Officially the USSR Championship was played from 1921 to 1991 and they were probably the strongest national championship ever held; eight world chess champions and four world championship finalists were among the winners. It was held as a round-robin tournament with the exception of the 35th and 58th championships, which were of the Swiss system.
In 1920 the All-Russian Chess Olympiad was held in Moscow; it was later recognized as the first USSR championship. Conditions were deplorable; the players who didn’t live in Moscow were housed in a cold dorm with hard beds and poor food.
Organizer and participant Ilyin-Genevsky managed to convince everybody to finish the tournament with the promise to pay expense money and increase the ration of bread and cheese. According to Levenfish, they were still hungry, but decided to finish the tournament anyway.
First prize was supposed to be an ivory Chinese chess set. However, it turned out to be assorted junk formerly belonging to emigres that had been confiscated from pawn shops. Alekhine chose a big, heavy vase and he and second place winner Romanovsky also received a cheap paper certificate. According to Alekhine, the apple cakes made from fine white flour that were served at the closing ceremony were pretty good though.
At age 26, Alekhine was by far the strongest player in Russia, but he was lucky to be alive to win the tournament. After his arrest and release at Mannheim 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, he had served as a Red Cross worker and was wounded twice, earning three medals in the process. However, his hair raising adventures weren’t over.
He had been in Moscow in 1917 during the revolution that overthrew the Czar and left Moscow's economy in ruins, so he left for the Ukraine to be a professional player even though it was also a battleground.
In 1919 the Red Army occupied Odessa and arrested and shot some 1,300 suspected traitors and Alekhine was nearly one of them. He was arrested by the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, and interrogated as a result of an anonymous accusation that he had passed on secret information.
There have been various stories about how Alekhine dodged the firing squad, but the future Canadian player Fedir Bohatyrchuk claimed that a strong master and problem composer from Odessa told him that just a few hours before Alekhine went before the firing squad, the master/composer sent a telegram to the Chairman of the Ukrainian Commissar who had heard of Alekhine and so ordered him freed. Clearly, Alekhine had political enemies, but he also had friends in high places because of his chess.
Going into the tournament, besides Alekhine, the only serious contender for first was Levenfish, but he was out of practice, arrived late from Petrograd and lost his first two games after getting winning positions from Romanovsky and I. Rabinovich. Alekhine was a clear winner, going undefeated. Romanovsky finished second despite three defeats (I. Rabinovich, Blumenfeld and Pavlov-Pjanov), but he only had two draws (Alekhine and Grigoriev).
1) Alekhine 12.0
2) Romanovsky 11.0
3) Levenfish 10.0
4) I. Rabinovich 9.5
5-7) Grigoriev, A. Kubbel an A. Rabinovich 8.5
8) Blumenfeld 8.0
9-10) Danushevsky and Iljin-Genevsky 7.0
11-12) Zubarev and Pavlov-Pjanov 6.5
13) Tselikov 5.5
14) Mund 4.5
15) Pavlov 4.0
16) Golubev 3.0
In the following game the position after 12.Nxd4 is worth taking a look at because it results in some neat tactics if black takes the R with 12...Bxe1.
After 13.Nc5 Qb6 14.Ndxe6 Ne5 15.Qxe1 fxe6 16.Qxe5 white has a B and N for the R. Stockfish assigns white a winning advantage of almost four Ps, but just looking at the position, that looks very optimistic. In Shootouts white won every game, but how exactly would that be accomplished?
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| Position after 16.Qxe5 (analysis) |
You can see Stockfish’s solution HERE.
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