Bobby Fischer Goes to War

“The party bigwigs felt like that. You should die for the homeland and the Party. As for the games themselves, only chess players were interested. What really matters is that at the board you’re a Soviet person.” Today he smiles at the memory of the morale-boosting exercises undergone by contestants in student tournaments, with the whole team gathered in the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee.

They would sit us down in front of some official who didn’t know anything about chess. He would walk about the room. Nikitin, Spassky, and I would be sitting there. He would say, “You realize the honor that you have to defend. Do you understand the honor? Do you understand it properly? Do you understand it or not?” We would just sit there quietly. He would say, “Who is playing today? Ah, Bebchuk, you’re a journalist. Do your colleagues realize the honor they have to defend?” “Yes, they understand.” “You had better explain it to them. Do they understand it properly or not?”

In fact, there were high-level doubts before the Rekyjavik match as to whether Spassky did recognize his duty as required. Viktor Baturinskii, the director of the Central Chess Club, was called in for questioning by Aleksandr Yakovlev, the acting head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee and later Mikhail Gorbachev’s right-hand man. “Tell me, does Spassky understand he carries the moral responsibility for the outcome of the match in relation to the entire Soviet people?” Diplomatically, Baturinskii responded, “I hope he does understand.” Thirty years after making that statement, he admitted it had been deliberately disingenuous: he was clear that Spassky did not understand.

A former assistant to the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Baturinskii owed both his interest in chess and his legal training to one of the founders of Soviet chess, Nikolai Krylenko, who had encouraged him to take up each in the years after the revolution. Colonel Baturinskii served in the army for thirty-five years. He had been number two in the team prosecuting the key British-American spy, Colonel Oleg Penkovskii. Baturinskii’s nickname was “the Black Colonel.” After Viktor Korchnoi defected in 1976, he said Baturinskii should be hanged, drawn, and quartered for his role under Stalin.

Blind and hard of hearing, the former senior chess administrator lived out the end of his days at the top of one of the huge, grim, and grimy apartment blocks that encircle Moscow (he died in December 2002). He was still baffled as to how anyone could question why Spassky had a moral duty to demonstrate the primacy of the Soviet system. The answer seemed too obvious to merit discussion: “Of course it was an ideological question.”

Given that Spassky owed so much to the Soviet state, how did he fail to appreciate—in the eyes of the authorities, at least—his reciprocal obligations to it? And if he rejected state nationalism, what did he believe in? Two fundamental facts provide a starting point for comprehending Spassky’s character and the evolution of his convictions: He was an ethnic Russian, and he was a Lenin-grader, a denizen of the former imperial capital, Peter the Great’s window on the west. In Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky’s narrator calls St. Petersburg (as it was and is) “the most abstract and intentional city in the whole round world. (Towns can be either intentional or unintentional.)” In literary terms, it signified a bridge between the low realities of life and the strange, the enigmatic, and the hidden.

In the Western press, Spassky was marked out among Soviet chess players for naming Dostoyevsky as his favorite author. References to the Dostoyevsky-loving player were used to contrast him with the American, who, if he read anything at all beyond chess magazines, read comics. Some Westerners might have assumed that Spassky was taking a risk in his choice of literature. In fact, Spassky’s passion for Dostoyevsky was far from defiant; even Stalin is said to have relished The Devils. And though some of Dostoyevsky’s writings were censored in the 1950s and 1960s, a major new edition of his works was announced in 1971 on the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth.

All the same, the qualities of a Dostoyevsky novel, the realism, the psychological depth of the characters, the stress on the dualism of human nature, on nonrational motivation—these made the author the most subversive of prerevolutionary writers. He embraces life lived for the journey, not for its ending—as seen in his Notes from Underground. There the hero ruminates that “man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself. And who knows (nobody can say with certainty), perhaps man’s sole purpose in this world consists in this uninterrupted process of attainment, or, in other words, in living, and not specifically in the goal….”

