A Political History of Chess in the Soviet Union, 1917-1948
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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Storming Fortresses: A Political History Of Chess In The Soviet Union, 1917-1948 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0s71f0cw Author Hudson, Michael Andrew Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ STORMING FORTRESSES: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF CHESS IN THE SOVIET UNION, 1917-1948 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by Michael A. Hudson September 2013 The Dissertation of Michael A. Hudson is approved: ______________________________________ Professor Peter Kenez, chair ______________________________________ Professor Jonathan Beecher ______________________________________ Professor Walter Goldfrank ______________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies i Copyright © by Michael A. Hudson 2013 ii Table of Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments....................................................................................................... vi Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Chess in Pre-revolutionary Russia....................................................... 12 Chapter Two : Karl Marx’s Chess Problem ............................................................... 33 Chapter Three: Lenin’s Game .................................................................................... 48 Chapter Four: Il’in-Zhenevskii and the Origins of Soviet Chess .............................. 69 Chapter Five: The First Soviet Championship........................................................... 96 Chapter Six: The Struggle for the Soul of Soviet Chess: 1920-1924 ...................... 108 Chapter Seven: The Spectacle of 1925 .................................................................... 129 Chapter Eight: Retrenchment and Expansion .......................................................... 164 Chapter Nine: Soviet Chess and the Workers’ Chess International ........................ 185 Chapter Ten: Botvinnik: The New Soviet (Chess)Man ........................................... 212 Chapter Eleven: The Classical Land of Chess ......................................................... 234 Chapter Twelve: The Terror of Chess ..................................................................... 270 Chapter Thirteen: Soviet Chess and the Great Patriotic War .................................. 301 Chapter Fourteen: Storming the Fortress ................................................................. 339 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 380 Appendix .................................................................................................................. 396 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 399 iii Abstract Michael A. Hudson STORMING FORTRESSES: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF CHESS IN THE SOVIET UNION, 1917-1948 From the end of the Second World War through the demise of USSR, Soviet chess players dominated world chess. Not only did they control the world champion title after 1948 (except for the Fischer interlude), they also monopolized all other areas of international chess competition. When the Soviets captured the world title in 1948, this was the culmination of a long, carefully cultivated program to foster a chess community in the Soviet Union. The rationale for this initiative, which engaged the attention of the highest levels of the Soviet state, had deep ideological roots. This dissertation explores the social/political history of chess in the Soviet Union, particularly its utility to Party and State. The story of Soviet chess begins in the Civil War, when chess was enlisted as a training tool for military recruits. After the Bolshevik victory, a very similar rationale was used to promote chess as an instrument for training Party cadre in the burgeoning Communist Party. The same attributes desired in soldiers were also desired in Party activists, and chess was seen as a tool for nurturing these attributes. In the early 1920s, the state-sponsored chess program was greatly enlarged, and at the same time its ideological rationale shifted. Faced with the reality of building socialism in a backward country, the Party believed that chess could be of great utility in raising the cultural level of the laboring masses. A culturally developed iv proletariat was one of several prerequisites for socialism that the Soviet Union lacked. Chess became closely tied to the State labor organizations, although officially attached to the government’s sport and physical education bureaucracy. Whether chess refashioned Soviet society is debatable, but official encouragement refashioned chess, which became a significant cultural component in the lives of Soviet citizens. Chess achieved a stature in Soviet society that was entirely without precedent. One outcome of the popularity and status of chess was, by the mid-1930s, the cultivation of a generation of world caliber players. Soviet ability to stand toe-to-toe with the world’s best exemplified by the Stalinist slogan, “catch up and overtake.” Soviet chess now reinvented itself as a propaganda device for touting the superiority of Soviet culture. The world championship was conquered in 1948, and Soviet domination of world chess was a very important weapon in the cultural front of the Cold War. Although this concept of three stages–martial emphasis, chess for the workers, and Cold War chess–is a convenient way to divide up the formative period of Soviet chess, the shifting emphases do not supplant their predecessors. Chess continued to be an important part of military culture, while the wide dissemination of chess in Soviet society remained a priority of the Soviet chess organization, even as the top Soviet players dominated international chess. All of these aspects of Soviet chess have outlived the Soviet state, and chess can be seen both as a positive achievement by the Soviet state and as a positive legacy of Soviet rule. v Acknowledgements I am incredibly grateful to the History Department–faculty and staff–for its boundless, collective patience with me in this enterprise. In particular, I want to thank Professor Jonathan Beecher for his persistent support. I also want to thank my advisor, Professor Peter Kenez, who made himself available whenever I requested his assistance. And thank you, Professor Wally Goldfrank, who stepped in on short notice to read and comment so helpfully. The staff at the White Collection at the Cleveland Public Library was always helpful, courteous and kind. The director of the St. Petersburg Chess Club, who remembered me from the “old days,” helped me obtain access to private collections in Petersburg, and I am in his debt. Friend of my youth, Sasha K., now an official at the Lenin Library, allowed me to access parts of the collection closed to the public at that time. On a personal note, I want to thank my wife, Natnicha, and our son, Fluke, who granted me the incredible gift of a year to write this paper. I will make it up to you. I am also very grateful to my sister, Chris, for her herculean efforts in receiving, storing, repacking and shipping my research library. Guess what, Chris, I’m send it some of it back to you! Finally, I dedicate this work to my late mother, Theola Kennicott, a life-long educator who played an enormous role in shaping my intellectual habits. She instilled in me the habit of finishing my work, and that is probably the principal reason I couldn’t rest comfortably until this work was finished. vi Introduction The title of this work, “Storming Fortresses,” comes from a claim made in 1927 by Soviet economist, Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilin (1877-1974), who wrote: “Our task is not to study economics, but to change it. We are bound by no laws. There are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm.” 1 Strumilin was a powerful influence on Stalin, who used very similar phrases in his speeches and writing.2 In each case, the meaning was the same: Bolsheviks could disregard objective material realities and reach their objectives by the application of human will. Strumilin played a leading role in the Soviet Union’s planned economy in the 1920s. Lenin appointed him to Gosplan, the central economic planning committee, in 1921, and he would later become a leading figure in the development of the first five- year plan. 3 Strumilin was a founder of the “teleological” school of planned economics, maintaining that economic planning should be guided by the goals of the state and should not by limited by the possibilities seemingly dictated by material reality. In other words, production goals should serve as the starting point in economic planning. Goals, he believed, should be based on the desired political, economic and social 1. S. Strumilin, “Industrializantsiia SSSR” [Industrialization of the USSR], Planovoe khoziaistvo [Planned Economy] 7 (1927), quoted in Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 349. 2. Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience