By the mid-1920s, the Soviet Union had decided to adopt the game as a form of mental training because it was deemed to be classless and untainted by bourgeois ideology and so it was incorporated into the official culture of the communist revolution.
Chess was one of the few things that the Soviet Union excelled at and one of the most prominent promoters was Nikolai Krylenko (1885-1938). Lenin appointed him as head of the People's Commissariat for Justice in 1931 and when the Cheka unleashed their purges later that year, Krylenko declared, “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”
Krylenko put this idea into practice throughout his bloody career. Then, when in 1937 Stalin turned on the veterans of the secret police, Krylenko was like Haman in the book of Esther: At once, Haman was hanged on the gallows he had built to hang Mordecai. Krylenko was not only liquidated but also airbrushed out of history. Only in the 1960s was he rehabilitated as one of the founders of
Soviet chess.
In 1924, Krylenko’s job was to turn chess into the Soviet Union’s national game. As chairman of the chess section of the supreme council for physical culture of the Russian socialist republics, he persuaded the Kremlin to organize the first international tournament at Moscow in 1925, to be followed by two more in 1935 and 1936. Krylenko also edited the Soviet chess magazine 64 and under the slogan “Take chess to the workers!” there were tens of millions of players.
The first chess hero of the Soviet Union was Mikhail Botvinnik because he belonged to the first generation to reach maturity under communism. Soviet domination of was established by Botvinnik’s victory in the 1948 match-tournament in The Hague, which included the five leading players in the world.
It was in that tournament that Paul Keres, whose results were equal to Botvinnik’s, was under pressure from the Soviet authorities as a result of his collaboration with Germany during their occupation of Estonia during the war. Keres played well against everybody, but collapsed against Botvinnik ans so drew a lot of suspicion.
Halfway through the tournament, the Soviet leaders panicked about the threat posed by Samuel Reshevsky after he beat Botvinnik in excellent style. Botvinnik was summoned before the central committee, but was able to reassure them that he could win. Fortunately for Botvinnik, personally and Soviet chess in general, Reshevsky didn’t do well in the second half and ended up tied for third.
The United States was the strongest chess nation in the 1930s, but its players got the shock of their life in September 1945 when, in the first important postwar match between the new superpowers, the Soviet Union defeated the American team in a radio match by the crushing margin of 15.5-4.5. The following year the Soviet team annihilated England 18-6. And so it went. For the next thirty years the only serious competition came from its own satellite countries.
The Soviet School of Chess was supposed to have raised the theory of the game to a much higher level than had been possible in the bourgeois culture of the west. As Botvinnik explained it, “If a culture is declining then chess too will go downhill.” During this time openings were renamed after Russian masters and non-Russian masters were either ignored or disparaged.
The real reason for their success though wasn’t their training methods so much as their chess infrastructure created a pool of millions of players and literally hundreds of players achieved Master or GM strength between the 1940s and 1960s.
There were rewards and punishments. A strong player was a privileged to receive stipends that were much higher than average and foreign travel was allowed. Nevertheless, there was a steady stream of chess refugees that fled the country and for a long time many of the leading GMs in the US, Israel and western Europe were Soviet immigrants.
This brings me to a delightful old book in my library, Soviet Chess by Robert Wade published in 1968 which Sam Sloan has republished in its original format. Wade used his extensive library which at the time contained many rare (to the West) books as the principal source of his material and used much of the analysis presented by the GMs themselves.
The book has more than 120 games in Descriptive Notation of the leading players in the USSR. Wade gives a brief history of Soviet chess and then looks at some of the early players like Petrov, Jaenisch and Chigorin. Then he looks at the World Champions and the contenders: Keres, Bronstein, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian and Spassky.
And next he considers Soviet champions like Bondarevsky, Lilienthal, Kotov, Averbakh and Stein to name a few. After that, Wade looks at problem composers, women players, world correspondence champions and finally some early Soviet champions: Romanovsky, Bohatirchuk, Levenfish and Rabinovich.
Although the only mention of Grigory Ravinsky in Wade’s book was a game he lost, this virtually unknown player is worth a look. Grigory Ravinsky was born on October 18, 1909 in St Petersburg.
When he was 19, he made his debut in the city championship, where he played against Botvinnik, Romanovsky, Ilyin-Genevsky, Levenfish and Rabinovich, but it wasn’t until 1941 that he became a master of sport and qualified for the semi-final of the USSR championship, which took place in Rostov-on-Don. The tournament was interrupted by the War.
After the German attack, St Petersburg started a city chess tournament, which ended up unfinished. One of the documents that remains times stated: “Today, we are opening another chess tournament during a difficult and uncertain time for Leningrad. All the renowned masters of the USSR will play, including Romanovsky, Rabinovich, Chekhover, Lisitsin and Ravinsky. The tournament will also be attended by talented masters for sport- Novotelnov, Belchikov, Sklyarov, Ber and Model. We will play in hospitals and military bases, to make our tournament beneficial to our brave soldiers, their commanders and political officers of the Red Army. We will play twice a week and report our results by radio and print. We feel enthusiastic: no blockade and no deficits will stop us from hosting another tournament. We hope that all participants will demonstrate their full potentials in this historic tournament.”
After the war, Ravinsky lived in Moscow, where he played in several city championships and qualified for the USSR tournament for the first time in 1944. His best tournament was the Moscow championship of 1947, where he tied for first with Bronstein and Panov. After that, his next major success was the semi-final of the 1952 USSR championship, where he came fourth but did not qualify for the finals.
Mostly Ravinsky’s role was that of a trainer. After arriving in Moscow at the end of the War, Ravinsky, who never married, lived in the same communal apartment the rest of his life. He loved the theater and saw his favorite play, Queen of Spades, many times. Every day was spent at the chess club in the Prague Cafe which was famous for his favorite chocolate cakes.
Ravinsky worked as a nameless, faceless bureaucrat waiting for a promotion that never came. Soviet Master Evgeny Gik described him as having loved chess to the point that he sacrificed his personal life for it. He was a kind man, but was very strict when it came to chess.
After his students enjoyed some successes in 1957, he became recognized as a trainer of the USSR and two years later, an International Arbiter.
In those days one became a Soviet Master by defeating a recognized Master in a match. So, in 1965, Ravinsky was appointed “examiner” in a match against a player named Revyakin, who won the match by an overwhelming margin. After that humbling loss, Ravinsky gave up serious competition. His last student was Sergey Gorelov, who ended up dying at a very young age. In 1986, Ravinsky, along with Oleg Moiseev, published a book on the Paulsen Variation.
Ravinsky passed away at the age of 85 in 1994.
Naturally when attacking along the e-file, it’s fundamental that the opponent’s K is on the file and should find it difficult or impossible to move away. Another important condition is that the e-file should be open or else it can be opened.
Equally important, the attacker should have a piece (R or Q) that can control the e-file or at least be able to quickly reach the file. The attacker will also usually need to double Rs. An attack along the e-file usually happens early in the game, often after an opening mistake.
When Reuben Fine annotated the following game, he kind of went overboard with the “!!” but even so, white’s play is an excellent example of an attack along the e-file.
No comments:
Post a Comment