The Immortal Game (17 page)

Another full-on retreat for Black (and a loss of a tempo), in this case moving the Knight to free up space for the retreating Queen. This was a new low for Black: having to waste an entire move in middlegame to a retreat back to a starting square. Few pieces had been exchanged, and Black was still a piece ahead, so it would have been silly to say that all was lost. But momentum seemed to be overwhelmingly on the side of White—even if it was still impossible to discern his precise plan.

15. B×f4

(White Bishop takes Pawn on f4)

Anderssen then advanced his Bishop, capturing the Black Pawn at f4 and further pressing his attack on Kieseritzky’s Queen.

15….Qf6

(Black Queen to f6)

Kieseritzky retreated to f6, and behold the change in momentum. One of the magical qualities of chess is its potential for a lightning-quick reversal of fortune. The complexity of the game often hides traps and opportunities so well that neither player is aware of the new paradigm until it stares at them from the board.

Suddenly, with the Black Queen moving to an adjacent square, an enormous opportunity had opened up. The Queen, now safe, menacingly threatened Anderssen’s b2 Pawn and his Queen’s Rook. Had Anderssen wasted a crushing attack on the Black Queen and inadvertently walked himself into a highly vulnerable position?

16. Nc3

(White Knight to c3)

Anderssen appeared to be concerned enough about the Queen threat that he developed his Knight as a block against the Queen—or so it would seem. (At this point, Anderssen was actually playing a very different game in his mind from what observers could see on the board.)

16….Bc5

(Black Bishop to c5)

Now it was Kieseritzky who was on the offensive, advancing his Bishop so that it directly attacked Anderssen’s King’s Rook, and also cutting off two of five retreat squares potentially available to the White King.

How would Anderssen answer this new threat?

I
N THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
chess became a symbol of nationalistic pride for totalitarian regimes seeking to prove their moral and intellectual superiority.

The Nazis were fascinated with chess as a game of war, discipline, and purity. In the late 1930s they made a propaganda film in the chess-loving town of Ströbeck, in eastern Germany, showing off the chess-playing schoolchildren as ideal Aryan citizens.
^*23
A Nazified version of chess called
Tak Tik
(Tactics) replaced the traditional pieces with modern war implements—air force, soldiers, bombs, etc.

In 1941 the Germans scored a stunning propaganda coup, persuading the world chess champion Alexander Alekhine, a Russian by birth, to embrace the Nazi ideology and very publicly adapt it to chess. Chess play, according to Alekhine, was yet another window into the inherent moral and intellectual depravity of Jews. Jews played cowardly, empty chess, he argued, in contrast to the obviously superior Aryan courageousness. Indeed, Jews had nearly ruined the game. Under so much Jewish influence, Alekhine said, most of the first half of the twentieth century had been a “period of [chess] decadence” where too many players “relied not in victory but in not losing.”

Alekhine’s defenders like to point out that he offered up this nonsense under duress. Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine had been born into an aristocratic Russian family. After slipping in and out of Soviet government favor, including one very close brush with a firing squad, he eventually fled the Soviet Union and settled in France. When the Germans captured France in 1940, Alekhine agreed to write about and play chess on their behalf in order to protect his family’s assets. Whatever the motive, Alekhine spewed the worst kind of racist invective. His essay “Aryan Chess and Jewish Chess” blasted Jews—including German Jew and former world champion Emanuel Lasker—as playing inferior, defensive chess. Coming from someone with so much authority in the game, the essay was analogous to “Jewry in Music,” the German composer Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic diatribe from the previous century.

“Can we hope,” wrote Alekhine, “that after Lasker’s death—the second and probably the last world champion of Jewish descent—Aryan chess will finally find its path, after having been led astray by the influence of Jewish defensive thinking?” (Invoking the Lasker name was particularly depraved considering that Lasker’s sister would ultimately die in a Nazi concentration camp.)

As with every piece of successful propaganda, there were kernels of reality within Alekhine’s claim. First, Jews did have a long and special relationship with the game, and had made a disproportionate impact on it. The connection went back many centuries and was rooted in the very character and culture of Judaism. The Talmud, the central Jewish text of laws and ethics, was built on a culture of curiosity and verbal combativeness, in accordance with the idea that constant, animated discussion and relentless interpretation and reinterpretation of ideas would bring people closer and closer to the truth.
^*24
This sense of never-ending argument became a part of the core of Jewish character and drew many Jews to chess, which, in its highest form, also demanded endless examination and interpretation.

