The KGB Plays Chess

    The KGB Plays Chess was published by Russell Enterprises back in 2010 and is a collaboration between GMs Boris Gulko and Viktor Korchnoi, Russian journalist Yuri Felshtinsky and former KGB Colonel Vladimir Popov.

     The book claims, among other things, that Anatoly Karpov was a KGB agent with the code name "Raul" and the Russian secret police helped him keep his world championship title after he was awarded the title when Booby Fischer chickened out and wouldn't play him.    

    The book starts out with Popov and Felshtinsky telling of things the KGB did to Soviet players. Note: one reviewer claimed they present no "evidence" because there is no documentation of their claims. The reviewer also observed that Popov and Felshtinsky exhibited a lack of chess history. They claim the KGB had experts on poisonous substances who monitored Karpov's food and bowel movements. They also supposedly had chemicals that caused anxiety, disrupted sleep and raised blood pressure that they were able to sneak into rooms occupied by Korchnoi and his team.

     Also, if that didn't work and it looked like Karpov may possibly lose, the KGB had Plan B...they would somehow slip Korchnoi something that would cause congestive heart failure and kill him. A fact later confirmed by Tal. 

     The next part of the book is the story of Boris Gulko, who along with his wife Anna, a WGM, were allowed to emigrate from Moscow in 1986, almost ten years after they first tried. During those ten years they were stymied, harassed and humiliated by the KGB as was Korchnoi when he defected in 1976. Most of the book is about their escape.

     Gulko also wrote the Foreword and his brief description of Soviet World Champions is interesting. Botvinnik, the founder of the Soviet school and first Soviet world champion, is described as being an ideological Communist, although an idiosyncratic one. We are also told that while Grigory Levenfish, the USSR champion who was invited to AVRO in 1938, it was Botvinnik who went because the Soviet government did not trust Levenfish and was afraid to allow him to leave the country. 

     According to Gulko, Vasily Smyslov was not the Soviet man the Communist Party painted him to be. Smyslov was a religious Christian and told Gulko, who once served as his second, that the Soviet government was “demonic.” However, Smyslov was not above skulduggery when it came to using the Soviet hierarchy. He wrote letters to his supporters in the upper echelons of the government and got his rivals replaced in tournaments by Smyslov instead. 

     Tigran Petrosian was not a member of the party, but actively collaborated with the KGB and served as an informer. The apolitical Mikhail Tal did not collaborate with the KGB and it caused him a lot of grief from the government, the party, and the KGB. 

     According to Gulko all Tal wanted to do was play in tournaments, but for some reason the officials did not want him to play. I think this may have been because Tal was a notorious womanizer and a drunk and so was not a good representative of the Party. 

     However, Tal accepted compromises in order to play as, for example, when he signed a letter condemning Korchnoi for defecting. On the other hand, when Tal was coaching Karpov during the Korchnoi matches, his coaching job abruptly ended when he said Kasparov was the best player of 1983.

     Tal didn't help his cause any when during the Olympiad in Novi Sad in 1990, he told Korchnoi that if he (Korchnoi) had defeated Karpov in their world championship match, the KGB would have murdered him. Tal found out about this while working as Karpov’s coach. 

     Boris Spassky was a dissident. When the Soviet press covered the trial of Angela Davis, a member of the American Communist Party, who was charged as an accomplice in the murder of a judge, Spassky wouldn't sign a letter supporting her.

     In fact, Spassky enjoyed insulting to the Communist government and mocking Lenin. The KGB persecuted Spassky when he decided to marry Marina, an employee of the French embassy in Moscow, and later, when he wanted to join her in France. It was during this period that the KGB made unsuccessful, attempts to infect her undergarments with venereal disease. Spassky, afraid that the KGB would kill him, with the help of a West German steel casting magnate and chess sponsor was able to leave the USSR. 

     Garry Kasparov's strange fate is also discussed. In spite of all the help Karpov got, Kasparov defeated him and even though a dissident himself, Kasparov survived...that is except for his arrest in 2007. Oddly, after his arrest and while he was in solitary confinement Karpov visited the prison and left a chess magazine for him. 

     An interesting book!