David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, Spassky’s career was one of effortless success, groomed by the chess authorities for the grandmaster status that such natural ability made his for the taking. In 1952, he parted from Vladimir Zak. His coach, tutor, and friend had realized that he had given all he could. To develop, his protégé needed a heavier hitter. The replacement was Aleksandr Kasimirovich Tolush. In chess terms, Tolush, a master of attack, was exactly the right man. Spassky “watched with delight how K. [Kasimirovich] mobilized reserves, manoeuvred, and created threats.” Tolush continued Spassky’s wider education, “teaching me how to eat with a knife and fork, how to knot and wear a tie, how to use a serviette and handkerchief, things like that.”

In 1953, in a Bucharest tournament, he justified splitting from his first coach with a sensational win in thirty-four moves over the world championship challenger Vasili Smyslov. But in Romania he learned about more than high-level chess. This was not long before the death of Stalin in March of that year, and the tremors of his latest, and last, purge—the “doctors’ plot”—were shaking Party and government. Laszlo Szabo, a Hungarian grandmaster, was in the lead, and in a Soviet team meeting, the “commissar” in charge of them read a telegram from the Sports Committee: “Stop fighting each other. Make draws. Stop Szabo.” The committee’s anxieties were unnecessary, says Spassky. “Szabo was stopped because he wasn’t strong enough. Even I won against him.”

Two years later, Spassky won the World Junior Chess Championship in Antwerp, and a year after that he tied for first place as Soviet champion and became the youngest player ever to qualify for the Candidates round. He finished third at the Amsterdam Candidates tournament in 1956, making him by that measure one of the top five players in the world—and at the age of only nineteen. It all seemed so simple: a life full of promise, apparently destined for glory. He was now a student. In 1955, he had enrolled at Leningrad University, choosing journalism over mathematics. He says chess competitions prevented him from studying every day—and anyway, he had no talent for math. The young student was already being spoken of as a future world champion. Thanks to his chess, his family jumped the interminable housing queue, moving from one room of fourteen square meters to a “palace”—two rooms of twenty-eight square meters.

Then, just at the age when he was expected to secure his position within the ranks of the world’s elite, the highflier’s career stalled and went into a spin. The nadir came in an encounter with Mikhail Tal in the 1958 Soviet championship. Spassky needed to beat him to enter the Portoroz Interzonal, lost, and cried for the first time in years. His future opponent for the world championship, Tigran Petrosian, participated in the tournament and watched the game. “When I went up to the board, Spassky raised his eyes. They were the eyes of a cornered animal.”

Spassky now discovered how easily the authorities’ benign smile could turn to a frown. Later that year, in the student team championship in his home city, he was on first board and was defeated by the talented American William Lombardy, who would be Fischer’s chess aide in Iceland. The United States took first place. Criticized for not preparing sufficiently, Spassky was banned from playing abroad for the next two years. He also twice failed to qualify for the Interzonals and so for the Candidates rounds in 1959 and 1962. “My nervous energy was completely destroyed,” Spassky recalls.

His game’s entering a trough coincided with turmoil in his relationships. In 1960, he parted from Aleksandr Tolush. Mikhail Beilin, who was head of the Sports Committee’s Chess Department from 1967 to 1971, remembers, “Tolush was quite depressed after this episode—he didn’t have children of his own, and he had spent a lot of time with Boris. He could empathize with bad boys, and he taught Spassky a great deal.” Spassky acknowledged his debt to Tolush:

My play became active over the whole board. My imagination, intuition, sacrifices, and tactics improved. I had almost reached my greatest strength, staying cool during a crisis.

Tolush’s influence endured. In the 1969 world championship match against Petrosian, long after teacher and pupil split, grandmaster Efim Geller still detected the trainer’s fingerprints on Spassky’s game. At a critical moment, Geller wrote, “Kasimiro-vich’s cannon roared.” But after eight years together, according to Spassky, their relationship slowly wore out: “Tolush complained that I had become an unguided missile.”

The coach was exhausted from constantly having to shield his pupil from trouble, with school, the KGB, the USSR Chess Federation. There were also domestic problems.

In 1959, he had married a philology student at his university, Nadezhda Latyntseva (Tolush opposed his choice of bride). A daughter, Tania, was born a year later. Married life cannot have been easy, living with Spassky’s mother, brother, and sister in that twenty-eight-square-meter “palace.” Shortly after Tania’s birth, Boris suggested a divorce, explaining later, “We had become like bishops of opposite colors.” Nadezhda refused—and refused to leave the palace. A state of war ensued. Through his trade union chess contacts, Spassky found her a one-room apartment and she finally moved, but the divorce proceedings were still very drawn out, naturally preying on his mind.

During this tough phase, Spassky had a tendency to dwell on lost games, on might-have-beens; a tendency toward melancholy and pessimism. However, by 1962 both his personal life and his chess had rebounded. His divorce had finally gone through, and he had met his future second wife, Larisa Solovieva. They got to know each other on a beach in Vilinagorsk, a small town near Leningrad, discovering that they lived in the same block back in the city. They married in 1966.

Spassky also had a new, more congenial trainer, Igor Bondarevskii. Bondarevskii was descended from the Don Cossacks; his nickname was “Cossack of the Don.” War damage to his nervous system prevented him from making the most of his chess gifts, and he competed in his last tournament in 1963. Spassky describes him as sharp, lively, and inquisitive, presenting himself as dignified and modest. He adds that an explosive temperament combined with “ambition and vanity made it impossible [for Bondarevskii] to forgive the sins of others.” Nevertheless, Spassky, who revealingly dubbed him “Father,” avows that their years together from 1961 to 1969 were “the best of my life.” (Bondarevskii remained his trainer until 1972.) “[He] became my friend, clever adviser, excellent coach, good psychologist, and, to a certain extent, my father.” Endurance, discipline, the will to fight to the last pawn—these were the qualities the new coach aimed to develop in his pupil.

Under the influence of Bondarevskii, Spassky’s results improved steadily, rather than dramatically. At the end of 1961, he won the USSR championship outright, with ten wins, nine draws, and only one defeat. He was runner-up in a tournament in Havana the following year and tied for first place in the USSR championship of 1963, coming second in the playoffs behind grandmaster Leonid Stein. He began to take seriously the prospect of capturing the world title, telling his trainer in 1964, “I will be world champion.” He meant he would take the crown from his fellow Soviet, the Armenian Tigran Petrosian.