Chess was a battle of superpowers

The Soviet chess machine was meant to demonstrate mental and athletic primacy over the decadent West.

It’s a different world, of course, and a different rivalry, but it’s hard when following the world chess championship match between Magnus Carlsen of Norway and Sergey Karjakin of Russia, which goes into a battery of tiebreakers after the first 12 games ended in a tie, not to go back in time to the epic chess battles of the Cold War.

Back in July 1972, when Bobby Fischer, an unknown, brilliant and eccentric American, sat down in Reykjavik, Iceland, opposite Boris Spassky, heir to 24 years of Soviet domination in chess, a lot more than chess was on the line.

The Cold War was raging, and the Soviet chess machine was meant to demonstrate mental and athletic primacy over the decadent West. The match was the first for chess to be televised in the United States and it drew millions of viewers.

An obscure New York chess master, Shelby Lyman, stood in a public television studio in Albany, rearranging pieces on a primitive demonstration board when the players made a move and filling in the intervals with analysis and commentary.

It was ‘‘The Match of the Century’’, and like the US victory over the Soviet ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, it had an irresistible narrative: Upstart takes on the ruthless Soviet sports machine and wins.

Ideology permeated Soviet sport, including chess. One story I wrote for The Times from Moscow, in June 1981, was about Boris Gulko, a Soviet champion excluded from major tournaments after he applied to emigrate to Israel. Allowed to compete in the Moscow open championship, he won, and then brought a hushed pall over the awards ceremony when he urged the Soviet Chess Federation to facilitate the emigration of the wife and son of Viktor Korchnoi, a Soviet grandmaster who had defected to the West.

Korchnoi twice challenged the Soviet champion Anatoly Karpov, a Kremlin loyalist who assumed the title after Fischer failed to defend it. Their matches are memorable for bizarre controversies, which ranged from demands that chairs be X-rayed to complaints of hypnotism and secret codes.

Karpov next ran into a Jewish Armenian challenger named Garry Kasparov, at 21 an aggressive player who stormed through the ranks of Russian grandmasters. Both were Soviet players, so it was not quite an Eastwest sequel, but Karpov was the standard-bearer of the Soviet establishment, and Kasparov became the favourite of dissidents and the West as they slugged through a marathon series of matches, the first of which went to 48 games.

I covered that match for The Times in Moscow, and the tension was palpable in the hushed excitement that would sweep the crowd whenever Kasparov made a bold move and the KGB types scattered through the audience to see who applauded.

The current contest between Carlsen and Karjakin in New York doesn’t have the political intrigue, though the president of the International Chess Federation, a Russian businessman named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, has been banned from entering the US because of alleged dealings with the Assad regime in Syria. And Karjakin did switch from Ukrainian to Russian citizenship in 2009.

The focus this time is largely on the chess, which is probably as it should be. But it won’t be as memorable as when the kings, queens and their retinues stood on opposite sides of an ideological divide.

New York Times