For the Kremlin, importantly, détente also meant America’s acknowledgment that the USSR was a military superpower and a political equal. As the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko said in 1971: “There is no question of any significance that can be decided without the Soviet Union or in opposition to it.” To Brezhnev, recognition of equality was of greater consequence than SALT. The Soviet leader could reassure himself and the Soviet people that the so-called correlation of forces in the world was tilting toward communism; the Soviet Union was riding the wave of history that would wash capitalism away. An article in Komsomolskaia Pravda justifying the policy was entitled “A Triumph of Realism.” Détente did not mark the end of global political competition. On the contrary, now was the time to step up the struggle; at this juncture in history, the circumstances were exceptionally favorable to the onward march of socialism. (Kissinger saw Brezhnev’s sensitivity on political equality as showing his psychological insecurity: “What a more secure leader might have regarded as a cliché or condescension, he treated as a welcome sign of our seriousness.”)
Détente also offered immediate practical and material payoffs for the adversarial superpowers. The Soviets wanted trade to avoid root-and-branch economic reform. The United States hoped détente would give the Soviets a stake in stability and temper their adventurousness abroad.
Thus, there was necessarily a contradiction at the heart of détente—between cooperation and competition. Rivalry between the two superpowers remained intense—as seen in the long list of Nixon’s reactive measures against perceived Soviet threats. The administration took action to counter the construction of a Soviet naval base in Cuba (U.S. spy planes had photographed a football field being set out when the Cuban national game was baseball), the movement of Soviet surface-to-air missiles to the Suez Canal, the Soviet role in the Indo-Pakistan war, and Brezhnev’s aggressiveness and apparent readiness for military intervention in the Arab-Israeli war.
Both sides worked on improving their weaponry and extending their influence. And both sides had problems with allies and client states whose interests did not align with theirs, or who felt their interests were subordinated to those of the superpower. For example, during the first days of Fischer-Spassky, the Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, expelled the 20,000 Soviet advisers and technicians based in his country, together with Soviet combat and reconnaissance aircraft. Angered by Moscow’s refusal to give him advanced weapons, Sadat initiated secret contacts with the Americans.
When the match was over, some of the press picked up these opposing themes—suspicious antagonism against peaceful competition. On the one hand, Fischer and Spassky represented their countries, and the match, according to the broadsheets, embodied East-West confrontation, particularly given the Soviet claim that its chess supremacy was the outcome of its superior ideology. On the other hand, no nationalist rivalry had been sparked off. Many Americans had supported Spassky, and many Russians had quietly rooted for Fischer. All in all, concluded The New York Times, the match had a unique political importance in terms of improved U.S.-USSR relations.
So Reykjavik was a cold war confrontation in this sense: It illustrated the tension within détente and the strains that led to the policy’s breakdown within three years. Fischer-Spassky smacked of both the continuing divide in politics and society and the suspicion and enmity that infused relations across the Iron Curtain. The separate territory kept to by the Soviet team, with all their customary watchfulness and suspicions, their lack of experience in dealing with the press, the go-go aggression of the Fischer staff, the tendency of the Western officials and Americans to make unilateral decisions and then to present them to the Soviets, the stereotyping by Western journalists of the Soviet team—all these reflected the cold war and directly affected the match.
Our two heroes also dramatized the contradictions of the era. For Spassky, Reykjavik was supposed to be a feast of chess, a celebration to be shared with friendly rivals. As for Fischer, in victory he had no doubt about the implications of his win. He said he could crush anyone the Soviets threw at him: “The Russians are wiped out.” He was delighted to have seized the title from the Soviet Union. “They probably now feel sorry they ever started playing chess,” he told the BBC. “They had it all for the last twenty years. They talked of their military might and their intellectual might. Now the intellectual thing… it’s given me great pleasure… as a free person… to have smashed this thing.”
Of course, as it turned out, news of the cold war’s death was greatly exaggerated. But if Fischer had not been so anti-Soviet and mercurial, if he had been as convivial as Spassky, the match might even have gone down in history as symbolizing détente.
22. UNEASY LIES THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWN
Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.
Fame is when you stop signing and start autographing.
With the match over and Fischer wrapped in triumphalism, the organizers were still unable to relax. His absence at the opening ceremony had been a catastrophe; now they worried that the new world champion would ignore the final dinner. Worn down by two months of Fischerism, Gudmundur Thorarinsson was almost reconciled to this. Fred Cramer fed the doubts. He thought his man should be crowned in his hotel room: “I cannot see Bobby sitting quietly through a load of speeches.”
Euwe, Schmid, and Thorarinsson met for a drink at the hotel Esja before the ceremony. A journalist asked Schmid whether he would arbitrate another match. “I would have to have a long think about that,” was the cautious response. Euwe thought the best thing about the match was that it was over. Corriere della Sera completed its coverage of Fischer-Spassky as though it had been a fairy tale: “Good night, Fischer; good night, Spassky; good night to the enchanted island of Iceland.”
China’s newly appointed ambassador to Iceland, Chen Tung, was one of many delighted that the match was finally over. Chen Tung had a long-standing booking of the presidential suite in the Loftleidir, expecting the match to have concluded. So as not to cause a diplomatic row, the hotel had approached Cramer, wondering whether, in view of Chen Tung’s prior reservation, Fischer might be willing to move to another suite. “We are not prepared to discuss anything but chess at the moment,” the panjandrum shot back. “Bobby cannot be bothered with the problems of the Chinese ambassador.” For Chen Tung, there was always the option of the other main luxury hotel in town, the Saga. But that was where the representatives of China’s ideological foe—the Soviets—were quartered.
For the closing dinner at the Laugardalsholl on Sunday, 3 September (price $22 a head), a Viking theme had been chosen. The waiters wore plastic Viking hats. Guests could feast on barbecued suckling pig and spitted mountain lamb, washed down with Viking’s Blood, a potent concoction unknown to Vikings and containing wine, cognac, orange juice, and lemonade. The meal began on time at seven P.M. Spassky was there, as were Schmid, Thorarinsson, Euwe, the minister of finance Halldor Sigurdsson, and over 1,200 other people. In a reprise of the opening ceremony, Fischer’s place was vacant.