Commentators have made much of the similarities between Fischer and Spassky, pointing out that Spassky too was a second child, had a single-parent upbringing, and spent his early years in poverty. In fact, challenger and champion could scarcely have had more contrasting personalities and attitudes to life. Nor were America’s prosperity and democracy remotely comparable with the Stalinist horrors among which Spassky grew up and where the chessboard provided protection, fame, and, in Soviet terms, a fortune.
4. CHILD OF DESTRUCTION
Chess provides indisputable proof of the superiority of socialist culture over the declining culture of capitalist societies.
Spassky was born in Leningrad on 30 January 1937 into the maelstrom of suspicion, denunciation, arrest, torture, confession, and death known as the Great Terror—Stalin’s liquidation of a wholly fantastic conspiracy against the Soviet state. Such was the upheaval that in the year of Spassky’s birth, each of the most senior positions in the provincial Party and state apparatus was vacated and refilled, on average, five times. The Great Terror cost between two million and seven million lives. So frenzied was the destruction that an exact total will never be known.
Stalin placed Spassky’s home city, Leningrad, at the center of the imagined plots against which he directed his savagery. The Leningrad poet Yevgeni Rein, unpublished during the Soviet era, conjured up the deadly effect, writing of the Vitebsk Canal in his home city: “… malodorous and sticky, / like a poisoner palming cyanide, / creeping into union with the river.”
On 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive ground and air attack on the Soviet Union. The German leader attached particular significance to the taking of Leningrad, a city he despised as “the cradle of Bolshevism.” On 8 September 1941, Leningrad came under heavy assault from the Luftwaffe; incendiary bombs wiped out the food warehouses. Faced with the threat of starvation, the city authorities ordered the evacuation of thousands of children. With his seven-year-old brother, Georgi, four-year-old Boris Spassky was sent to the Kirov district, in the shadow of the Ural Mountains well to the east of Moscow. “Fortunately our train wasn’t bombed,” he says. It was there that he learned the rudiments of chess, watching the other inhabitants of the children’s home where they had been placed. In 1943, his parents escaped the siege and took their two children to Sverdlovka, forty kilometers from Moscow, saving them from starvation.
Behind him in Leningrad, the agony of the German siege was prolonged for nine hundred days, until January 1944. Over a million of those left behind died, 200,000 directly from German shelling and air raids, but the majority from starvation and cold: in the winter the temperature fell to minus twenty degrees centigrade. The living were too exhausted to bury the dead or fell into the grave after them. Cannibalism was endemic, the bodies of children preferred because their flesh was tender; for a long time afterward, Leningraders could not bring themselves to buy meat pies on the street. Spassky’s future rival Viktor Korchnoi survived only because so many in his family perished, leaving behind their ration cards. “Were we stronger chess players—tougher—because of our background?” Korchnoi asked the authors rhetorically. “On the contrary; imagine what my generation would have produced without this trauma.”
Returning to Leningrad in 1946, the nine-year-old Spassky would have passed through a lunar landscape of destruction wrought by the retreating German army. The suburbs had been demolished. Scarcely a tree was standing where thousands had stood before. Just outside the city, the Tsar’s Village, renamed for Aleksandr Pushkin in the year of Spassky’s birth, was dominated by fresh graves, Catherine the Great’s breathtaking Baroque palace reduced to a devastated shell. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg noted that not a building in the city was without a wound or scar.
Amid the ruins of his city, chess provided the near destitute young Spassky with a connection to society, subsistence, and a much needed sense of order.
In no other country would chess have bestowed on a child the financial support Spassky received. But in no other country was chess seen as part of the state system and its players’ success as a symbol of that system’s superiority. In the Soviet Union, chess stars were lauded and privileged, the top players revered household names, their results followed in the newspapers, their faces recognized in the streets.
Official encouragement of chess had not begun with the revolution in 1917. Some Tsars approved of chess: Nicholas II conferred the original “grandmaster” title on five players of legendary skill during the great St. Petersburg tournament of 1914: Emanuel Lasker, José Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Frank Marshall, and Siegbert Tarrasch.
But with the revolution came the idea of the game as a socialist sport. Three years after the revolution, a strong chess master, an old Bolshevik who had played chess in exile with Lenin, Aleksandr Fiodorvich Iliin-Zhenevskii, was appointed chief commissar at the General Reservists’ Organization in Moscow, responsible for preparing young men for conscription into the factory workers’ militia, the Red Guard, and later the Red Army, providing them with both physical and military training. The physical training included a range of sporting activities, ball games, athletics, swimming, boxing, and so on.
Iliin-Zhenevskii believed that chess could take on a political role and purpose and that it should be subordinated to the ideological struggle. In the USSR, he wrote, “chess cannot be apolitical as in capitalist countries.” Sport improved discipline; it taught patience, composure, and determination; it enhanced concentration, endurance, and willpower; it sharpened and focused the mind. Chess in particular could help educate the proletariat and sharpen the minds of the workers, offering an ideologically sound activity after the rigors of a hard day’s toil in the factory or on the collective farm.
In 1924, the All-Union Chess Section was established, answering to the Supreme Council for Physical Education. The chairman of this Chess Section was Nikolai Krylenko, short, bald, and burly, an old Bolshevik who shared a platform with Lenin, rousing the masses during the October revolution. Lenin appointed him supreme commander and commissar for war. Later he became public prosecutor for the revolutionary tribunals, terrifying defendants and sending thousands to their deaths before he himself became one of the victims in 1938. To the British agent Bruce Lockhart, he was a “degenerate epileptic.”
In the previous fourteen years, working alongside Iliin-Zhenevskii, Krylenko had created a Soviet chess production line. “We must for once and all put an end to the neutrality of chess…. We must organize shock brigades of chess players and immediately begin fulfilling the five-year plan for chess,” he proclaimed. Hundreds of experts began to receive a stipend from the state. They were dispatched to the far-flung corners of the Soviet empire to evangelize and proselytize. Krylenko founded and edited a chess magazine, 64, still going today. Major newspapers such as Pravda and Izvestia began to carry regular chess columns.
The results were spectacular. It is estimated that there were only 1,000 registered chess players in 1923. By 1929, the number had risen to 150,000. In 1949, four years before Stalin’s death, 130,000 people entered a tournament for collective farm workers. By 1951, there were 1 million registered players; by the end of that decade, almost two million; by the mid-1960s, three million.