David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Until this match, Mark Taimanov had lived an enviable double life, conducting his chess in tandem with a career as a highly respected classical pianist. He performed duets with his wife, Liubov Bruk; their work together has earned them a place in the record collection Great Pianists of the Twentieth Century. Their pianist son, Igor, would join them on the concert platform. Taimanov made occasional forays into journalism and led an otherwise normal existence. To the Soviets he appeared, in many ways, to be a model citizen.

Then forty-four years old, and so a relative veteran, Taimanov had come across Fischer several times in tournaments over the years. Like many others, he was astonished by Fischer’s single-minded devotion: “I swear that I never saw him without a chess set.” Despite Fischer’s evident promise from a young age, Taimanov had been one of the few to be skeptical that he would achieve the breakthrough to the superleague. For all the American’s maturity at the chessboard, Taimanov thought the adolescent Fischer suffered from a weakness. He was “too deeply convinced that he is a genius. Self-confidence that borders on a loss of impartiality in assessing one’s potentialities is a poor ally in a difficult contest.”

If overconfidence was a failing, it was not one Fischer ever attempted to rectify. He saw himself as the firm favorite in the Taimanov match. He was not alone; the noncommunist press was of the same mind. Only Taimanov insisted he could win, dismissing Fischer as a mere computer. Even the Soviet Communist Party daily Pravda must have been pessimistic, failing to print this self-assured forecast.

Taimanov prepared hard, helped by former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, who handed over his enormous Fischer file in its entirety. This had been compiled a year earlier, in 1970, as negotiations dragged on for a Botvinnik vs. Fischer match supposed to take place in the Dutch town of Leiden. The plans had been aborted after Fischer insisted the victor would have to win six games, draws not to count. For the organizers, this had major financial implications since it meant that, in theory, the match could go on forever. It was not a risk they were willing to take.

Botvinnik’s analysis of Fischer’s play was full of fascinating, detailed insights. Through a painstaking deconstruction of all of Fischer’s published games, he claimed to discern certain themes and patterns that Fischer consciously or unconsciously adopted. The Russian drew a number of conclusions—for example, that Fischer had a penchant for long moves with his queen, and that in the endgame he preferred a knight to a bishop. Also in the endgame, observed Botvinnik, his king was often dispatched on deep forays across the board. Taimanov was grateful but felt that ultimately “it didn’t help me—in the Russian saying, this straw was not for the right horse.”

In addition to the file, Taimanov was backed by the thorough organization of the Soviet chess machine. He was supplied with three grandmasters: Aleksandr Kotov led the team, supported by the highly thought of, but young and relatively inexperienced, Yuri Balashov, and by Yevgeni Vasiukov, an old sparring partner. It was not Taimanov’s ideal squad. “I wanted Tal. He was a friend of mine, and in case of defeat I would rather have had Misha with me.” But Botvinnik thought he was too bohemian and that his fondness for drink might render him incapable of the long hours of sober analysis required of a second. Puritan sports apparatchiks in the Central Committee also disapproved of Tal’s three divorces.

By contrast, in terms of the actual chess, Fischer was without assistance. He had hoped to bring grandmaster Larry Evans along as his second, but Evans refused because of Fischer’s twin demands that he abstain from journalism and leave his wife at home. Colonel Ed Edmondson, however, was there to help with the arrangements and with resolving any disputes.

The game started several days late, this time because of an objection by Fischer’s opponent. To Taimanov’s annoyance, the organizers had attempted to preempt a Fischer tantrum about the spectators by setting the board in a cramped room at the back of the campus library. Taimanov, used to playing the piano in front of a large and appreciative concert audience, said it was too stuffy. After some haggling, they compromised on the student cinema, which seated 200. Victory would go to the player who racked up five-and-a-half points; there would be a maximum of ten games.

Fischer won an epic first game in eighty-nine moves. He won the second and the third games. Taimanov blundered badly in the second. After a postponement, taken on Taimanov’s request on health grounds (he was diagnosed with high blood pressure), Fischer won the fourth game, then the fifth, again after a shocking Taimanov howler. And then Fischer won the sixth. It is difficult to portray to non—chess players the magnitude of such a shutout. A typical result between well-matched players might be, say, six wins to four, with nine draws. Fischer had just beaten a world-class grandmaster six games to none, with no draws. The British chess player P. H. Clarke wrote that “this performance by Fischer may be the best, in statistical terms anyway, ever recorded in a single competition.”

Taimanov’s defeat turned his hitherto settled life inside out. This pillar of the Soviet chess establishment suffered the wrath of a system that felt betrayed and disgraced—even scared—by the scale of his rout. In his account of this episode, I Was Fischer’s Victim, Taimanov writes about his “civic execution.” “If on the eve of the match I was officially and popularly reputed to be ‘an exemplary citizen’… I suddenly fell into the flames of ruthlessly destructive criticism by the authorities at all levels.”

His “civic execution” began on 5 June 1970, on his return from Vancouver when he was passing through Soviet customs at Moscow’s Sheremet’evo Airport. He had done this dozens of times before, always without incident. Now he found himself thoroughly searched, on the orders of the senior customs official on shift, named in the report of the incident as Comrade Dmitriev. Taimanov’s suitcase had been delayed, but in his hand baggage the officials discovered a copy of The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They also found a large sum in dollars, Taimanov’s prize plus unused subsistence money. Taimanov then told Comrade Dmitriev that in his suitcase was a letter containing 1,100 Dutch guilders that he had failed to declare on entry. Taimanov had been asked by Max Euwe to take this letter to grandmaster Salo Flohr—the money was payment for articles Flohr had published in Dutch periodicals. “Since I was asked by the president of FIDE, a person who enjoys respect in our country,” Taimanov would explain, “I did not consider it appropriate to refuse him.” To a suspicious mind, it looks as if the customs officers knew in advance what they would hit upon.

Taimanov was in effect put on trial by the Sports Committee—hauled before them for these two customs offenses, bringing in both undeclared currency and a book that the minister Sergei Pavlov told him was too repulsive even to pick up. “By the expression on their faces,” Taimanov wrote, “I might have robbed the Bank of Canada and smuggled millions of dollars into the country.”

Taimanov’s importing of a foreign edition of Solzhenitsyn’s novel was potentially a serious offense. In 1969, the author had been expelled from the Writers Union for “conduct anti-social in nature and fundamentally at variance with the principles and tasks formulated in the charter of the Writers Union,” and could not be published in the Soviet Union—his last work was published there in 1966. He had opposed the publication of his work abroad but his books were still accused of “being used by Western reactionary circles for anti-Soviet aims.”