David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

At that reception, Fischer chatted amiably with officials from the Soviet embassy, and he and Spassky tentatively agreed to go swimming the following day. Spassky later rang to cancel: He was leaving for home early the next morning and he had to pack and so forth. Fischer was annoyed and told Palsson he would not bid good-bye to his opponent. Palsson recounts how he became angry in turn and told Fischer that he should at least write a farewell letter. The Life photographer Harry Benson had given Fischer a cheap camera. As Fischer did not want it, the Icelander suggested he present it to Spassky. Fischer replied that it was too cheap. “‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not the point, it’s a token.’ So I took it to the Saga to hand it over, and Spassky was so emotional. I’ve never seen a man so pleased. It was one of the best things I did during the match.”

In 2000, looking back at his time as world champion, Spassky remarked to the Irish Times, “I was a king in Russia.” Yet his period of office had been so uneasy that we can imagine his mixed feelings on watching Fischer, whom he had so admired, take his place. David Spanier of The Times sensed “that in some deep and hidden part of himself, he wanted Fischer to win.”

After the debacle of the third game, Spassky had fought hard. When it was all over, he commented that Fischer had started the match as a sprint but instead it had become a marathon; he had expected the American to crack at any time. He met Fischer only once after the closing ceremony, at the presidential reception, and asked the new champion whether they could have a rematch.

“Maybe,” replied Fischer.

“When?”

“Maybe in a year—if the money side is okay.”

The former champion reflected on the fate that awaited his successor: “It will be a hard time for him. Now he feels like a god. He thinks all problems are over—he will have many friends, people will love him, history will obey him. But it is not so. In these high places it is very cold, very lonely. Soon depression will set in. I like him, and I am afraid what will happen to him now.” These somber words were also about himself.

By the end, Spassky was far from the figure of radiant well-being who had arrived in Iceland so full of confident anticipation. Larisa Spasskaia remembers also being affected: the healthy woman who went to Reykjavik returned with stomach pains and was not herself for six months. Boris, she recounts, was in a bad way, drinking more than usual and needing psychotherapy to deal with the trauma of the contest.

Trauma was to be expected. “I do not know which is worse, before the match or after,” Spassky said. “In a long match, a player goes very deep into himself, like a diver. Then he comes up very fast. Every time, whether I win or if I lose, I am so depressed I want to die. I cannot get back in touch with other people. I want the other chess player. I miss him. Only after a year will the pain go away. A year.”

There were material compensations. Spassky had his share of the prize money, $93,750. The USSR chess authorities had made no provision for dealing with such staggering winnings, and Spassky simply kept the money for himself; the authorities never asked for it. In the Soviet Union, it made him at least the equivalent of a millionaire in the West. Tigran Petrosian remarked, “Normally you could buy a car with your winnings, but when you could purchase the whole car park, that was something else.” (In future, Soviet participants in world championship matches would be obliged to hand over half their bounty.) He could also parade around in a new Range Rover four-wheel-drive car, sold to him at cost by his dealer friend, Sigfus Sigfusson, who had arranged for the latest model, in white, well equipped with spares, to be sent to Reykjavik and shipped on to Leningrad. Larisa’s prize possession was a new Icelandic winter coat. (The car was sold after two years of hard labor on Soviet roads; the winter coat lasted much longer.)

After leaving Reykjavik on 7 September, Spassky and his wife stayed in Copenhagen for a few days before returning to Moscow to face the music. Was he not the Soviet who had surrendered the crown to an American, and with it Soviet hegemony? Would he not be seen as having failed to live up to the spirit of the great motherland? Perhaps visions of Taimanov’s reception after his defeat by Fischer haunted his dreams.

In fact, the message had already gone out from Central Committee secretary Piotr Demichev that Spassky was to be received in a civilized manner. At Sheremet’evo Airport, the welcome party included a representative of the Sports Committee, a journalist, and some close friends. Nikolai Krogius remembers that “on the whole, Spassky’s defeat was received calmly in Moscow. It was a pleasant surprise that the sporting leadership and the press did not seek to punish him and his team.”

Nevertheless, it was hardly the hero’s reception he would have expected had he been victorious. The Associated Press described it as “anti-VIP” treatment. He had to stand in the long line for passport control, queue up for his bags, fill out the customs forms. A battered gray-and-blue bus awaited them rather than an official Chaika limousine. Larisa was observed chewing gum: a “dirty habit” she had learned “over there,” someone remarked. “Over there” meant outside the USSR. His bus stopped at all the traffic lights: triumphant, he might have sailed through as if he were Brezhnev.

And knives were out over his defeat. Mikhail Botvinnik commented later that Spassky lost because he overrated himself. The former world champion Vasili Smyslov chastised Spassky. In a creative sense, he said, Spassky went to the match completely empty. And he added that Fischer and Spassky both took home what they thought about: Fischer the crown and money and Spassky only money. Geller gave his views privately to Ivonin: that Spassky loved himself, that this defeat had taught him a big lesson, that he had underestimated the need for preparation and had not played enough, that he was still an idealist who “melted again” when he last talked to Fischer. Spassky was “very soft with his enemies and very ferocious with those trying to help him.”

These were just the precursors to the official postmortem held on 27 December 1972 at the Sports Committee and chaired by Viktor Ivonin. Apart from Spassky, Geller, and Krogius, the top brass of Soviet chess was represented in the fifteen men gathered around the table. They included five grandmasters, two of them former world champions, as well as the senior officers of the USSR Chess Federation. Their deliberations are recorded in near verbatim minutes.

The purpose of the meeting was to look ahead, Ivonin declared from the chair: “We must draw up plans for returning the championship to our Soviet family.” But in opening the discussion as the official team leader in Reykjavik, Geller wasted no time in going for Spassky, laying on him all the blame for the lost title. He cited Spassky’s decision “taken on his own” to play in the closed room, constant and incomprehensible departures from agreed tactics, and unbelievable blunders. The most damning accusation related to a psychological failure:

We were unable to change Spassky’s mind about Fischer’s personal qualities. Spassky believed that Fischer would play honestly. Perhaps Spassky’s views on bourgeois sport were important to his agreement to play in a closed room. He placed a naive trust in the honesty of this sport.

Geller had set the tone, although Krogius, in a much briefer intervention, couched his opinion more positively: Spassky’s defeat was due to his treating people better than they deserved. He related to Fischer as to a comrade and an unhappy genius, but not a cunning enemy.