8. TROUBLE IN PARADISE
What I really like is when I’m in a festive mood and my friends are in a wonderful mood, too….
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.”