Red Pawns, Red Soldiers: How the Bolsheviks Built a Chess Power

This is Indian Grandmaster Aarav Dengle’s latest column for TOI In Samarkand, a historic city in Uzbekistan, the latest Chess Olympiad began this week. Uzbekistan is making huge progress in chess. The current challenger to D. Gukesh’s world champion title is Javokhir Sindarov, a young phenomenon from Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan won gold at the 2022 Olympics in Chennai. It is also no coincidence that Uzbekistan was once a Soviet republic like many other modern chess powers.The former Soviet Union entered the Chess Olympiad for the first time in 1952 in Helsinki and won it. Between his first appearance in 1952 and his final appearance in 1990, he participated in nineteen Olympiads, winning eighteen, while finishing second but not winning in a single Olympiad.After the collapse of the USSR, Russia won six more Olympics in a row between 1992 and 2002. Ukraine and Armenia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, won five more Olympics between 2004 and 2012 (while Russia finished second in three of those five). Uzbekistan won it in 2022. It is an extraordinary record for a game that did not originate in Russia.The seeds of this dominance were laid a century ago after the Bolshevik Revolution. Chess had a venerable history in Imperial Russia. It was played by tsarist aristocrats and members of the urban intelligentsia; Leo Tolstoy was an enthusiast.While the Bolsheviks eliminated much of what had existed in the Tsarist regime, including its cultural symbols, they actively promoted chess and appropriated it as a tool in their vision of building a new nation.

Chess as a tool to build a new Soviet man

Alexander Ilyin-Zhenevsky, an unusual combination of chess master, revolutionary and military official, helped make this vision a reality. During the Civil War, he worked with Vsevobuch, a system of universal military training created by the new government. Ilyin-Zhenevsky believed that chess could train qualities useful to a soldier: cool nerves, long-range foresight, dynamic decisions under pressure, and iron discipline.The idea found a receptive audience. In October 1920, sixteen of the country’s strongest players gathered in Moscow for the All-Russian Chess Olympiad organized by Vsevobuch. The nascent post-revolutionary Soviet state faced severe food shortages, and tournament participants were expected to receive generous rations from the military. However, with apparently poor playing conditions, players were almost hit with insufficient food.Ilyin-Zhenevsky later recalled that seven players had signed a petition threatening to go on strike unless the food was improved and the cigarette ration increased. Alexander Alekhine, who won the tournament and was later considered the first Soviet chess champion, did not sign the petition, but said he would stand by these players because he did not think it was right to play against hungry opponents.

Ilyin-Genevsky

Alekhine married a Swiss woman and left Soviet Russia in 1921. He spent the rest of his life in Europe and held anti-Semitic views during World War II. But that’s for another section.Bolshevik thinkers spoke of creating a “New Soviet Man” who was educated, disciplined, rational and committed to collective life. They saw chess as the perfect vehicle to create the society they wanted. Chess required little more than a board, pieces and two chairs and could be played anywhere. It rewarded study, self-control, and contained no element of chance. Chess was also intellectual without being elitist.

How the Bolsheviks turned chess into a mass movement

If workers could learn a game once reserved for a largely educated society, chess could become evidence of cultural progress itself. In the mid-1920s, the chess movement spread to the masses. Chess clubs and labor organizations appeared in factories, newspapers and magazines published chess materials, and tournaments attracted ever-larger audiences.The Soviet state also tried to turn chess into mass entertainment. In 1924, she organized a public spectacle on the grounds of the Leningrad Palace Square. Sailors and soldiers of the Red Army became human chess pieces on a giant chessboard, moving around the square in front of a crowd of spectators.The symbolism would be hard to miss.

Red Army soldiers

The former Palace Square, the great ceremonial space of Imperial Russia, now hosted chess played by representatives of the revolutionary state.The All-Union Chess and Checkers Congress in 1924 placed chess under the bureaucracy of physical culture and put Nikolay Krylenka in charge; 64 was founded the same year with Krylenko as editor. Krylenko was a senior revolutionary who briefly served as Bolshevik Commander-in-Chief in the winter of 1917-18 and later became People’s Commissar of Justice.Krylenko was not very interested in chess as an elegant diversion.He believed that he should serve society. In his view, the game was part of a wider cultural revolution and was supposed to contribute to the intellectual education of Soviet citizens. The Soviet state gradually built an ecosystem: chess clubs, coaches, tournaments, publications, and a ladder for promising players to climb.

From workers’ clubs to a Soviet chess machine

The results of these decades of state support became visible to the world after World War II. From Mikhail Botvinnik forward, Soviet players dominated the World Championship for decades, except for a brief interlude when America’s Bobby Fischer overturned Soviet hegemony. Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Karpov and Kasparov were very different personalities with very different playing styles, but they all emerged from the Soviet state chess system and continue to be counted among the greatest players of all time.The Soviet chess machine began during the Civil War, when the old Bolshevik chess master Ilyin-Zhenevsky convinced the military bureaucracy that thirty-two wooden pieces on sixty-four squares could help build better revolutionaries.READ ALSO: Italian jobs, French connections and Berlin walls: Chess’ European tourIlyin-Zhenevsky died in a German air raid in 1941 during the siege of Leningrad. Krylenko, another Bolshevik leader who played a key role, was himself arrested in 1938, convicted by the Military Collegium, and executed in July 1938. The man who helped build Soviet chess as an instrument of the state was killed by that state.