Bobby Fischer Goes to War

The Western public too was convinced of the geopolitical significance of the battle, and there were letters to the local and national press to this effect. Donald Kurtis, from Connecticut, wrote to The New York Times to point out that “chess is far more important to millions of people abroad than in the United States. A victory by Mr. Fischer can be more positively impressive to these people than all the trade, aid, and arms treaties.” A New York Times editorial makes a similar point, referring to the Soviets’ space achievement, with relish: “Unquestionably, Spassky’s loss of the title would be regarded as a major national setback; a Sputnik in reverse.” Just before the first game, The Washington Post claimed, “A Fischer victory would strike at a basic claim of Soviet ideology.” Decades later, many of the characters in our story concurred. For Icelandic cameraman Gissli Gestsson, this was not simply a chess match: “It was a battle for the minds of people all over the world; it was about the superpowers. I think it was a bit sad for chess, that it was used in this way.”

Stereotyped contrasts between “us” and “them” abounded in articles and contemporary books by writers projecting the period through which they lived. The Soviet embassy interpreter Valeri Chamanin was used as an example of the Soviet lack of humanity. Francis Wyndham, coauthor of an instant account of the match, saw Chamanin as dummylike. (How animated should a professional interpreter be? In private life, Chamanin is warmly ebullient.)

According to Brad Darrach, Chamanin was “one of many quasi-official Russian bureaucrats of the island whose faces appeared to have been restored to almost human form after a fatal accident.” The Soviet delegation, he noted, walked in single file, expressionless and uncommunicative, “like finalists in a self-effacement contest.” All except Spassky, that is, and Krogius, who was expressive enough to Westerners to seem sinister and who was accorded the character of a horror movie psychologist plotting the hero’s downfall through his cruel insights. However, to his Soviet contemporaries, let alone to Western reporters, Efim Geller seemed unusually paranoid about the West, and TASS correspondent Aleksandr Yermakov called him “Mr. No” for his unwillingness to share anything even with the Soviet agency. (In Icelandic, “no” was pronounced like “Nei,” so to the local population another Spassky aide was Mr. No.)

The London Sunday Times perception of the two protagonists in Iceland revealed how, seen through the prism of ideological confrontation, reality was distorted: “Both are wonderfully cast for their roles. Fischer the rugged individualist, adventurous and occasionally reckless both in his life-style and chess style; Spassky the more benign type of Soviet bureaucrat, cautious, noncommittal, evasive.”

GosKomSport officials would have greeted with incredulity the idea of Spassky as the benign bureaucrat. But for Moscow and the Soviet bloc, Fischer-Spassky was demonstrably a clash of systems. Naturally, red-clawed capitalism was held responsible for the American’s undesirable obsession with money, though it is not difficult to discern a note of envy over the way in which Fischer grasped riches from the game. But there was worry, too, about how this could transform the financial weather for Soviet players, making them less amenable to state control, diverting them from socialist priorities.

Even so, once the match got under way, ideology vanished from the coverage. The turning point was Spassky’s disastrous third game, when the Soviet press settled down into straightforward chess analysis, with increasing hints that the champion was the author of his own misfortune. The match itself took second place to the Olympics in the use of limited hard currency and journalistic resources. Aleksandr Yermakov’s living expenses were severely restricted; he survived by finding student accommodations and cooking for himself. The TASS man’s task was to send the moves to Moscow. His editors had next to no interest in the anecdotes, drama, and human stories preoccupying Western journalists, though the facts were reported.

Back in Moscow, commentaries in the press made clear Soviet grandmasters’ dissatisfaction with Spassky’s standard of play. Although there was little coverage of the Fischer sideshow, an American journalist in Moscow, Robert Kaiser, was struck by the freedom of the coverage of the chess itself.