This chimed with Spassky’s attitude to chess. Although he was intensely competitive, the process of achieving a result mattered as much to him as the result itself. He also displayed distinct affinities with Dostoyevskian characters. In the novels, there are existentialist choices, constantly faced, choices that will forever mark those who have to make them. A Dostoyevskian character is hard to classify, he or she is incomplete, always with the potential to adapt and evolve. The Dostoyevsky theorist Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “They all acutely sense their own inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within…. Man is not a final and defined quantity upon which firm calculations can be made; man is free, and can therefore violate any regulating norms that might be thrust upon him.”

Certainly, Spassky did not conform to the model of Soviet man; his fame and status afforded him the luxury of a self-determination denied others. Although the state lifted him and his family out of poverty, he always rejected any notion that he owed it a debt. Queried on this, he points out that the Russian Tsar Nicholas II also gave allowances to talented children, paid out of his own pocket.

But if, like a latter-day Dostoyevskian character, he contravened the norms of the Soviet state, and in many ways resisted categorization, he also had much in common with Dostoyevsky himself. Dostoyevsky is a profoundly Christian writer, imbued with a belief in the world of the spirit and in life everlasting; these beliefs, he thought, were the keys to moral health. Spassky, raised amid the religious atmosphere of his mother’s Russian Orthodox beliefs, was intensely proud of his paternal family’s connection with the Orthodox Church. Spassky’s favorite among Dostoyevsky’s novels is The Brothers Karamazov, which carries a heavy dose of theology. The novel also gives a pointer to Spassky’s political stance. In the central episode, the trial of one of the three brothers for parricide, the prosecutor claims that in the three are represented Russian Europeanism, national principles, and the ingenuous spontaneity of the Russian temperament. The stress is on Russian. In the period of official Soviet state nationalism, Spassky was a Russian patriot, the inheritor of Russian Orthodox religious culture.

Spassky’s university experience would have reinforced his nationalism. It came during a period of convulsions in the arts, what the Leningrad poet Yevgeni Rein called “that half-literary, half-bohemian life that was fermenting in Leningrad.” This entailed in part a subversion of Soviet culture. According to Rein, “We started to turn again toward the Western influences, toward contemporary Western culture; we again turned to Russian tradition, saw the nineteenth century, the Age of Silver, in a new light, and again linked up with the ring of tradition.”

In Grand Strategy, Spassky reflects on his university thesis. Significantly, he had returned to the prerevolutionary period for his choice of subject: Shakhmatni Listok 1859–1863, the first Russian chess magazine. He had always had an interest in Russian history, he says. “For this work I had to read journals from the 1860s. I saw the Russian culture of that time. What a beautiful city St. Petersburg was! When I left the National Library, I found myself in the sleepy, dreadful, provincial town of Leningrad. What an abyss when Russia collapsed.”

His yearning for the old Russia also explains Spassky’s disturbing description of himself as “an honorable anti-Semite.” Dostoyevsky was a nationalist Slavophile with a strong streak of anti-Semitism—seen in his crude attacks on what he called “Yidism.” Spassky’s forthright self-characterization stems from his hostility to the takeover of Russia in 1917 by the international Bolshevik movement, several of whose leaders were Jewish. As so many senior Soviet chess grandmasters and administrators were both Jewish by descent and Communist Party members, we must assume that he was able to separate his professional relationships from his historic antipathy.

Grandmaster Nikolai Krogius remembers Spassky unerringly stressing that he played for Russia and was not glorifying the Soviet Union through his successes. Krogius sniffs, “The authorities tolerated this exposition (possibly, as they say, only for the time being).” “Bourgeois nationalism” was how the authorities would have normally, and critically, described Spassky’s brand of patriotism. The KGB considered such an attitude to be a “pernicious and dangerous survival of the past.” Nevertheless, as a grandmaster of world caliber, Spassky enjoyed the forbearance