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.”