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The Lubyanka Gambit
First published in Russian in 2004 and now available in English for the first time, The Lubyanka Gambit is a classic work investigating the darkest side of chess history in the Soviet Union. It is the culmination of nearly two decades of research by Correspondence Chess Grandmaster, historian and human rights campaigner Sergei Grodzensky, whose own father was sent to the Gulag in Stalin's times. It describes the careers and life stories, based on archival documents and witness testimony, of Soviet chess composers, players and famous amateurs who were repressed by the Soviet authorities, ending up either executed or sent to the Gulag. Featured names include Lazar Zalkind, Arvid Kubbel, Vladim...
Soviet Chess 1917-1991
This large and magnificent work of art is both an interpretive history of Soviet chess from the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 and a record of the most interesting games played. The text traces the phenomenal growth of chess from the Revolutionary days to the devastations of World War II, and then from the Golden Age of Soviet-dominated chess in the 1950s to the challenge of Bobby Fischer and the quest to find his Soviet match. Included are 249 games, each with a diagram; most are annotated and many have never before been published outside the Soviet Union. The text is augmented by photographs and includes 63 tournament and match scoretables. Also included are a bibliography, an appendix of records achieved in Soviet national championships, two indexes of openings, and an index of players and opponents.
White King and Red Queen
White King and Red Queen is the story of chess, and how it was inexorably connected to the rise and fall of Soviet Communism. Daniel Johnson's landmark book begins with the early days of revolutionary activity in central Europe, when the chessboard was the province of exiled intellectuals and games were confined to coffee houses. When the Bolsheviks moved to the Kremlin after the 1917 revolution, they took chess with them. Although Lenin himself was a keen player, it was Nikolai Krylenko, creator of the Red Army, who persuaded the Kremlin to adopt chess as a symbol of Soviet power. From then on, competitors were obliged to play for the state, or risk imprisonment and exile.
The 100 Best Chess Games of the 20th Century, Ranked
How does one determine the "best" chess games? What one may see as brilliant, another may see as simply necessary. Like some art lovers, chess fans claim that they know a good game when they see it, and that they know better from good. But "best"? How is this articulated? This book, itself a work of art, is brought together by the use of five criteria: the overall aesthetics (clever and relentless are insufficient qualities); the originality (e.g., not yet another white knight sacrifice in a Sicilian); the level of opposition (the loser played very well); the soundness (i.e., are the moves refutable with perfect play?), accuracy (few of the moves are second-best), and difficulty (the winner ...
Tal, Petrosian, Spassky and Korchnoi
This book describes the intense rivalry--and collaboration--of the four players who created the golden era when USSR chess players dominated the world. More than 200 annotated games are included, along with personal details--many for the first time in English. Mikhail Tal, the roguish, doomed Latvian who changed the way chess players think about attack and sacrifice; Tigran Petrosian, the brilliant, henpecked Armenian whose wife drove him to become the world's best player; Boris Spassky, the prodigy who survived near-starvation and later bouts of melancholia to succeed Petrosian--but is best remembered for losing to Bobby Fischer; and "Evil" Viktor Korchnoi, whose mixture of genius and jealousy helped him eventually surpass his three rivals (but fate denied him the title they achieved: world champion).
Smyslov, Bronstein, Geller, Taimanov and Averbakh
A crucial decision spared chess Grandmaster David Bronstein almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis--one fateful move cost him the world championship. Russian champion Mark Taimanov was a touted as a hero of the Soviet state until his loss to Bobby Fischer all but ruined his life. Yefim Geller's dream of becoming world champion was crushed by a bad move against Fischer, his hated rival. Yuri Averbakh had no explanation how he became the world's oldest grandmaster, other than the quixotic nature of fate. Vasily Smyslov, the only one of the five to become world champion, would reign for just one year--fortune, he said, gave him pneumonia at the worst possible time. This book explores how fate played a capricious role in the lives of five of the greatest players in chess history.
Red Letters
This is an important work for chess history and also will be of great practical interest as numerous previously unknown or forgotten master chess games are made available in the West for the first time. The Correspondence Chess Championships of the Soviet Union were a series of high-level postal chess events held continuously from 1947 onwards and involving many leading masters and grandmasters of chess from the USSR. Many players who then or later were famous as professional grandmasters or opening theoreticians competed in these events at one time or another. On the break-up of the USSR in the 1990s, the preliminaries of the last two championships had begun and these were completed by the Russian federation with players from other nations of the former USSR. The final of the last championship was due to end in December 2001, about 10 years after the break-up of the Soviet Union; the quarter-final stages had just begun ten years earlier. Sergey Grodzensky profiles the champions and other leading personalities and presents the best games from the events. The games were collected by Tim Harding with assistance from his co-author and from German journalist and correspondence chess gr
Chess Life
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Wormwood Forest
When a titanic explosion ripped through the Number Four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in 1986, spewing flames and chunks of burning, radioactive material into the atmosphere, one of our worst nightmares came true. As the news gradually seeped out of the USSR and the extent of the disaster was realized, it became clear how horribly wrong things had gone. Dozens died - two from the explosion and many more from radiation illness during the following months - while scores of additional victims came down with acute radiation sickness. Hundreds of thousands were evacuated from the most contaminated areas. The prognosis for Chernobyl and its environs - succinctly dubbed the Zone of Alienat...
Sergei Korolev
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