Author: Chuck Grau

Collectors of Soviet chess sets are familiar with the pieces that have come to have been known as “Baku” chessmen so-named by Western collectors because the photographic record establishes that they were used in the 1961 Soviet Championship held in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR. The name raised eyebrows among collectors in the former SSRs, who typically refer to otherwise unnamed sets by where they were produced, because they understood the pieces to have been manufactured in the Leningrad region.

The design is well-liked among collectors. Noted American collector Mike Ladzinski names it his favorite Soviet design: “These pieces exude a wonderful board presence. I love the unique Bishops, those whimsical Knights, the wide base Pawns with big ball heads, and the stocky Rooks along with the wonderful Kings and Queens with BFII elements.” The kings range in size around 110 mm and appear in a variety of finishes. Here is a set from Ron Harrison’s collection with blond White pieces like those shown in the Tal photo above.

A red-orange specimen resides in my collection. It came with a board stamped Red Combine bearing a hand-written gift inscription “In memory of Yuri, from relatives,” and “1951” inside the box. While I don’t think that Red Combine manufactured the pieces, I do think the board is contemporaneous to the pieces, and is evidence of their dating.

Here are two other specimens from my collection.

The pieces exude modernist design influences, combining them with a twist of Ancient Rus. The base and stems have been simplified into a single conical structure, which after a tapering ascent flairs out to form pedestals upon which the piece signifiers rest. The royals’ piece signifiers are attached to the pedestals by a double collar connector, reminiscent of basic Staunton design. The sweeping, curved tower walls of the rooks rhyme with the base and stem structures of the royals, clerics, and pawns. The knights are simply carved and tubular, bearing a striking resemblance to an early 15th century horse unearthed in an archaeological dig of ancient Novgorod, which I like to describe as “Novgorod Knight.”

Inasmuch as the dig occurred after the Baku first appeared, I cannot claim that they were directly copied. The connection may exist in the recesses of the collective unconscious of Russian art, a topic for another day.

The three sets that I have reweighted all came with cavities stuffed with a combination of glue and sawdust that reeked when drilled.

While variations in piece heights, base widths and structure, finishes, and snout sizes are observable, I don’t find them significant or systematic enough to merit any sub-genuses of the design, with one exception. Some sets contain faceted knight bereft of the simple mane carvings found on the tubular knights. Here is an example.

While it seems clear that the faceted knights are a simplification of the main design inasmuch as they are easier and quicker to make, I don’t find that there is direct evidence at this time sufficient to say whether the faceted design or the tubular one came first. But I do find some compelling circumstantial morphological evidence probative of the issue. Consider this set, commonly known to collectors as the BFII Penguin Knight set owing to the shape of the knight. It appears in the photographic record right about 1940.

The unitary conical base-stem-pedestal configuration of the Penguin Knight set is virtually identical to that of the Baku sets. The knight shares the same Novgorodian form. Even the facial carvings appear similar. The royals’ piece signifiers are very close in shape to those of the Bakus. The Penguin Knight’s bishop has an altogether miter, and is attached by a double-collar connector that has disappeared in the Bakus even as it remained in the Baku royals. The Penguin Knight’s rook is a typical, straight-walled BFII rook characteristic of BFII sets from the 1930s and later, whereas the Baku rook’s walls are curved to repeat the general shapes of the royals, clerics, and pawns. I infer from this that the Baku design derived from the Penguin Knight BFII some time after 1940. Further research may shed some light on this morphological relationship.

Already St. Petersburg collector and researcher Sergey Kovalenko has tied the Baku design to the early- to mid- 1950s. Here are two photos Sergey dissects.

Writes Sergey:

New label. “White Baku” chessmen with the “native” board. By “native” I mean same period board. Both artels (“Древпром” and “Лужский мебельщик”) from Leningrad region. According to accounting documents located in the archives of the Leningrad region, the “Drevprom” artel produced two types of chess and many other wood products, with the exception of chess boards. The “Luzhskiy Mebel’shik” artel produced a lot of wooden furniture, as well as chess boards, but did not produce chess. It is worth noting that the situation could change over time. The documents viewed in the archive relate to the period 1953-1956.

