David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

B. Spassky spoke without prompting about his financial position. He noted that his salary was 300 roubles, which he received in payment for his post as trainer in the Lokomotiv club, without carrying out any training duties.

Comrade Spassky stressed that insufficient attention is paid to chess players in the Soviet Union, and their labors were poorly compensated. Explaining the reasons for his nonparticipation in the USSR championship, he cited the small sum awarded for the first prize (250 roubles). B. Spassky noted in his speech that the biggest prize he had received abroad was the sum of $5,000, while in his native land it was only 2,000 roubles.

Spassky’s salary had been raised from 250 roubles a month to 300 on his becoming world champion. It may not have seemed much to Spassky, but Mikhail Beilin, who signed the necessary document authorizing this increase, recalls the envy Spassky’s relative wealth provoked among colleagues: “I remember when the young Spassky received $5,000 in Santa Monica, a lot of people suffered over this as though experiencing a personal loss.” To put Spassky’s earnings in context, in the late 1960s (after the currency reform) the average monthly wage for a skilled or white-collar worker was 122 roubles.

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, The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, defined this sin as “A worldview [based on] sociopolitical ‘neutrality’ and [refraining] from Party-based conclusions…. In reality it… masks a social and class-based subjectivism… objectivism is orientated toward serving, albeit not openly, the dominant conservative or reactionary force of the social ‘order of things.’” In other words, Spassky was demonstrating an incorrect political consciousness.

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 yurodivyi (one of “God’s folk”), was a wandering monklike figure, venerated for his or her self-imposed suffering in the cause of humility and intense religiosity. The Holy Fool was credited with mystical powers. But most relevant here, like the king’s jester, the Holy Fool also enjoyed a license to poke fun at rulers, expose evils, and tell unpalatable truths. And when some of his contemporaries try to explain Spassky, they express a tolerance of his “eccentricities and unorthodox opinions” in a tone of voice that might be used of such a figure.

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, vol’nodumets. Spassky the frivolous, Spassky the un-Soviet man. Even Spassky the Holy Fool.

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.