Historical Context – Soviet and Late Tsarist Chess Sets

Maizelis’s Set

Soviet Master Ilyan Maizelis included a photo of the pictured set in his famous primer “Chess Beginnings” (1937). There he described it as “Modern Chess Figures (Staunton form).” At 9. So the set dates no later than 1937. For sake of convenience, I’ll refer to it as “Maizelis’s Set,” though I have no other evidence that he actually owned or played with one like it.

I recently added such a set to my Soviet and Tsarist collection.

The set is magnificently turned, carved finished, and weighted, with several small defects, a couple chipped coronet tips, broken finials on a White Bishop, a partially broken off finial on the White King, a few cracks and worn finish for character.

The Black King measures 97 mm with its fully intact finial. The Kings’s finials are carved in a unique diamond pattern. The Black pieces are painted with age-consistent wear and chipping, but the White pieces have a finish approximating French polish akin to two Tsarist sets that have matriculated through my collection. Beautiful patina.

Diamond-shaped finial. Chuck Grau photo.

The Knight carving is spectacular, the best of any of my Soviet sets and even better than my best Tsarist ones. Highly detailed mane carvings on both sides of the torso. Crisp mouth and eye details. Just spectacular.

The style is of the group of sets commonly but not unreasonably mistaken for the 1933 Botvinnik Flohr match. I included pictures of several of these sets in my article on the 1933 set.

Shane Chateauneuf recently acquired a beautiful, related set.

The board accompanying my set is wonderful in its own right. Beautiful veneer worn consistent with its age. Gorgeous patina. 53 mm squares are perfectly sized for the pieces, very un-Soviet. None of the asphyxiation that Arlindo Vieira repeatedly complained of. This is perhaps another factor hinting that the set may be much older than 1937.

Simply a gem.

Ilyan Lvovich Maizelis

A close friend of Yuri Averbakh, Maizelis was a noted teacher and author, even outside the Soviet Union. No less than Bobby Fischer studied his work.

Soviet chess historian Jorge Njegovic Drndak has compiled this brief biography:

Ilya Lvovich Maizelis (1894-1978)

He was born on December 28, 1894 in Uman, a small village in the Cherkasy region. Having passed college in Ukraine, Ilya won the Union-wide Tournament of Cities in 1924 (a parallel tournament). Once in Moscow, Maizelis quickly joined the chess movement and became one of its most prominent figures.

Having started working as a chess journalist, Maizelis covered the Alekhine-Teichmann match (Berlin, 1921), at that time Alexander Alexandrovich’s name was not yet animated in his homeland. Ended with a score of 3:3.

Ilya Maizelis was close friends with Emanuel Lasker. It was he who during the Moscow International Tournament (1925) handed the great thinker a telegram saying that the work of the second world champion would be staged. The played Lasker ended up getting the foot of the “mill” in the match against Torre, but consoled the young man, who at first considered himself responsible for this defeat of the great chess player.

Maizelis was one of those who convinced Emanuel to move to the USSR, take Soviet citizenship and train for the national team. Shortly before leaving for America, Lasker handed the journalist the manuscript of his children’s book. Ilya’s friend Alexander Ilyin-Zhenevsky believed it was Maizelis’ duty to publish the book, but the work “How Victor Became a Chess Master” was only published in the 1970s.

Ilya Maizelis is a member of the editorial board of the magazine “64”. “Checkers and Chess in a Workers’ Club” (1925-1930), executive secretary of the publication “Soviet Chess Chronicle” (1943-1946), published in English in Moscow under the auspices of the Union Society for Cultural Relations (VOKS). He trained at the Pioneers House of the capital, but at the same time, until the late 1930s, he did not stop the practical performances, performed regularly at the finals of the Moscow championships. In 1932, Ilya Lvovich took fourth place in the championship of the capital and, of course, played in the strength of the master, but did not officially fulfill the title, opting for journalism.

Author of the books “Beginner Chess Player”, “Chess Yearbook 1937-1938”, “Fundamentals of Opening Strategy”, “For 4th Chess Players”. a and 3. “under category”, “Selected games of Soviet and International Tournaments of 1946”, “Chess Textbook Games”, “Tower vs Pawns”, “On the Theory of Tower End”, “Chess Finals. Pawns, Bishops, Horses” edited by Y. Averbakh, “chess. Fundamentals of Theory. Ilya Maizelis translated from German the books “Endgame Theory and Practice” by Johann Berger and “My System” by Aron Nimzowitsch.

With his article, he was the first in the USSR to draw attention to the 1603 painting “Ben Johnson and William Shakespeare,” attributed to Karel van Mander and depicts 17th-century English playwright playing chess. Ilya Lvovich studied the works of the poets Henry Longfellow and Heinrich Hein, translated their works into English and German.

Ilya Maizelis has compiled a chess library that is widely known not only in Moscow and the USSR, but also abroad.

