Chess by Larry Evans
June 29, 2008
Gens Una Sumus — we are all one — is the motto of FIDE, the world chess body. Yet the tradition that chess should be above politics eroded during the Cold War.
At the 1974 Chess Olympiad in France, each team signed a pledge to play against any other country. Then Rhodesia and South Africa were expelled for purely political reasons as FIDE started down a slippery slope. In 1986, Israel was banned from an Olympiad in the United Arab Emirates.
FIDE also voted not to accredit an international tournament if a master played against the wishes of his own chess federation. In effect, this destroyed a standard of excellence and reduced players to political pawns.
In an open letter, Czech grandmaster Ludek Pachman recalled his imprisonment “with a broken skull and backbone, hovering between life and death, after a six-week hunger strike.” His crime? Protesting Soviet occupation of his homeland.
His book, Checkmate in Prague: Memoirs of a Grandmaster (1975), is a vivid chronicle of his Kafkaesque battle with bureaucracy, arrest and “trial.”
Upon his release, Pachman settled in Solingen, West Germany, and organized an international tourney there in 1974. But at the last moment he was excluded when both Russia and East Germany threatened to withdraw. After that shameful incident, Pachman was admitted to the West German chess team and moved to Berlin, where he died at 78 in 2003.
Here is the full article.
USCF politics is dirtier.