David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

No matter how wounding the postmortem, Spassky’s career at the top was far from over. He had returned from his defeat with his basic will to compete undiminished, though he told Ivonin that he wanted to consider his position now that he was an ordinary grandmaster. He had decided not to enter the USSR championship, but he intended to play in a big tournament the next year. And indeed, the next year he recaptured the Soviet title. In 1974, in the Candidates round, he beat American grandmaster Robert Byrne without losing a single game, though he failed to reach the Candidates final for the chance to settle scores with Fischer.

He was still motivated in part by a desire to surprise and tease. On one occasion, this threatened to cost him his passport when an application to go abroad took him in front of the Foreign Travel Commission of Party worthies. Assessing his political reliability, they asked about the situation in Angola. At the time, Portuguese forces were battling with Marxist rebels. Soviet newspapers gave the war many column inches, celebrating the victory of the people over the “colonizers.” Perhaps to shock, Spassky replied that he did not have the time to follow developments in Angola. The commission was duly shocked and refused him a passport. The Sports Committee had to step in to reverse the decision.

After his loss of the world title, professional crisis and divorce had coincided again, and in September 1975, Spassky married for the third time. He met Marina Shcherbacheva—a French citizen—at the apartment of a French diplomat; she worked in the commercial section of the French embassy in Moscow. Her grandfather was General Shcherbachev, who had commanded the Tsar’s armies on the Romanian front in 1916–1917. Later, the general emigrated to France.

Spassky might have been a king in Russia (or an ex-king), but like every other Soviet citizen who wanted to marry a Westerner and live abroad, he faced obstruction from the authorities. Marina came under pressure to leave the country but refused. After Spassky moved into her Moscow apartment, the two of them were put under surveillance, and in August 1975, Spassky’s own apartment was mysteriously robbed and all his personal possessions disappeared (including the camera Fischer had given him). From around this time, his Western visitors were liable to be searched on leaving the country.

The story has a happy ending. A Franco-Soviet summit was scheduled, and the Soviets wanted to avoid bad publicity. Spassky also profited from Brezhnev’s signing of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement: its sections on human rights encouraged the free movement of peoples and contained provisions on facilitating binational marriages. The chess establishment saw that the exchampion was determined to go, but they wanted to keep their ties to him; he certainly did not want a clean break from them. So with some help from Ivonin, says the former deputy minister, and some publicity in the Western press, Spassky and the authorities came to an arrangement. He left the Soviet Union with Marina in September 1976, moving to Paris on a visitor’s visa, regularly renewed, while he kept his Soviet passport. Among his peers in Moscow, Spassky’s departure reinforced the view that he saw himself as set apart from Soviet society. His son, Vasili, felt it prudent to change his surname to his mother’s maiden name, Soloviev, to safeguard his application to become a student of journalism.

The year 1977 saw Spassky again in the Candidates round. Back in Reykjavik, to the delight of the Icelanders, he beat the Czechoslovak grandmaster Vlastimil Hort, and he followed this up with a win over the Hungarian grandmaster Lajos Portisch in Switzerland. In a profound irony, he then represented the Soviet Union against the despised Viktor Korchnoi, who had defected from the USSR in 1976 by walking into a police station in Amsterdam to claim political asylum. From his self-exile, Spassky accepted the Sports Committee’s offer of full support. At his request, the committee sent Bondarevskii to join him in Belgrade, and Ivonin even went to give moral support. Spassky lost, 10.5 to 7.5. But in spite of the result, his waging a form of psychological war showed that he might have learned something from Fischer.

Korchnoi was already under strain: he was subjected to a sustained campaign of vitriol in the Soviet press, while Soviet players boycotted tournaments in which he appeared. His family was still in the Soviet Union. After game nine, and 6.5 to 2.5 down, Spassky appeared on the stage only to make his move, darting back behind the scenes. Korchnoi complained that it was like playing a ghost.

Spassky also put on a silver sun visor, swinging it as he came and went. In this poisonous atmosphere, with notes of protest and recrimination going back and forth, Spassky addressed an open letter to “chess players,” defending his actions and claiming anarchy had broken out. The match had passed into a phase in which, “expressed by the words of Fedor Dostoyevsky, ‘Everything is allowed.’” Spassky had refused to put his name to a letter condemning Korchnoi’s defection, but after the match he felt it right to attack him in terms of which Pavlov would have approved. Korchnoi “had lost his moral principles, and thus his future both morally and in chess is insignificant.”

Spassky’s defeat did not signal the end of his involvement in world-class chess. He again played in the Candidates round in 1980; this time Portisch had his revenge, beating Spassky on a tie break. Spassky’s last appearance in the world championship cycle was in 1985, and he continued to participate in the Olympiads and the World Cup until 1989.

Settled in France, Spassky seems to have had the best of all his worlds, a happy marriage, as much competitive chess as he desires, and freedom in his daily life from the Soviet system.

Today, he lives among other Russian émigrés in the tranquil eighteenth-century town of Meudon, on the edge of the French capital and famous as the home of the sculptor Rodin. Often asked to serve as an “ambassador” for chess, he travels extensively in Russia as well as other parts of the world. In his apartment, the chessboard is set up, but the tennis racket too is close to hand.

He bears no malice toward Fischer, telling the Irish Times in 2000, “Ever since my youth at about twenty-two, twenty-three years of age, I had a good impression of Bobby. He was always very honest and said exactly what he thought.”

After becoming champion, Fischer stayed put in Iceland for another two weeks, whiling away the days with Palsson, swimming, bowling, and, of course, absorbed in his chessboard. On 15 September, he exchanged the calm of Iceland for the commotion of New York. The following week, there was a lavish reception at City Hall hosted by Republican mayor John Lindsay, who saluted Fischer as “the Grandest Master of them all,” while Sebastian Leone, the president of the borough of Brooklyn, hailed his fellow resident as the world champion of “a truly Brooklyn sport—the sport of intellectuals.” A large poster read WELCOME, BOBBY FISCHER, WORLD CHESS CHAMPION. Displayed among the official plaudits was evidence of local government frugality—the sign’s reverse side greeted earlier conquering heroes, the crew of Apollo 16, who had returned to earth on 27 April, six days after landing on the moon.

The officials had shared a question with chess organizers worldwide: Would Fischer show up at the proceedings at all? According to an anonymous aide quoted in the press, when Fischer had been offered the key to the city he responded, “I live here, what do I need a key for?” In the event, the celebrations found him in an unusually relaxed state of mind. So eager was he to sign autographs that he mistook several hovering journalists for groupies, grabbing their pens. And when he gave his speech, he even made a joke: “I want to deny a vicious rumor that’s been going around—I think it was started by Moscow. It’s not true that Henry Kissinger phoned me during the night to tell me the moves.” Comfortingly for those who relied on Fischer for dinner party horror stories, some things remained constant. He banned cameras from the reception, and only after some discussion was the press allowed in.