White and Red

Only pawns in their game?

Steven Poole cautions against Daniel Johnson’s cartoon view of Soviet grandmasters as mere political agents in White King and Red Queen

Saturday January 5, 2008
The Guardian

White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard
by Daniel Johnson
383pp, Atlantic, £22

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, was imprisoned for five days last month after participating in an opposition rally in Moscow. On his release, he wrote an impassioned editorial for the Wall Street Journal denouncing “Mr Putin and his gang” and observing that “KGB officers in plain clothes were clearly in charge even at the police station”. Although Kasparov is no longer a professional chess player but a politician himself, the event makes a chilling postscript to Daniel Johnson’s colourful history of chess as an ideological weapon in the USSR.

Most famously, chess became a proxy version of the cold war during the 1972 match in which Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, after Henry Kissinger had intervened to persuade the holed-up Fischer to play. Johnson efficiently relates the by-now-familiar story of Fischer’s rise, punctuated by drama-queen vanishings, with a wry running simile that compares him to Achilles, “sulking in his tent”. In view of Fischer’s later deterioration into ranting anti-semitism, Johnson sensibly resists the cliché that chess makes men mad, and instead offers the valuable observation: “It was not chess that made Fischer what he eventually became – it was the abandonment of chess.”

The virtue of Johnson’s book, rich in anecdote, is that it places the much-discussed political significance of this one match in a longer context, stretching the normal definition of the cold war somewhat to begin in the years after the 1917 revolution. Here we meet, for example, the fantastically nasty Vasilyevich Krylenko, who “created the Red Army”, played chess with Lenin, and decided that chess should “become a political weapon in the proletarian revolution”. Already by the 1930s, famous composers of chess problems were being arrested and shot for voicing the wrong opinions. Nonetheless, Krylenko’s idea had legs. Over time, an extraordinary pedagogical infrastructure was built up. The best chess players were given good salaries, and had foreign-travel privileges for playing in international tournaments. By the 1950s, the Soviets were miles ahead of the rest of the world in chess strength. As Johnson points out: “Chess was one of very few officially sanctioned areas of intellectual freedom. Unlike art, music or literature, chess was a creative pursuit that did not have to be conducted according to rules and theories laid down by the authorities.”

Here is the full article.