Back in Moscow, commentaries in the press made clear Soviet grandmasters’ dissatisfaction with Spassky’s standard of play. Although there was little coverage of the Fischer sideshow, an American journalist in Moscow, Robert Kaiser, was struck by the freedom of the coverage of the chess itself.
All Russia seems transfixed…. The self-centered, unpredictable American is a puzzlement here, but he is also the object of admiration. His moves as well as Spassky’s are subjected to a rare form of public commentary—vivid, outspoken journalism. The grandmasters all write well, in a frank and lively style more like American political commentary than standard Soviet journalism. Phrases like “Then Spassky grossly miscalculated” may read like normal comment to an American eye, but it jumps out at a reader of the Soviet press.
There was freedom among park bench experts, too. Another American reporter overheard a note of gloom: “Spassky is playing like a shoemaker.”
But some two-thirds into the match, its prominence in the state newspaper Izvestia steadily declined. After game seventeen, the FIDE logo was removed from its place beside the articles (whether as official disapproval of the federation or simply to make the match less prominent—or both—is unclear), and the byline of grandmaster David Bronstein, who had provided the analysis, also disappeared. The final report from TASS was tucked away on the lower-left-hand corner of the sports page, overshadowed by pictures of Soviet athletes and gymnasts. It was one column, eleven lines:
Not arriving for the game, Spassky admitted his defeat in yesterday’s adjourned twenty-first game of the chess world championship. This decision is explained by the fact that further resistance on the part of white, as analysis showed, was already hopeless. Thus Fischer won the match with a score of 12.5–8.5 and earned the title of World Champion of Chess.
The newspaper Sovietskaia Rossia put the passing of the title from Russian hands in a black-bordered box used for an obituary. But the Munich Olympic games were now the lead story, and for good reason. As Fischer seized the title, a Russian sprinter, Valeri Borzov, took from the United States the crown of world’s fastest man. Just as an American had never before been world chess champion, a Russian had never before won the Olympic 100-meter sprint. (Pavlov had chosen the right event to mastermind.)
A downplaying of the chess match was to be expected. The role of the Soviet press was to reflect official views and priorities, not to satisfy the appetites of readers. With the strength of Fischer’s challenge to Soviet hegemony, the news media’s response became pragmatically low-key.
Significantly, there were neither political allegations nor recriminations against the West. There were no attempts to couch the match in strategic terms. While the loss of the title was a blow, it was to be presented as an internal chess issue, not a matter of direct international or ideological importance.
But then this was not a time for unnecessary dissension toward the United States. Indeed, far from epitomizing East-West conflict, the championship took place in the high blossoming of détente. In Europe, the cockpit of the cold war, a postwar settlement had finally emerged, in effect the long-deferred World War II peace treaty. Though almost all Western accounts of Fischer-Spassky couch the match in geopolitical terms, they are, in this respect, curiously misleading. The encounter might have been seen by the public and written up in the press as a cold war showdown, but in the Kremlin and the White House, East-West showdowns were not on the agenda.
Thus, on the Soviet side, the political level of interest in Spassky’s preparation was high, but not exceptionally so. One of the two secretaries of the Central Committee who ranked just below Brezhnev in authority, Mikhail Suslov was in ultimate charge of ideological matters and therefore chess. He apparently never officially discussed the match. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev does not appear to have involved himself in the match, though the figurehead president of the USSR, Nikolai Podgornii, sent a telegram of good wishes to Spassky. (It would have been unthinkable for Brezhnev himself to put his name to such a message.) When Spassky was plainly in trouble, Lev Abramov, the former head of the Chess Department of the State Sports Committee, wanted a team manager sent to Reykjavik. He went directly to one of Brezhnev’s aides, Konstantin Rusakov, to enlist his help. But Rusakov was abroad; there was no sense of urgency in the Kremlin, and Abramov’s initiative came to nothing.
As for the Americans, we know that Henry Kissinger made two calls to Fischer, but his almost day-by-day record of his time as national security adviser, The White House Years, contains no reference to them. There is no mention of the match in Nixon’s equally detailed Memoirs. The Soviet ambassador to Washington, D.C., Anatoli Dobrynin, told the authors that in his frequent contacts with Kissinger, the match never came up. Neither Fischer nor Spassky is cited in his book, In Confidence, even though Kissinger appears to have rung Fischer when he and the Soviet ambassador were the president’s guests in California, working and relaxing together while Fischer was threatening to fly home to Brooklyn.
In an interview for this book Dr. Kissinger reflected, “It was not the biggest decision I had to make in those days, but I thought it would help create an atmosphere of peaceful competition.” Indeed, what could be more competitive or more peaceful than a World Chess Championship? Yet the former national security adviser insists that, unlike most members of the public, he did not see the match as an aspect of the cold war or democracy versus communism.
By the end of 1971, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), in its Strategic Survey of that year, compared 1971 to 1947 in that it marked a point where “the international system as a whole formed into a visibly new pattern.” One of America’s foremost strategic thinkers, Samuel P. Huntington, summed up geopolitics of the early 1970s: “All in all, the skies were filled with planes bearing diplomats to negotiations, and the air was rich with the promise of détente.” In its Strategic Survey for 1972, the IISS announced that the cold war was dead and buried.
The broad period of the championship saw three successful summits, when Nixon visited Beijing and Moscow in 1972 and when Brezhnev visited Washington in June 1973. A torrent of talks, suggestions for talks, the promise of future agreements, and actual agreements cascaded into the diplomatic desert. These included the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the Interim Agreement on Certain Measures with Respect to Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT I), and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Eventually, 150 agreements were signed and 11 joint commissions established. A handshake in space in 1975 could be seen as the culminating moment.
The essential difference between détente and the previous era, Dr. Kissinger argues, is that Nixon believed that negotiations were still possible and desirable with the Soviet regime as it was. Previous U.S. administrations held that any meaningful dialogue with the Soviets would have to await a fundamental transformation in the Soviet political system. Nixon turned this thinking on its head. He maintained that if international stability could be created over a long enough period, the monolithic Soviet system would be unable to resist change.
What was Brezhnev’s view of détente? Essentially that it was a mechanism for dealing with problems between governments and that this foreign policy was distinct from and not applicable to domestic affairs. Or, if there was a connection, it was a matter of preserving the Soviet system, not liberalizing it. Indeed, in the Soviet Union, repression stiffened in the détente years.