David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

As is widely reported, Spassky was not a Communist Party member. But too much is made of that. Some of the characters in this story—grandmasters Averbakh, Taimanov, and Stein and apparatchiks Baturinskii, Abramov, and Ivonin—were members. Others—grandmasters Tal, Geller, Krogius, and Smyslov—were not. The father of the Soviet H-bomb, Andrei Sakharov, declined powerful “offers” to become a member long before he became known as a dissident, though he was in receipt of a massive income and other privileges from the state. Spassky insists he was never under any pressure to join: perhaps he was considered a lost cause.

The absence of a Party card did not excuse Spassky from political responsibility or from demonstrating the approved political consciousness. While he saw himself as “politically independent,” his was a country where the phrase had no meaning. And from the beginning of his career, in certain non-chess circles he was being spoken of as someone who should be watched as potentially “politically unreliable.”

A thoughtless remark during a championship in Antwerp in 1955, when he was still a teenager, led to an inquiry by the Sports Committee. All innocence, no doubt, Spassky had asked the team commissar, “Did Comrade Lenin suffer from syphilis?” Spassky recollects “the eyes of my apparatchik glittered dangerously.” Why risk such a question? “Lenin had been made into an icon, and I was curious about the reality.” Only action by the deputy sports minister, Postnikov, prevented the case from being taken up by the Komsomol, which would have threatened Spassky’s future.

Officers of the Leningrad KGB were now among those following the career of the chess highflier. Doubtless the organization’s plentiful supply of informers kept them in touch with his every word and deed. His independence of spirit was beginning to be observed by some of his colleagues. In 1960, after they had flown to Argentina for the Mar del Plata international tournament, grandmaster David Bronstein told Spassky that they should report in to the embassy. Spassky had better things to do: “David Ionovich, you go, but I won’t. I belong to a different generation, to which these rules don’t apply.”

By the mid-1960s, the non-chess interest in Spassky was such that Bondarevskii urged him to move from Leningrad to the Moscow area. “The KGB is too curious about you,” he told Boris. In a studio flat shaken by passing express trains, forty kilometers from the capital, twenty-seven-year-old Spassky lived on his own for the first time.

Being in the international spotlight did nothing to curb his independence. At the 1970 Chess Olympiad in the West German city of Siegen, two years after the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and by now world champion, Spassky took care to shake hands with the entire Czechoslovak team. Even though the Czech authorities must have considered their team members politically reliable enough to travel to the West, Spassky’s gesture can still be seen as an intended, if restrained, display of sympathy for that country.

Then, famously and dangerously, in January 1971 he refused to sign a collective letter in support of the black American communist Angela Davis, who had been arrested in the United States. He believed that the world championship should not be used for politics. This refusal was no small matter for the world champion. Leading Soviet representatives of science, sport, music, ballet, and literature had added their names. Botvinnik had signed and had solicited Spassky’s signature. The world champion still declined. The chess apparatchik Mikhail Beilin feels generally warm toward Spassky as a person: “He was nice, sympathetic, and most people felt well disposed toward him. I think people liked him for his human qualities but disliked him if they judged him on the upholding of Party values.” Yet Beilin disapproves strongly of Spassky’s decision. “This letter was signed by different cultural leaders—Spassky was asked to sign on behalf of our chess federation—and it was regarded as a great honor to be asked, a very special honor. So Spassky was being honored by the Central Committee, and he didn’t value this honor.” To an old communist like Lev Abramov, it was distasteful: “He was a product of the system. The Soviet system provided him with everything he needed for his chess; yet when it came to areas beyond chess, he didn’t want to be part of it.”

The general reaction was sufficiently negative for the deputy sports minister, Viktor Ivonin, to call a special meeting at the Sports Ministry. Spassky himself was not invited to what bore a strong resemblance to a trial in absentia. The participants included the leader of the Trade Union Sports Committee (of which Spassky was a member), representatives from the State Sports Committee, the Komsomol Central Committee, and the Central Chess Club, as well as the journalist from the news agency Novosti who had drafted the protest letter. As the participants evaluated Spassky’s attitude and tried to decide what to do about his refusal, a more general dissatisfaction with him emerged. There was broad agreement that he could not be forced to sign. But Botvinnik’s influence, Spassky’s desire for a new apartment, and unfounded gossip about improper behavior in the presidium of the USSR Chess Federation were all discussed as means of bringing pressure to bear. In the end, it was decided that Ivonin would simply talk to him again, though this proved futile: Spassky’s mind was made up. He could not be brought round even by another call, this time from the KGB.

In discussing the preparations for Fischer, Viktor Baturinskii, the director of the Central Chess Club, instanced Spassky’s refusal to put his name to the Davis letter as an indication of his immaturity. Mikhail Beilin says that it was in Spassky’s nature to delight in outraging others, even at the risk of offending them. This meant saying what nobody else would dare to say. “For example, he was lecturing to a large chess audience in Nizhny Novgorod. He was talking about Estonia as a very nice little country with a very difficult destiny. Such a view didn’t appeal to me: there were people who thought it had an extremely happy destiny. His allowing himself to say such a thing is not very agreeable.” If as a good Soviet you believed that the USSR’s annexation of Estonia was a stroke of good fortune for the country and its people, you might well find Spassky’s indirect censure upsetting.

Perhaps there was even a hint of cruelty when Spassky forced unsafe political opinions on a listener. Nikolai Krogius remembers how “in public he often displayed bravado with his paradoxical declarations: ‘The communists have destroyed nature,’ ‘Keres lives in an occupied country [that is, in Estonia],’ and so on. Of course, if such statements had been made not by a famous chess player but by an ordinary citizen, then harsh punitive measures would have been taken against that citizen—possibly even a prison sentence.”

Obviously, the authorities were fully apprised of Spassky’s idiosyncratic outlook. At least when he was at the top, he did not bother to confine his views to his inner circle—though even there he would have known that someone was noting it all for the KGB. Baturinskii complained of “his thoughtlessness” during public appearances, and cited as typical a speech Spassky made to an audience of chess lovers in the city of Shakhty in the Rostov region on 26 September 1971. The speech had been the subject of an outraged letter from the secretary of the Shakhty City Committee of the CPSU, one Comrade Kazantsev: