Chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi dies in Switzerland
6th June 2016
Russian-born Swiss chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi, who defected to the West in 1976 and settled in Switzerland two years later, has died at his home in Wohlen, canton Aargau. He was 85.
Korchnoi was one of the leading Soviet chess players before defecting to the Netherlands. His matches against the official Soviet champion, Anatoly Karpov, became famous as duels on political, psychological and physical levels. Korchnoi tried twice to unseat Karpov as world champion, failing both times.
“It’s a great loss for the world of chess. Korchnoi has had a brilliant life and has done a lot to democratise chess. Even at an advanced age, Viktor Korchnoi continued to promote and play chess, which says a lot about him,” Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the World Chess Federation FIDE, told the Russian news agency TASS on Monday.
Korchnoi – widely considered the strongest player never to have become world chess champion – was born in Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg), where he graduated in history.
He learnt to play chess from his father at the age of five. In 1952, aged 21, he qualified for the finals of the USSR Chess Championship for the first time. He was awarded the Grandmaster title at the FIDE Congress in 1956.
Korchnoi won the USSR Chess Championship four times during his career and the Swiss Chess Championship five times, in addition to many other titles.
Political asylum
In 1974, Korchnoi gave an interview to a Yugoslav newspaper in which he criticised certain aspects of the Soviet chess system. This resulted in his being dropped from the national team for a year and banned from playing in international tournaments. He was even banned from publishing articles on chess.
In 1976, after these measures had been lifted, Korchnoi took part in a tournament in Amsterdam, during which he requested political asylum in the Netherlands. He lived there for some time before moving to West Germany and then Switzerland in 1978.
In August 1990, Korchnoi welcomed as an “important step” a move by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to restore his Soviet citizenship, along with 22 others including novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But Korchnoi said it wasn’t enough to make him return to the Soviet Union.
Korchnoi, who became a Swiss citizen in 1991, frequently represented Switzerland at the Chess Olympiad, the biennial tournament featuring teams from all over the world.
He retired from competitive chess in 2012 for health reasons, but not before winning the Swiss championship in 2011, becoming one of the oldest chess players to win a national title.
Source: http://www.expatica.com
Perhaps not ‘the’ strongest player never to become World Champion, but ‘one’ of the strongest — along with Nimzowitsch, Bronstein, Larsen, Keres…others. A choleric personality, amply reflected in his style of play, always seeking complications. He was an artist, in his own particular fashion, and we are all in his debt.