Russian Chess Sets (Tsarist, Soviet and Modern), 14 November 2022.

Sergey’s research is supported by the emergence of at least one Baku specimen in an original cardboard box from Artel Drevprom. Graphic images of the Baku pieces appear on the box’s cover.

Artel Drevprom’s Baku set is a much-loved design with ties to Old Rus, the renaissance of chess set design in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, and the dominant chess played at the highest levels of Soviet competition.

Another example of a Vsekokhudozhnik Upright recently sold on EBay.UK, collector Vikhram Ravi reports. The specimen was of the rarer 3.75” king variety, and was complete with its original box, Artel stamps, and a retail label. Here are the photos posted by the seller, bovkey109.

The Vsekokhudozhnik stamp, Chess No. 4, likely denoting the size of the set. The significance of this artel is discussed here.

According to St. Petersburg collector and researcher Sergey Kovalenko, the colorful label affixed to the inside of the box is from Дом ленинградской кооперации” (The House of Leningrad Cooperation), the largest department store in Leningrad from 1927 to 1935.

The pieces and finials are nicely turned and shaped. The finish is worn.

Off-center and missing finials are not uncommon in vintage Soviet sets.

The woven “felts” appear to be in very good condition.

Many thanks to Vik and Sergey for their contributions to our growing understanding of Soviet chess sets.

If you follow this website or the Facebook group Shakhmatnyye Kollektsionary, you know that our knowledge of Soviet chess sets remains far from complete, even though it is growing. One thing we have learned, helped by Sergey Kovalenko’s research into Soviet archives, is that chess pieces (shakhmaty) and chess boards (shakhmatnyye doski) were seldom produced or sold as a unit, at least prior to the Great Patriotic War. Rather, they typically were produced, marketed, and sold as separate components, with the pieces housed in cardboard boxes. The evidence for this and its implications for dating and identifying pieces’ manufacturers will be explored in a future article. Few of these cardboard boxes have survived to the present, making every discovery of one previously unknown significant.

Mykhailo Kovalenko (no relation to Sergey) recently found a set of so-called “Soviet Upright” or “Botvinnnik-Flohr I” pieces housed in an original cardboard box. His discovery has allowed us to identify who likely made the pieces, and to help us situate them in the historical context of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Here are specimens of the type of pieces I am referring to:

We already have explored this design and the inaccuracy of the “BFI” name in our article on the pieces of the 1933 Botvinnik-Flohr match, and won’t repeat the discussion here. Quite a few specimens of these pieces have survived, from which we can reasonably infer that quite a few of them were produced. Indeed, evidence of their use in the second half of the 1930s can be found in the photographic record.

Here are the pieces and the cardboard box discovered by Mykhailo.

The bottom line of the stamp identifies the contents of the box as Chess Pieces No. 4, likely meaning that they were appropriate for a size 4 board with 40 mm. squares. The middle line gives a Moscow address. The bottom line of the label provides the name of the entity that manufactured the pieces: Vsekokhudozhnik, which translates to All-Russian Cooperative Association ‘Artist.’ Wikipedia offers the following photo of the production facilities.

Simply identifying the entity that produced a board or pieces tells us little about the entity itself. Most of the artels and Gulag workshops that produced chess equipment remain shrouded in mystery, as we have discussed earlier. Such information is important in situating that equipment in its social, historical, economic, political, and cultural context. That context included both use value of the equipment, and the social relations and political economy of their production.

The equipment had use value at two levels. Most concretely, it was used to play chess. Chess playing was not for the sake of chess in the Soviet Union, however, but to manifest Political Chess, the state’s policy to use chess to raise the cultural levels of the masses and to defeat the West in this arena of cultural competition. As we have seen, Political Chess demanded a continuously expanding supply of chess equipment. The means and social relations of the production of these sets were structured by the evolution of Soviet economic policy from War Communism to to NEP to Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, as we have begun to explore here.

We also have seen how the design of Soviet pieces reflected a dialectic between Modernism and Traditionalism. We have begun to explore that dynamic as a manifestation of Stalin’s cultural policy for the arts, namely the suppression of the Modernism of the Avant Garde and the official endorsement of Socialist Realism.