All Russia seems transfixed…. The self-centered, unpredictable American is a puzzlement here, but he is also the object of admiration. His moves as well as Spassky’s are subjected to a rare form of public commentary— vivid, outspoken journalism. The grandmasters all write well, in a frank and lively style more like American political commentary than standard Soviet journalism. Phrases like “Then Spassky grossly miscalculated” may read like normal comment to an American eye, but it jumps out at a reader of the Soviet press.

There was freedom among park bench experts, too. Another American reporter overheard a note of gloom: “Spassky is playing like a shoemaker.”

But some two-thirds into the match, its prominence in the state newspaper Izvestia steadily declined. After game seventeen, the FIDE logo was removed from its place beside the articles (whether as official disapproval of the federation or simply to make the match less prominent—or both—is unclear), and the byline of grandmaster David Bronstein, who had provided the analysis, also disappeared. The final report from TASS was tucked away on the lower-left-hand corner of the sports page, overshadowed by pictures of Soviet athletes and gymnasts. It was one column, eleven lines:

Not arriving for the game, Spassky admitted his defeat in yesterday’s adjourned twenty-first game of the chess world championship. This decision is explained by the fact that further resistance on the part of white, as analysis showed, was already hopeless. Thus Fischer won the match with a score of 12.5–8.5 and earned the title of World Champion of Chess.

The newspaper Sovietskaia Rossia put the passing of the title from Russian hands in a black-bordered box used for an obituary. But the Munich Olympic games were now the lead story, and for good reason. As Fischer seized the title, a Russian sprinter, Valeri Borzov, took from the United States the crown of world’s fastest man. Just as an American had never before been world chess champion, a Russian had never before won the Olympic 100-meter sprint. (Pavlov had chosen the right event to mastermind.)

A downplaying of the chess match was to be expected. The role of the Soviet press was to reflect official views and priorities, not to satisfy the appetites of readers. With the strength of Fischer’s challenge to Soviet hegemony, the news media’s response became pragmatically low-key.

Significantly, there were neither political allegations nor recriminations against the West. There were no attempts to couch the match in strategic terms. While the loss of the title was a blow, it was to be presented as an internal chess issue, not a matter of direct international or ideological importance.

But then this was not a time for unnecessary dissension toward the United States. Indeed, far from epitomizing East-West conflict, the championship took place in the high blossoming of detente. In Europe, the cockpit of the cold war, a postwar settlement had finally emerged, in effect the long-deferred World War II peace treaty. Though almost all Western accounts of Fischer-Spassky couch the match in geopolitical terms, they are, in this respect, curiously misleading. The encounter might have been seen by the public and written up in the press as a cold war showdown, but in the Kremlin and the White House, East-West showdowns were not on the agenda.

Thus, on the Soviet side, the political level of interest in Spassky’s preparation was high, but not exceptionally so. One of the two secretaries of the Central Committee who ranked just below Brezhnev in authority, Mikhail Suslov was in ultimate charge of ideological matters and therefore chess. He apparently never officially discussed the match. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev does not appear to have involved himself in the match, though the figurehead president of the USSR, Nikolai Podgornii, sent a telegram of good wishes to Spassky. (It would have been unthinkable for Brezhnev himself to put his name to such a message.) When Spassky was plainly in trouble, Lev Abramov, the former head of the Chess Department of the State Sports Committee, wanted a team manager sent to Reykjavik. He went directly to one of Brezhnev’s aides, Konstantin Rusakov, to enlist his help. But Rusakov was abroad; there was no sense of urgency in the Kremlin, and Abramov’s initiative came to nothing.

As for the Americans, we know that Henry Kissinger made two calls to Fischer, but his almost day-by-day record of his time as national security adviser, The White House Years, contains no reference to them. There is no mention of the match in Nixon’s equally detailed Memoirs. The Soviet ambassador to Washington, D.C., Anatoli Dobrynin, told the authors that in his frequent contacts with Kissinger, the match never came up. Neither Fischer nor Spassky is cited in his book, In