Each had a specific task. Bondarevskii’s job was to study in minute detail 500 of Fischer’s games in an attempt to identify deficiencies and weaknesses. Krogius had developed a technique for appraising players’ psychology and was now applying it to Fischer. He aimed to find the critical positions in his games and assess Fischer’s thought processes, studying also his reaction to defeat. He would carry out the same process on Spassky and compare the two. Geller would concentrate on the openings.
Later, Krogius complained that Spassky had ignored the results of his toil, just as Geller grumbled that Spassky had not followed his openings advice. Ivonin recorded in his diary that Spassky had paid little attention to the notes on Fischer commissioned from other leading Soviet grandmasters such as Tal, Smyslov, and Petrosian, nor had he taken the opportunity to discuss Fischer with them in person. The champion had his reasons, some less respectful than others. “We don’t need general advice from old men,” he opined to Ivonin. And he was determined that these “old men” should not discover any of the new weapons he was developing for use against Fischer. “The most important thing is we won’t be able to tell them
It was and remains quite normal for grandmasters to fear that their ingeniously worked-through ideas might seep out to the wider world, but Mikhail Beilin describes this as a Spassky obsession and claims that the champion had been suspicious of others since childhood: “He would keep quiet; it was his nature, and he wouldn’t trust or believe anyone.” The world champion also believed that some grandmasters, Petrosian for one, actively disliked him. He had grounds to be wary. Because foreign travel and the other rewards for success were so dependent on the favor of the authorities, Moscow chess was a wasps’ nest of rivalry, intrigues, and plots.
So for Spassky the formation of a tight, loyal team was vital. To Bondarevskii, Geller, and Krogius, an Estonian player was added. Ivo Nei had captured the USSR Junior Chess Championship in 1948. He was only an international master, a lack of foreign tournament play having cost him the chance of the grandmaster title. Baffled by the choice, some put it down to Nei’s being a close friend of his fellow Estonian Paul Keres, whom Spassky was said to have idolized. Certainly Spassky was an admirer of Keres. But talent with a tennis racket was the primary reason for Nei’s selection. A former Estonian tennis champion, his major role was to keep Spassky physically fit. He was likable and ebullient, and according to Nei, he and Spassky enjoyed a freedom of conversation the champion did not share with the others. Looking back, Spassky says he trusted Nei, and it is probable that he felt more at ease with the unpretentious non-Muscovite than with the other denizens of the Central Chess Club.
However, the Sports Committee felt Nei to be an extremely poor choice. After all, he had little to offer in terms of chess analysis; he was not in the same class as the others, and if Spassky required a physical trainer, then a real expert should have been found. The KGB also objected to the non-Party member Estonian; during the match, doubts about him would take a more menacing turn.
By August 1971, as Petrosian prepared to meet Fischer in the last of the Candidates matches, Spassky discussed the details of his preparation with the Sports Committee. Baturinskii had already informed Ivonin that the world champion had not worked much in the previous year. Ivonin told Spassky he should be playing more in the Soviet Union, where the competitors were stronger and fought more fiercely.
Since becoming world champion, Spassky had played ninety-two games, eighty-eight of them abroad. Ivonin suspected that Spassky did not want tough competition. He appeared to be suffering from post—world championship loss-of-form syndrome.
In July 1971, in a small tournament in the Swedish city of Goteborg, Spassky had managed eight points out of eleven (five wins, six draws). In the Alekhine Memorial tournament in Moscow in November/December 1971, he was placed only joint sixth, below the new prodigy, Anatoli Karpov, and ex-champions Smyslov and Petrosian. He had agreed a series of unimpressive short draws. But he was not the only champion to have avoided tough competition. In a later article in the chess magazine
If he were minded to make excuses, Spassky could point to personal preoccupations—private troubles that the Sports Committee tried to help him resolve. He was unsettled by the obligations that fell to him as the leader of Soviet chess. He had to ensure that Bondarevskii and Krogius had permits to live in Moscow and that Bondarevskii gained a much needed pay increase. He wanted to change his Moscow flat in Prospekt Mira; he described the Stalin-era apartment as noisy and claustrophobic, with nowhere to put his books or work. He wanted more money. He had to pay alimony to his first wife and provide for his mother. His second wife, Larisa, had come to Moscow with their child, and they too had to be taken care of—a suitable kindergarten found for the little boy, Vasili. With all these expenses, 300 roubles a month was not enough, he told Ivonin.
As a senior politician, a deputy minister, Ivonin also received 300 roubles a month. He initially told Spassky that the Sports Committee did not have sufficient money for chess as well as for other sports in the Soviet Union. Privately he thought that compared to other people, Spassky had a privileged enough life already; the real problem was that Spassky knew how sports stars lived abroad. However, Spassky’s demands could not be ignored, and when they met again in late November, Ivonin capitulated. Spassky was awarded an increase to 500 roubles a month—the same as a Soviet minister and the first Soviet sportsman to be remunerated at this level. The Council of Ministers—the government—had to approve the increase as an “exceptional personal salary.”
On 16 November, Viktor Baturinskii, director of the Central Chess Club, wrote a report to the Sports Committee on Spassky’s training, expressing the authorities’ disquiet at the champion’s attitude to the defense of his title. Clearly exasperated, he explained Spassky’s unsuitability to carry the Soviet flag and gave a merciless review of the world champion’s general readiness for the mission ahead:
As a result of his difficult childhood and gaps in his upbringing, he allows himself to make immature statements, infringes sporting procedures, and does not display the necessary level of industriousness. Certain individuals in our country and abroad try to aggravate these weaknesses, nurturing his delusions of grandeur, emphasizing his “exclusive role” as world champion in all sorts of ways and encouraging B. Spassky’s already unhealthy mercenary spirit. Two points cause particular anxiety:
a) He spends a great deal of time on improving his living conditions (exchanging his flat, buying a dacha, repairing his automobile), and this may in future influence his training, which demands the full devotion of his energy and time…
b) Thoughtlessness during public appearances; his attention has been drawn to this several times.
The very next day, the Sports Committee lost control of Spassky’s preparation.
Within the structure of government, the Sports Committee was answerable to the Council of Ministers. But the Soviet Union had two (unequal) sources of governing authority. Operating alongside the government, at this time led by Andrei Kosygin, was the real center of power, the Communist Party. At the top of the Party was the Central Committee. It had a cabinet, the Politburo, the pinnacle of the power structure. The Central Committee and its secretaries were at the heart of the political system, and the general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, was the true leader of the country. (This caused puzzled head scratching in diplomatic circles: how could Brezhnev pay state visits abroad when he had no official governmental position?) Any issue with major ideological implications went to the Central Committee for discussion and decision. If the response was positive, the government ministry would act; if not, not.
Without informing the Sports Committee (in other words, the deputy minister, Viktor Ivonin, and the bureaucrats who would have to make all the practical arrangements and find the money for them), Spassky initiated a meeting with a senior functionary in the Central Committee and handed over his outline “Training Plan.” The unnamed functionary conveyed it to Piotr Demichev, the Central Committee secretary whose beat covered chess. Chess fell under “ideology,” and Demichev had been the secretary responsible for ideology since 1961—he was also a candidate, or nonvoting member, of the Politburo. Spassky himself says that he never met Demichev.
Why did Spassky take this radical step and give his schedule to the Central Committee, the control room of the Party? He says it was because of his growing friction with Baturinskii; he wanted to bypass him—and with him, presumably, the other Sports Committee apparatchiks.