Abraham ibn Ezra, the Spanish poet who became one of the great medieval Jewish scholars, championed the game in the twelfth century, writing:

I will sing a song of battle

Planned in days long passed and over.

Men of skill and science set it

On a plain of eight divisions,

And designed in squares all chequered.

Two camps face each one the other,

And the Kings stand by for battle,

And ’twixt these two is the fighting.

Bent on war the face of each is,

Ever moving or encamping,

Yet no swords are drawn in warfare,

For a war of thoughts their war is.

Since then rabbis have incessantly debated the game’s virtue, some objecting that it took too much time away from scholarship but most praising chess and encouraging it among youth as a tool to focus the intellect. From century to century the game became increasingly interwoven with Jewish culture. In Germany, it became customary for Jews to play with special silver pieces on the Sabbath, putting aside their weekday wooden pieces. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a number of Jews became dominant players. World champion Wilhelm Steinitz, father of the Scientific school, who changed the game perhaps more than any other single individual and dominated it for decades in the late nineteenth century, was Jewish. His successor, Emanuel Lasker, world champion from 1894 to 1921, was the son of a cantor and the grandson of a rabbi. Lasker’s most persistent challenger during his long reign was the German Jew Siegbert Tarrasch. (Tarrasch and Lasker became such bitter rivals that in 1908 Tarrasch publicly declared that he would henceforth only speak three words to Lasker: “check and mate.” Alas, he got to speak to his rival only a few times after this declaration. But even without capturing the title, Tarrasch’s further clarification and expansion of Steinitz’s ideas made him the more influential player in the long run.) The Polish player Akiba Rubinstein, another major contender to Lasker’s title, was the product of a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, as was the Latvian Aron Nimzowitsch—a chess revolutionary who was later credited with inspiring the Hypermodern school of chess theory and reinvigorating play for the twentieth century.

The second kernel of truth that gave Alekhine the space to make his outrageous accusations was that Steinitz and his successors
had
indeed overwhelmed the thrilling Romantic school with a new style of play that was inherently cautious, plodding, and defensive. Compared to the swaggering Romantics, Scientific players were about as dull to watch as the name promised. Steinitz revealed that chess had an inherent logical structure (albeit an ultracomplex one) and that a careful player could prevail by respecting it. Like medical pioneers who took the time to actually count, measure, map out, and name all the bones, muscles, and tendons in the human body, the Scientific players laid chess bare. They proved that even the most far-reaching combinations could be thwarted by cautious positioning. The wise player no longer aimed to captivate an audience’s imagination with previously unheard-of combinations, but to induce small weaknesses in the opponent’s position and gradually exploit these weaknesses to gain an advantage, eventually achieving a position sufficient for a win. Chess was now less like a parlor trick and more like a mathematical proof.

But it was still more sophisticated than nineteenth-century Romantic play, and Alekhine knew it. After the tide turned against the Germans, Alekhine not only disavowed his six pro-Nazi essays, he also explicitly denied writing them, hoping to erase the permanent stain on his international reputation. Sadly, the truth was irrefutable: after his death in 1946 the original manuscripts were found in Alekhine’s own handwriting.

As it turns out, the Nazis’ abuse of chess for propaganda purposes was just a warm-up for the real specialists at nationalistic chess: the Soviets.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
1, 1945, seventeen days after Japan unconditionally surrendered to the United States, effectively ending World War II, a symbolic new war began. With a thousand American spectators looking on inside a ballroom in Manhattan’s Henry Hudson Hotel, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York played the ceremonial first move in a radio telegraphy chess match between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A few minutes later came the reply from Moscow’s Central Club of Art Masters, five thousand miles away. This was the first international sports match since the conclusion of the war, and the first ever official team sporting event for the USSR. In due course, the cold war would be waged through proxy armies across every continent, would stretch out over nearly five decades, and would threaten the planet with nuclear annihilation. But for now, in its germinal moments, it was fought between a brainy American businessman and an electrical engineer marshaling the Semi-Slav Defense (1. d4 d52. c4 e6 3. Nc3 c6…).