Socialist Realism portrayed an idealized view of the Soviet Union through the use of realistic images and forms. Maxim Gorky outlined its basic principles, declaring that Socialist Realist art must be proletarian; it must be typical, addressing the everyday lives of the Soviet people; it must be Realist in style; and it must be partisan, actively promoting the aims of the Soviet state. For Stalin, Socialist Realism meant that art must offer unambiguously positive images of life in the Soviet Union, in a ‘true-to-life’ visual style that the masses could readily digest. The Art Story (accessed 18 May 2022).

Vsekokhudozhnik was instrumental to the institutionalization of Socialist Realism and concomitant marginalization of the Avant Garde. Its production of chess sets both facilitated the success of Political Chess and helped bankroll the institutionalization of Socialist Realism.

The early 1920s saw a proliferation of artists’ groups, many of them by different groups within the Avant Garde. But some of the groups opposed the Avant Garde, notably the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR), which contended art should depict the happy aspects of everyday life under socialism via “artistic documentary” and “heroic realism.” Noted Suprematicist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) wrote in 1926 that the Association was “drowning the remains of art in its quagmire,” “We must overthrow this AKhRR,” he penned, “but we must be careful–so that this rot doesn’t bring any damage.” Murray infra.

Throughout the 1920s, the Avant Garde nevertheless lost ground to the Realists. Art historian John Bowlt explains that Socialist Realism grew ascendant in the later 1920s, “a relentless move towards ‘art that is national in form and socialist in content.'”

Symptomatic of this was the opening of the Artists’ Cooperative Organization (Vseko-khudozhnik) in Moscow in 1929, a rich and active government organ. It provided its members (painters, sculptors and architects) with regular contracts from workers’ palaces, government offices, etc., and it gave direct material aid to artists and arranged exhibitions for them -with the unwritten prerequisite that the works produced be Realist and socially relevant. By the late 1920s leftism was officially being condemned although still tolerated: this situation meant that, while leftist exhibitions were still organized and opened to the public, their reception by the Press and critics was, because of government influence, negative.

John E. Bowlt, Russian Art in the 1920s, 22 Soviet Studies 575,591 (No. 4 1971)

Vsekokhudozhnik was founded under the name Khudozhnik (Artist) at the cusp between NEP and Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan.

In 1932, the Communist Party Central Committee adopted a resolution, On the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations, which decried “the influence of alien elements, especially those revived by the first years of NEP.” The resolution claimed that “the confines of the existing proletarian literature and art organizations (VOAPP, RAPP, RATIM, etc.) are becoming too narrow and are hampering the serious development of artistic creation.” It expressed fear that “these organizations might change from being an instrument for the maximum mobilization of Soviet writers and artists for the tasks of Socialist construction to being an instrument for cultivating elitist withdrawal and loss of contact with the political tasks of the present and with the important groups of writers and artists who sympathize with Socialist construction.” The resolution called for the abolition of these artistic organizations and the integration “of all writers who support the platform of the Soviet government and who aspire to participate in Socialist construction in a single union of Soviet writers with a Communist faction therein.”

Accordingly, in 1932, Khudozhnik was reorganized as the All-Russian Cooperative Union of Fine Arts Workers (Vsekokhudozhnik). Independent artistic groups were dissolved. Murray, infra.

Historian Galina Yankovskvaya of the Perm State National Research University reports that none of the artel’s founders were among the Avant Garde, though many Avant Garde artists did join it to obtain art materials and sell their works to various state entities comprising its clientele. It introduced collective work, organizing artists into brigades, and pressed them into the mass production of household goods and mass-market art. Among its most famous products were dolls crafted and sold for export.

The exclusion of Avant Garde artists as founders of Vsekokhudozhnik clearly was no oversight, as it reflected their official marginalization. Moreover, the inclusion of Avant Garde artists as members was not intended to create organizational pluralism, but to operate instead as a mechanism of social control. Artists depending on Vsekokhudozhnik for subsistence were economically coerced to toe the line.

