I was unaware of how many well known players were/are from the Ukraine...Wikipedia lists 115 players and that list is even missing some! A few ended up in the U.S. where they occupied a position of prominence, if not nationally, then locally. Here’s a partial list of some of the better known Ukrainian players. Note that some of the players were just born in Ukraine or places that at one time were under its control.
Lev Alburt, Boris Alterman, Boris Baczynsky, Alexander Beliavsky, Ossip Bernstein, Efim Bogoljubov, Fedir Bohatyrchuk, Isaac Boleslavsky, David Bronstein, Oscar Chajes, Alexander Chernin, Josif Dorfman, Fedor Duz-Khotimirsky, Pavel Eljanov, Maurice Fox, Mikhail Golubev, Eduard Gufeld, Vitaly Halberstadt, Vassily Ivanchuk, Nicolai Jasnogrodsky, Gregory Kaidanov, Sergey Karjakin, Abram Khasin, Boris Kogan, Alexander Konstantinopolsky, Irina Krush, Gennady Kuzmin, Konstantin Lerner, Isaac Lipnitsky, Paul List, Vladimir Malaniuk, Adrian Mikhalchishin, Alexander Moiseenko, Alexander Onischuk, Sam Palatnik, Roman Pelts, Ruslan Ponomariov, Stepan Popel, Vsevolod Rauzer, Oleg Romanishin, Nicolas Rossolimo, Iosif Rudakovsky, Lyudmila Rudenko, Vladimir Savon, Alexey Sokolsky, Victor Soultanbeieff, Leonid Stein, Mark Taimanov, Vladimir Tukmakov, Miroslav Turiansky and Boris Verlinsky.
There was no date on the Woochess article I saw, but the Ukraine was listed as the 4th strongest chess county with 91 GMs. Very impressive.
His books have been highly acclaimed and he acted as one of Garry Kasparov's seconds in his first four World Championship matches against Anatoly Karpov. As a result he was involved in a little intrigue in the Kasparov-Karpov matches. Mark Weeks covered it in The Dorfman Affair in his blog.
Later Dorfman moved to France where he coached the French player Etienne Bacrot from age nine until Barcot became a GM. In 2004 Dorfman was awarded the title of FIDE Senior Trainer.
In his career Dorfman has played some impressive games such as the following one. His opponent was Bulgarian GM Petar Velikov (born March 30, 1951), the Bulgarian champion in 1987.
The game was played in the very strong 9-round Swiss at Palma in 1989 that was won by Boris Gelfand (7.5-1.5) a half point ahead of Anthony Miles and Gata Kamsky.
Dorfman finished way down in the standings with an even score of 4.5, but so did players like Lev Polugayevsky, Murray Chandler, Zurab Azmaiparashvili, Sergey Kudrin, Jerorn Piket, Julian Hodgson, Bnet Lartsen, Edward Gufeld, Robert Byrne, Vladimir Bagirov and Andy Soltis, just to name a few! Samuel Reshevsky scored but a single point. Velikov scored 3.5 points.
The Palma de Mallorca 1989 event was a World Cup Qualification Tournament. In 1988–1989, the Grandmasters Association, a brainchild of Kasparov which held tournaments in competition with FIDE, organized a series of six World Cup tournaments in the form of a Grand Prix.
Speaking of Palma...it is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of the Balearic Islands in Spain. I was there in 1966 and the city and the weather were beautiful. When I was there a great tournament was taking place that was won by Tal ahead of Pomar and Portisch. I was in Palma because I was on a U.S. Marine Corps six-month long training cruise to the Mediterranean and the ship I was on was in port for liberty while the tournament was being played. I didn't find out about the tournament until months later when I read about it in Chess Review magazine.
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