would no longer put up with being treated like a child, spoken to in harsh language. What is more, Bondarevskii had not kept up with theoretical advances in openings: now that Geller was in the team, Bondarevskii was of no real value. Spassky added that he, Spassky, had been the first to declare they had to part.

To sweeten the pill, the group gave Ivonin a reassuring summary of their labor to date. Thanks to the Sports Committee, their personal problems, the dacha, flats, salaries, and living permits, had been resolved. The group was conducting its studies in a businesslike fashion, the creative work was going well, and the preparation plan had been successfully fulfilled. In groundwork they were probably ahead of Fischer. Ivonin noted: “They said Spassky would have a significant edge against Fischer in the opening because Fischer would not have time to rework his very limited repertoire.”

Whatever the basis for Bondarevskii’s departure, the original group had been working and living closely together; the loss of a member was inevitably unsettling. If there had been a driving force in the group, it was Bondarevskii. With Spassky as the new leader, the team simply performed what he wanted of them. An independent leader could have forced Spassky to do what he needed but did not care to do. Geller filled Bondarevskii’s place, but he was not at all suited to it. Unwilling to confront Spassky himself, he would quietly take Nei to one side. Could Nei cajole the champion to work?

“Obstinate, with a dimpled chin and a slow waddle, Geller looked more like a former boxer or elderly boatswain who had come on shore than the world-class grandmaster he was,” is the portrait drawn by Genna Sosonko in Russian Silhouettes. Spassky praised him as “a very complete player…. His diligence was extraordinary. He developed his talent by sitting on his backside, and his backside developed in turn thanks to his talent.” He belonged to a very elite club of those having a plus record against Fischer; over the course of his career, he had beaten the American five times.

Geller came from the most cosmopolitan city in the Soviet Union, the southern port of Odessa, and outwardly had the familiarity and warmth of the Jewish neighborhood where he grew up. However, Spassky once said the good nature was on the surface; underneath, Geller was envious and hostile. He was also wholly Soviet in outlook, deeply suspicious of the West and what he saw as its corrupt and devious ways. In his book Soviet Chess, Andrew Soltis quotes Geller as saying that success in chess awaited only those players of deep morality and high intellect who were “free from the flaws and evils rotting through the capitalist system.” Bondarevskii’s departure put this problematic character at the champion’s right hand in training and at the match.

With all these distractions, how effective and concentrated was Spassky’s preparation?

There are many gossipy tales of slackness; some might well come under the heading of vranyo—the Russian weakness for exaggerated, often preposterous untruth. Given Spassky’s insistence on complete secrecy, only a select few were granted any real insight into his training. One engaging story that seems short of genuine eyewitnesses recounts how Bondarevskii made his exit after Spassky was given a weekend off and came back a fortnight later. Another tells how visitors saw Spassky whiling away the time with whiskey and copies of Playboy magazine.

Still, that Spassky had a considerably more relaxed schedule than his opponent is unquestionable. Yuri Averbakh recalls that his first action when he took over as acting president of the USSR Chess Federation after Postnikov’s sudden resignation was to visit the camp for himself: “Spassky was sitting there with Geller and Krogius…. On the table were cards and dominoes, and when lunchtime came Spassky pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Everything became apparent to me immediately.”

Boris Spassky insists that he worked and worked hard. Ivo Nei agrees but adds, not enough. Spassky maintained then and maintains now that he operates best with a clear mind, that physical fitness was crucial. Hence the tennis, skiing, and swimming. It is also true that the champion, in Mikhail Beilin’s warm assessment, “loved life, loved to relax, to talk and spend time with friends, to repose. He wasn’t like Korchnoi, for instance, grinding away for eight hours.” A typical day would begin with Spassky regaling his team over breakfast with the Greek myths he had read the night before and would later include his ration of sport, leisurely meals—and five hours for chess.

“The main deficiency in our schedule was Spassky’s flippant attitude,” says Krogius. “He believed that he understood Fischer well, and that he, Spassky, would ‘find the key’ to Bobby’s chess during the match. He was encouraged to hold this view by those leading Soviet chess players who had written accounts of Fischer’s and Spassky’s styles of play. Keres, Smyslov, Petrosian, Tal, and also Botvinnik (who expressed his views orally) unanimously dismissed the possibility of any fundamental changes in the American’s game, especially in the opening. Only Korchnoi identified fresh features in Fischer’s chess evolution. But since Korchnoi’s opinion was directed at Spassky in personal and harsh terms, Boris did not pay it much attention.”

In May, when another grandmaster, Isaac Boleslavskii, came to assist, the work rate was stepped up. Spassky’s play, it was reported back to Ivonin, was becoming more imaginative as well as more accurate. This coincided with the date being fixed for the match—no doubt concentrating the title holder’s mind. On a visit, Baturinskii noted the improvement: “Each day, six to seven hours are dedicated to chess analysis, and three hours to physical training (tennis and swimming in the pool).”

Whatever the regime, Vera Tikhomirova was struck by the good health radiated by the champion and his team. “I remember when they visited me in my office for a photograph, they looked so healthy and so ‘plume-y’—bright eyed and bushy tailed—that I asked myself, ‘Did they really work or just enjoy themselves?’”

Spassky’s troubled relationships, the negotiations over the match, the aggravation over his apartment, his incapacity for hard grind—these combined to ensure that he arrived in Reykjavik in less than a settled state and underprepared. But his conviction that there would be a feast of chess in Reykjavik and that he would win at the table in a historic victory was undiminished. “He really wanted to go down in history,” says Mikhail Beilin. “He always denies it: I’ve asked him that ten times, and he always says, ‘What do you mean?’ But I’m confident he really wanted to go down in history.” And he did—his name forever being associated with the staging of an extraordinary event in a small island state in the North Atlantic.