Without its help, it would have been impossible for artists to work. It supplied them with canvases and paints, gave advances and loans, ordered and bought works, sent them one by one and ‘brigades’ on creative business trips – mainly, as it was then supposed, to factories and construction sites. It organized contests of monuments projects. Various workshops worked, either serving the artists or giving work to them. Moreover, the money earned on the sale of embroidered scarves and shawls, pottery and toys, went to ensure the unprofitable work of easel painters.

Bookvika (accessed 9 November 2022)

Vsekokhudozhnik‘s control over artists was not limited to economic coercion. From 1932 on, writes art historian Natalia Murray, it was used to monitor and control artists by ensuring their work complied with the tenets of Socialist Realism.

A clear hierarchy of genres was established, and new heroes and new subjects (such as Communist Party leaders, Party meetings, workers and workers’ delegates, miners and builders) were obligatory for every artist who hoped so survive under the new regime. The avant-garde was stopped dead in its tracks. Any artist deviating from the official Party line was denounced as a formalist and at best cut off from support, and at worst left to die of starvation or sent to the remote camps of the Gulag.

Natalia Murray, “The New World of the Mass Man,” Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 25 (Royal Academy of Art, 2017)

Vsekokhudozhnik was transferred into the jurisdiction of the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR in 1935, and assumed responsibility for issuing copyrights. In 1940, it was transferred to the Council of Commissars of the RSFSR, and later to the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR. The artel dissolved in 1954 and its functions transferred to the Art Fund of the USSR.

The recent discovery of well-known and well-liked chess pieces in their original cardboard box has revealed where they were made, and has historically situated their maker at the epicenter of Stalin’s institutionalization of Socialist Realism as the official theory and practice of art. The sale of these sets helped support that process.

The 1920s saw the world mesmerized by the discovery of the tomb of the young Egyptian pharaoh, Tutankhamun (c. 1341 – c. 1323 B.C.). Collector Eduardo Bauza suggests that this fascination perhaps led the Soviets to name this exotic chess set “Egyptian,” an act notable because they seldom named sets. Here is a beautiful specimen of a presumably later version of the set presented by collector and dealer Valerii Krasnykov.

The “white” army is sometimes finished with a red-brown varnish. These are presumably the earlier versions of the set.

At least one specimen of this interesting design has survived with its original cardboard box, providing us valuable information as to who made these sets.

The label tells us the design’s name, Egyptian, and the set’s manufacturer, Khalturin Kirov region industrial artel “MYUD.” Unlike many artels, which remain shrouded in mystery, MYUD’s history has been documented. MYUD was formed in Khalturin in the 1930s, and its name is an acronym for International Youth Day. Among its first products were caskets, cigarette cases, and wooden pipes made of wood and burls. By 1939 it was producing chess pieces. Around 1960, when the last artels were being sunset, MYUD merged with the artel Sila, founded in 1925. The merged entity was reorganized as a state factory under the name Khalturinskaya Factory of Cultural Goods.

The design bucks the Soviet trend towards simplification. All the bases are topped with pronounced pedestals from which the the stems of the royals, clerics, and pawns rest, as do the knights’ torsos and the rooks’ towers. The stems rise vertically, themselves topped with pedestals upon which the piece signifiers sit, attached by a connector defined by two collars, the bottom one slightly smaller in diameter than the pedestal but noticeably larger than the top collar. The proliferation of pedestals and collars hearkens back to various pre-Staunton designs. The kings are 9.5-9.7 cm. tall. The pieces are unweighted and appear to be made of linden wood, commonly known as basswood in North America.

The knights are large, as tall as the bishops, and quite wide. They incorporate the CV spine/chest shape typical of Soviet knights. The ears alertly perk forward. The angle of the ears essentially follows the curve of the back as they extend upward.

In at least some reddish-brown, presumably earlier versions, the ears distinctly angle up from the spine’s curve. Here are specimens from Vikham Ravi’s collection.

The Artel MYUD Egyptian set may have bucked the Soviet trend of simplification, but it illustrated well the richness and diversity of Soviet chess design of the 1930s and 1940s.