Nevertheless, it was hardly the hero’s reception he would have expected had he been victorious. The Associated Press described it as “anti-VIP” treatment. He had to stand in the long line for passport control, queue up for his bags, fill out the customs forms. A battered gray-and-blue bus awaited them rather than an official Chaika limousine. Larisa was observed chewing gum: a “dirty habit” she had learned “over there,” someone remarked. “Over there” meant outside the USSR. His bus stopped at all the traffic lights: triumphant, he might have sailed through as if he were Brezhnev.
And knives were out over his defeat. Mikhail Botvinnik commented later that Spassky lost because he overrated himself. The former world champion Vasili Smyslov chastised Spassky. In a creative sense, he said, Spassky went to the match completely empty. And he added that Fischer and Spassky both took home what they thought about: Fischer the crown and money and Spassky only money. Geller gave his views privately to Ivonin: that Spassky loved himself, that this defeat had taught him a big lesson, that he had underestimated the need for preparation and had not played enough, that he was still an idealist who “melted again” when he last talked to Fischer. Spassky was “very soft with his enemies and very ferocious with those trying to help him.”
These were just the precursors to the official postmortem held on 27 December 1972 at the Sports Committee and chaired by Viktor Ivonin. Apart from Spassky, Geller, and Krogius, the top brass of Soviet chess was represented in the fifteen men gathered around the table. They included five grandmasters, two of them former world champions, as well as the senior officers of the USSR Chess Federation. Their deliberations are recorded in near verbatim minutes.
The purpose of the meeting was to look ahead, Ivonin declared from the chair: “We must draw up plans for returning the championship to our Soviet family.” But in opening the discussion as the official team leader in Reykjavik, Geller wasted no time in going for Spassky, laying on him all the blame for the lost title. He cited Spassky’s decision “taken on his own” to play in the closed room, constant and incomprehensible departures from agreed tactics, and unbelievable blunders. The most damning accusation related to a psychological failure:
We were unable to change Spassky’s mind about Fischer’s personal qualities. Spassky believed that Fischer would play honestly. Perhaps Spassky’s views on bourgeois sport were important to his agreement to play in a closed room. He placed a naive trust in the honesty of this sport.
Geller had set the tone, although Krogius, in a much briefer intervention, couched his opinion more positively: Spassky’s defeat was due to his treating people better than they deserved. He related to Fischer as to a comrade and an unhappy genius, but not a cunning enemy.
Then it was Spassky’s turn—the speech for the defense. Like many such speeches, its strategy was to direct material guilt elsewhere while confessing to a human, eminently forgivable weakness. Thus he complained that because they had not been given an organizer, the team’s energies had been diverted into everyday affairs. Pre-Reykjavik, “special work on technical matters” had not been satisfactory—a dig at Geller and Krogius. But the main problem was his being a very weak psychologist, “giving rise to a series of mistakes”—in other words, he admitted to being too trusting.
I knew Fischer as a chess player, but perhaps I idealized him as a man. Bondarevskii’s departure was a strong blow. I found it difficult without him. It is a big minus to be involved in extraneous matters that you are not suited to dealing with. Bondarevskii shielded me from such matters. Our many sleepless nights… because of the mistakes we made were extremely damaging. It seems to me that I should have listened to the advice of my comrades that Viktor Davidovich [Baturinskii] be temporarily removed from the match.
He also owned up to a failure to foresee that someone was required in Reykjavik specifically to handle “the prematch fever” and what he described as “a real war.” He also offered his version of “the culminating moment,” game three, after which, he said, everything turned against him. Through faintheartedness, he had met Fischer halfway, rather than forcing him to play in the hall or withdraw. Thus he had opened the way to Fischer’s “colossal domination” up to game nine. Only from game ten did he begin to control his emotions.
There was no recognition of his own role in setting up the training routine and the other arrangements for Reykjavik. And the rifts with Baturinskii and Bondarevskii were scarcely as he described them.
Little wonder, then, that there is a note of suppressed wrath in Baturinskii’s point-by-point reply. It covered Spassky’s rejection of the grandmasters’ counsel (Yuri Averbakh noted dryly that “when a person does not wish to listen, it is difficult to give him advice”), his passive attitude to the maneuverings of Fischer and Euwe in the run-up to the match, his failure to prepare effectively, and his refusal to accept the full team on offer. It did not escape Baturinskii that although Spassky complained about the absence of a delegation leader in Reykjavik, he had not consulted Ivonin over the move to the closed room. Finally, he protested that he had done everything asked of him to ensure victory for Spassky, and would always do all he could for the common cause of chess and chess players.
As the discussion went on, the question marks over Spassky’s preparation and his inability to take advice were raised again and again—“superficial,” “unsatisfactory.” Mikhail Tal was particularly cutting: “It is not an embarrassment to have lost to a chess player like Fischer, but Spassky’s game was simply shocking.”
Spassky’s politics and personality were also attacked. The president of the Leningrad Chess Federation, A. P. Tupikin, told the meeting that the Leningraders’ love affair with Spassky was at an end, blaming what he called Spassky’s arrogance, his alien views, and his failure to understand the political significance of the match.
A deputy president of the USSR Chess Federation and FIDE vice president, B. I. Rodionov was even more brutally direct. In effect, the world champion had ignored the fact that he was wearing a red shirt and was guilty of damaging the prestige of the state. It was incomprehensible how Spassky had given in to his opponent—to what Rodionov called “the completely groundless demands made by that scum.”
At the end, Ivonin delivered judgment. He was unsparing about Spassky, castigating his attitude both to work and to ideology:
All his requests and wishes were fulfilled. Today we can only regret that these possibilities were not exploited in full and to the end…. Spassky’s words—that the match was a holiday and that there must be an honest fight—can be called idealism. This was not a holiday, but a very fierce struggle. And it is no coincidence that Marshall, Fischer’s lawyer, said that victory for Fischer was a question of national and personal pride. Unfortunately, Comrade Spassky did not make such declarations.
A sense of disillusionment pervaded the meeting. The defeat had been a warning. Like so much else in the USSR, the Soviet chess machine appeared to be rusting away. The first problem was the new champion. Baturinskii thought that “the struggle which we must wage for the world championship will be very difficult. If Fischer made so many demands when he was a challenger, then how will he behave now that he has won the world championship?” So the comrades must work harder and more systematically, and trainers must realize that they were in the service of the state, not independent actors.