David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Then it was Spassky’s turn—the speech for the defense. Like many such speeches, its strategy was to direct material guilt elsewhere while confessing to a human, eminently forgivable weakness. Thus he complained that because they had not been given an organizer, the team’s energies had been diverted into everyday affairs. Pre-Reykjavik, “special work on technical matters” had not been satisfactory—a dig at Geller and Krogius. But the main problem was his being a very weak psychologist, “giving rise to a series of mistakes”—in other words, he admitted to being too trusting.

I knew Fischer as a chess player, but perhaps I idealized him as a man. Bondarevskii’s departure was a strong blow. I found it difficult without him. It is a big minus to be involved in extraneous matters that you are not suited to dealing with. Bondarevskii shielded me from such matters. Our many sleepless nights… because of the mistakes we made were extremely damaging. It seems to me that I should have listened to the advice of my comrades that Viktor Davidovich [Baturinskii] be temporarily removed from the match.

He also owned up to a failure to foresee that someone was required in Reykjavik specifically to handle “the prematch fever” and what he described as “a real war.” He also offered his version of “the culminating moment,” game three, after which, he said, everything turned against him. Through faintheartedness, he had met Fischer halfway, rather than forcing him to play in the hall or withdraw. Thus he had opened the way to Fischer’s “colossal domination” up to game nine. Only from game ten did he begin to control his emotions.

There was no recognition of his own role in setting up the training routine and the other arrangements for Reykjavik. And the rifts with Baturinskii and Bondarevskii were scarcely as he described them.

Little wonder, then, that there is a note of suppressed wrath in Baturinskii’s point-by-point reply. It covered Spassky’s rejection of the grandmasters’ counsel (Yuri Averbakh noted dryly that “when a person does not wish to listen, it is difficult to give him advice”), his passive attitude to the maneuverings of Fischer and Euwe in the run-up to the match, his failure to prepare effectively, and his refusal to accept the full team on offer. It did not escape Baturinskii that although Spassky complained about the absence of a delegation leader in Reykjavik, he had not consulted Ivonin over the move to the closed room. Finally, he protested that he had done everything asked of him to ensure victory for Spassky, and would always do all he could for the common cause of chess and chess players.

As the discussion went on, the question marks over Spassky’s preparation and his inability to take advice were raised again and again—“superficial,” “unsatisfactory.” Mikhail Tal was particularly cutting: “It is not an embarrassment to have lost to a chess player like Fischer, but Spassky’s game was simply shocking.”

Spassky’s politics and personality were also attacked. The president of the Leningrad Chess Federation, A. P. Tupikin, told the meeting that the Leningraders’ love affair with Spassky was at an end, blaming what he called Spassky’s arrogance, his alien views, and his failure to understand the political significance of the match.

A deputy president of the USSR Chess Federation and FIDE vice president, B. I. Rodionov was even more brutally direct. In effect, the world champion had ignored the fact that he was wearing a red shirt and was guilty of damaging the prestige of the state. It was incomprehensible how Spassky had given in to his opponent—to what Rodionov called “the completely groundless demands made by that scum.”

At the end, Ivonin delivered judgment. He was unsparing about Spassky, castigating his attitude both to work and to ideology:

All his requests and wishes were fulfilled. Today we can only regret that these possibilities were not exploited in full and to the end…. Spassky’s words—that the match was a holiday and that there must be an honest fight—can be called idealism. This was not a holiday, but a very fierce struggle. And it is no coincidence that Marshall, Fischer’s lawyer, said that victory for Fischer was a question of national and personal pride. Unfortunately, Comrade Spassky did not make such declarations.

A sense of disillusionment pervaded the meeting. The defeat had been a warning. Like so much else in the USSR, the Soviet chess machine appeared to be rusting away. The first problem was the new champion. Baturinskii thought that “the struggle which we must wage for the world championship will be very difficult. If Fischer made so many demands when he was a challenger, then how will he behave now that he has won the world championship?” So the comrades must work harder and more systematically, and trainers must realize that they were in the service of the state, not independent actors.

Petrosian weighed in on the slothfulness of the elite players: “Our grandmasters have begun to work less.” Ivonin had tough words for the disunity among chess players, putting it down to the long monopoly of the world title. “It seems to me that in the past few years, several people have been attacked by the worm of parasitism in chess and a refusal to undertake a lot of research work.” There were problems of excessive secrecy and internal struggles that weakened the Soviet Union’s external performance.

The Sports Committee itself did not escape censure. In words of foreboding, another deputy president of the USSR Chess Federation, V. I. Boikov, pointed to a decline in the game’s predominance:

Why is it that the committee can build complexes, swimming pools, covered stadiums? What do chess players get? Old cellars. Big cities such as Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, do not have a chess club, and a club is a place where qualified cadres are developed. All the work of the leading masters has been set adrift…. Russia has over 200 sporting schools, of which only seven have a chess department, and those are run by candidate masters instead of grandmasters. The Physical Training and Sport publishing house is only planning to bring out three books this year.

The issues so agonizingly raked over at this meeting were followed by action. Ivonin produced a fourteen-point plan, affirmed in a committee decree. The plan included more chess education, a chess library that would include foreign publications, reform of the USSR championship, and proposals to improve the professional players’ physical training and nutrition.

Nikolai Krogius, who became head of the USSR Chess Organization, says that in the long run the impact of Spassky’s defeat was beneficial: “The authorities sought to assist young chess players and to develop chess in the country as a whole. Many children’s chess schools were opened, the publication of chess literature was increased, the system for staging USSR championships was reorganized, greater attention was paid to the leading young chess players headed by Karpov. It sounds paradoxical, but Fischer’s victory in reality had a markedly positive influence in raising the status of chess in the USSR.”

As for Spassky, he was not allowed to play abroad, he says, for nine months—a bad thing, “as after a defeat you need to play, since you have a lot of energy that needs releasing.” The extra 200 roubles a month he had been granted when preparing his title defense was cut, but he was still comparatively well off on his grandmaster’s stipend.

It could so easily have been worse for him. Early in the cold war, when the Soviet Union was newly taking part in international competitions, the Politburo’s impatience with poor performances led to their moving a General Appolonov from the Interior Ministry to the Sports Committee. Failure abroad brought a telegram from the general to the offender ordering an immediate improvement. Somehow, the athletes then found extra strength. And in 1974, the then interior minister Nikolai Shchelokov, promoted to the rank of general by Brezhnev, visited the Karpov-Korchnoi match (the winner to meet Fischer in the world championship). According to Baturinskii, he asked, “Who went with Spassky to Reykjavik?” On being told, he commented, “If it were up to me, I would put them all in jail.”