Ludmila Rudenko

     Hall of Famer Ludmila Rudenko, inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame in 2015, was born in Lubny, Ukraine in 1906 and died in Leningrad in 1986. Besides chess she had impressive accomplishments in swimming and economics. She was also a war hero during World War Two. 
     She started playing chess at the age of ten, but only began playing seriously at the late age of 25 when she moved to Moscow. When Vera Menchik was killed in during an air raid in 1944, her title was up for grabs after the war and Rudenko entered the Women’s Championship in 1950, winning it to become the second women’s world champion. Rudenko held the Women’s World Championship title until 1953, when she lost it to fellow Russian Elisabeta Bykova. 
     She was the first woman to be awarded the IM title (in 1950) and was awarded the WGM title in 1976. 

1951 Yugoslav stamp

     After Rudenko graduated from high school, she attended college in Odessa where she studied economics and was a champion swimmer in the 400m breastroke. In 1925 she was vice-champion of Ukraine in the breaststroke. 
     After graduation from college she began a career as an economic planner in Moscow, ut chess was nothing more than a hobby. She decided to ply in her first tournament in 1928, the Moscow Women's Championship which she won. 
     She then moved to Leningrad, where she met her husband Lev Goldstein with whom she had a son in 1931. Rudenko continued to refine her chess skills and trained with veteran master and trainer Peter Romanovsky. Thanks to Romanovsky's coaching she won the Leningrad women's championship three times. After the War her trainers were Alexander Tolush and Grigory Levenfish.
     At the time of the siege the armament factory Rudenko was working in was evacuated ahead of the advancing Germans. However, many of the children of the workers were left behind. Rudenko was put in charge of rescuing these children as the siege began. Her work of evacuating over 400,000 children by train from Leningrad to the surrounding, safer areas of the Soviet Union was her proudest achievement. She could have had no way of knowing that among the children evacuated was future world champion Boris Spassky who was evacuated to a children’s home in Kirov province which is where he learned to play chess. 

     The siege was gruesome and resulted in more than 3 million Soviet and more than 500,000 German casualties. More than 1 million civilians also perished, whether trapped inside the city or while attempting to flee. Famine was widespread, and reports of cannibalism common. With winter temperatures as low as -22 degrees F, thousands starved and froze to death.
     In the following game Rudenko demonstrates her style against Maria Teresa Mora Iturralde in the Women's World Championship at Moscow in 1950. This round robin tournament took place in the winter of 1949–1950 and determined the the replacement for Vera Menchik who had been killed in an air raid in 1944. Rudenko scored 11.5-3.5, losing only one game, to 12th place finisher Gisela Kahn Gresser of the United States. Iturralde finished tied for 10th-11th with a score of 6.0-9.0.