That first game, between U.S. champion Arnold Denker and USSR champion Mikhail Botvinnik, went to the Soviets in a scant twenty-five moves per player, and it was all downhill for the U.S. team from there. Over four days and twenty games, the Soviets obliterated the Americans with a score of 15
¹
/
2
to 4
¹
/
2
points. Of the ten players on the American team, only two actually won a game. If this high-profile competition was an indicator of each nation’s collective intellectual prowess, the United States was in for some rough times ahead.

Most people on both sides, though, realized that the trouncing reflected not raw intellect but the Soviets’ far richer chess history and ravenous political ambition with regard to the game. In reality, the outcome of the match was virtually preordained, as the Soviets had long been putting enormous resources toward the goal of an overwhelmingly powerful national chess team. The United States just happened to be the victim of their debut.
^*25

Whatever the Nazis made of chess to further their political agenda, it was nothing compared to the Soviet appropriation of the game. Russia had a special relationship with chess, having imported the game directly from the Persians and the Muslims centuries before, in established trade routes along the Caspian Sea and the lower Volga and Don rivers. It seemed to spread everywhere, and to find a special fit with the Russian temperament—long before it was embraced and popularized by such figures as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Lenin.
^†2

Deep admiration for the game was practically universal among the Bolshevik revolutionaries (as it had also been a passion of their philosophical hero, Karl Marx).
^*26
Vladimir Illych Lenin was a serious player who “grew angry when he lost, even sulking rather childishly,” recalled the writer Maxim Gorky. (He also leaned on chess for its metaphorical power, as in 1917 when he referred to the interim Russian prime minister Alexander Kerensky as a pawn shifted around by imperialist forces.) Leon Trotsky was also serious about chess, playing often in Vienna and Paris before the Revolution. Not long after the 1917 takeover, Nikolay Krylenko, Lenin’s supreme commander of the Soviet Army, took on chess as a personal project. Seeing it as “a scientific weapon in the battle on the cultural front,” he enlisted strong government support for the game, including financial assistance for its most promising players. He also organized prominent international tournaments. “Take chess to the workers,” was one of the early slogans of Krylenko’s chess movement.

“The Bolsheviks’ motives for promoting chess were both ideological and political,” explains British grandmaster Daniel King. “They hoped that this logical and rational game might wean the masses away from belief in the Russian Orthodox church; but they also wanted to prove the intellectual superiority of the Soviet people over the capitalist nations. Put simply, it was a part of world domination.

“With chess,” King continues, “they hit upon a winner: equipment was cheap to produce; tournaments relatively easy to organise; and they were already building on an existing tradition. Soon there were chess clubs in factories, on farms, in the army…. This vast social experimentquickly bore fruit.”

In the 1920s the Bolsheviks turned the popular but ragtag nature of public chess play into one of the self-identifying marks of emerging Soviet culture. By 1929, 150,000 serious amateur players were registered with the state chess program. That number swelled to 500,000 by 1934—which meant, by the estimate of American grandmaster and chess author Andy Soltis, that “perhaps half the world’s chessplayers were citizens of the USSR.” The growth was obvious in both quantity and quality, with a whole suite of world-class players quickly coming into view.

To no one’s surprise, the Soviets put their own philosophical and stylistic imprint on chess play. Not all of their great players played exactly the same, of course, but there was a distinctive Soviet approach that put a high degree of emphasis on pregame preparation and on gaining the initiative, even at the expense of weak Pawn structures.

After a few setbacks—including the defections of two champions, Alexander Alekhine and Yefim Bogolyubov, and an embarrassingly strong showing by Western players at the 1925 tournament in Moscow—the Soviet program started to gain steam in the late 1920s and early ’30s. The greater their individual achievements, of course, the more Soviet players were required to reinforce their allegiance and collective goals. “During the 1930s,” write Larry Parr and Lev Alburt, coauthors of
Secrets of the Russian Chess Masters
, “successful Soviet grandmasters spent much of their time dispatching telegrams to the ‘Dear beloved teacher and leader’ who made their various victories possible. ‘I sensed behind me the support of my whole country,’ wrote one grandmaster, ‘the care of our government and our party and above all that daily care which you, our great leader, have taken and still take.’”