Spassky did more than just complain about money. At this Shakhty meeting, he startled his listeners by saying, “Basically I am descended from a priest’s family. And if I had not made it as a chess player, I would happily have become a priest.”
The speech went all the way to the secretaries of the Central Committee, ending up with the acting head of the Central Committee Propaganda and Agitation Department, Aleksandr Yakovlev, who was told that the audience had expressed “bewilderment and indignation” at its contents.
Harsher and potentially more threatening judgments were made of Spassky. Baturinskii accused him of being under the sway of “objectivist views” over the location of the match with Fischer. At a preliminary discussion with the USSR Chess Federation leadership, Spassky had declared: “I consider it inadvisable to hold the match in the USSR, since this would give a certain advantage to one of the participants, and the match should be held on equal terms….”
Broadly, “objectivism” meant expressing views not based on a Marxist-Leninist analysis. The official Soviet reference book,
Spassky gave off dangerous political vibrations, but should we call him a dissident? Such he seemed to some contemporary university students. Viktor Korchnoi gives a qualified appraisal: “When I defected, I considered myself a dissident on two legs, while Spassky was a one-legged dissident.”
From his post as second in command of the State Sports Committee, and in charge of ten sports including chess, Viktor Ivonin regarded him with a possibly sinister tolerance: “We accepted him as he was, knowing that it was too late to change him. He is a nihilist. We could have helped him in certain ways, to talk and act ‘more correctly.’ And we tried to do that. But you can’t remake a person. So when he said certain things—perhaps in jest—we decided not to react. But he wasn’t a dissident.”
Yevgeni Bebchuk, the former president of the Chess Federation of the Russian Federation (a republic of the USSR), agrees: “On the other hand, Spassky never accepted the Soviet regime: he wouldn’t say that out loud, but he would say it among friends. From the very beginning, he pretended to play the fool, pretended not to know anything. I would often be called to official meetings in my administrative role, and colleagues on the committees would say, ‘Well, he’s a talented chess player, but he’s a little bit strange in the head,’ and I would say, ‘Well, yes.’ He protected himself. It’s a kind of survival technique, because in Russian culture they take well to fools; they forgive them a great many things.”
Here, Bebchuk is making a peculiarly Russian cultural reference. An established feature of Tsarist Russia, the “Holy Fool,” or
Spassky’s trainer Nikolai Krogius, the psychologist, says the world champion’s politics were the consequence of his complex character—an aspect of which was his hostility to discipline. “He’s like an independent artist, a very blithe person, a bohemian type. And as he was the world champion at that time, he thought everyone had to listen to what he said and take his opinion into consideration—though, to be frank, his opinion was not always the last opinion on a subject and not the most considered.”
Being opinionated was as much about entertaining as scandalizing. Spassky was certainly that risky type—a joker. Grandmaster Yuri Averbakh has a dramatic analysis of Spassky’s approach to life: “Spassky was an actor.” In other words, he wanted to be the focus of attention. Averbakh remembers going to Keres’s funeral with Spassky, “and everyone was dressed in black, except for Spassky, who came in a red suit. It was very funny because there were a thousand people on the streets and he was the only one who stood out. I wasn’t sure whether he simply neglected the usual formalities or whether this was his way of expressing himself. Such exhibitionism was very sad.”
Spassky was also highly convivial. Several of his friends and colleagues claim that once he became champion, he shed any former reticence. Then he wanted to be the life and soul of the party and broaden his social life. There was no shortage of invitations. As well as his strongly expressed remarks, he had a fund of amusing stories and was an excellent mimic. Baturinskii and Averbakh were two of his chess victims. Politicians did not escape: Brezhnev was a favorite. He even dared a (passable) Lenin.
Thus, the views of his chess contemporaries offer no single picture of the world champion other than that he was out of the ordinary, of independent character. They remember Spassky the artist, Spassky the buccaneer, Spassky the joker, Spassky the actor, Spassky the nihilist. Spassky the free spirit,
However we categorize him, there seems to have been an acceptance by the authorities of Spassky’s determination to be his own man and of his distancing himself from the regime. The official answer to their rogue champion was simply to dismiss his views as inconsequential, irritating but not worth taking seriously.
Until, that is, Fischer challenged Soviet ownership of the world title. Then the authorities could no longer escape the tensions between the political role of the world champion and Spassky’s obdurate rejection of that role, and between their distaste for his attitudes and admiration for his incontestable greatness as a chess player.
6. LIVING CHESS
I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.
There is nothing abnormal about a chess player being abnormal. This is normal.
How can we begin to understand what goes on inside the minds of world-class players while they are moving pieces on the sixty-four squares of the chess board for hour after hour, game after game, week after week? Months of preparation, mental and physical, precede so grueling a contest as Reykjavik. What resources of skill, intellect, memory, and imagination, of stamina and courage, does a match require?
The British Broadcasting Corporation archives contain a clue in a unique recording of a 1930s interview with Alexander Alekhine. Alekhine is preparing for his title challenge with Max Euwe, the only authentic amateur to become world champion. (Nearly four decades later, as president of FIDE, the sport’s governing body, Euwe will preside over the Fischer-Spassky match.) In the precisely enunciated, beautifully modulated diction of the day, the interviewer asks whether Alekhine does not by now know all the combinations in chess. His voice high-pitched and heavily accented, Alekhine replies, “Oh no, believe me, a lifetime is not enough to learn everything about chess.”
Like Fischer, Alekhine was a chess fanatic and loner. He lived and breathed chess; he was fiercely competitive, constantly seeking self-improvement, capable of turning violent on the rare occasions that he suffered defeat. His knowledge of the openings was unsurpassed. In Alekhine’s time, opening preparation could take elite players up to around move nine or ten, before the game spun off in a novel direction. By the early 1970s, theory had progressed to the extent that often the first fifteen moves would be familiar. Now, in their remarkable memory banks, assisted by computer databases, the chess elite can shuffle through a mental card index consisting of both