“Everyone knows that Maizelis had the best chess library in Moscow and was often asked to clear up something from an old magazine or a rare book. There was a phone in the room and Ilya Lvovich used to dictate chess and variation games for a long time. Maizelis’ mother-in-law was always in the room, paralyzed and completely indifferent to everything that was going on. He sat like an idol and stared at one point.. And Maizelis, dictating movements, did not say “a-be”, like everyone else, but in a low voice – “a-be”. And then, one day, the mother-in-law, who was apparently tired of this hug to hell, said sadly, “Abe, abe… Fucking idiots! ” (J. Neishstadt).

Shortly before his death, Ilya Lvovich sold the library to good hands to preserve it for posterity. The master of Russian chess journalism passed away on December 23, 1978 in Moscow.

THE GULAG ‘KNIGHT’ OF MORDOVSKA (ADDENDUM)

A wonderful essay authored by Alan Power, master of artistic chess set restoration and owner of the Chess Schach. Please click the link to read Alan’s highly informative article.

“For a reader living in the free world the word “thief” perhaps sounds like a reproach? But you misunderstand the term. In the underworld of the …
THE GULAG ‘KNIGHT’ OF MORDOVSKA (ADDENDUM)

Photos of the 1936 Third Moscow International Tournament

I recently posted photos of the 1935 Second Moscow International Tournament that were graciously provided by our friend Sergey Dubodel of Belarus. Sergey also provided some photos of the 1936 Third Moscow International Tournament, which I present here paired with historian Michael Hudson‘s account of the 1936 event and other relevant photos and images.

Like the 1935 Moscow International, the 1936 tournament used BFII chess pieces. Unlike the 1935 event, which was a single round robin, the 1936 affair was a double round robin. It was held in the Hall of Columns, the ballroom of Moscow’s House of Unions, and the site of Bukharin’s show trial in 1938.

Stamp depicting the House of Unions, where the 1936 Tournament was held. Both stamp photos are in the public domain.

“A few months after the Moscow 1935 event ended, Botvinnik (who had received a cash prize, an automobile, and a doubling of his post-graduate stipend for his efforts) began to petition Krylenko for another tournament. Botvinnik argued that Moscow 1935 was flawed by the inclusion of too many relatively weak players, which introduced an element of chance and made it difficult to judge the strength of the leading Soviet players. He proposed a smaller ‘match-tournament’ with five strong foreigners and the five strongest Soviet players. Krylenko was initially only lukewarm to the proposal. Selecting the five Soviet players would be difficult and divisive given his embarrassment of riches. More to the point, there was also the expense. Tournaments with Westerner participation required hard currency, which was always in short supply. But eventually Krylenko relented–swayed, perhaps, by an offer from the Central Committee of the Komsomol (the Party youth organization), where Botvinnik had powerful friends, to help with the funding. Significant Komsomol involvement in the Soviet chess organization, which dates from the middle 1930s, would eventually loosen the tight hold the Chess Section had on all aspects of Soviet chess.”

Botvinnik and Lasker. Drawn. Photographer unknown.

“The Third Moscow International Chess Tournament was held in the summer of 1936. The foreign contingent consisted of Lasker, Capablanca, Flohr, Lilienthal and the Austrian master, Erich Gottlieb Eliskases (1913-1997).”

Eliskases and Lasker. Lasker won. Photographer unknown.

“The younger Soviets were well represented by Botvinnik, Ragozin, Ryumin and Il’ia Abramovich Kan (1909-1978). Levenfish, alone, represented the old guard.”

Botvinnik and Flohr. They drew this game. Photographer unknown.

Botvinnik and Flohr several moves later. Photographer unknown.

“The tournament quickly became a contest between Botvinnik and a resurgent Capablanca. Botvinnik claimed to have suffered from the heat and insomnia during the tournament; Capablanca, on the other hand, was inspired by love. He had just met the woman who would become his second wife, and he promised her he would regain the world title. Botvinnik lost to Capablanca in one of their games, and this turned out to be the margin of victory for Capablanca.”

Capablanca and Botvinnik. Capablanca won. Photographer unknown.

“Botvinnik finished one point behind Capablanca, while Flohr finished a distant third. The rest of the Soviet contingent, however, fared rather badly. Krylenko was only grudgingly satisfied with Botvinnik’s play, and he was not at all pleased with his other protégés. In his foreword to the tournament book, he took the Soviet players to task, insisting that the most immediate lesson of Moscow 1936 was that Soviet players needed to drop their conceit, study their games, and learn from their numerous mistakes.”

Ryumin and Capablanca, the tournament winner. Capablanca won. Photographer unknown.

“A curious anecdote about Moscow 1936 was related years later by Capablanca’s widow, the woman whose love was said to have inspired Capablanca’s victory:

It is little known, I believe, that Stalin came to see Capablanca play, hiding behind a drapery. This happened in Moscow in 1936. Capa had mentioned it to me en passant, so I am a bit hazy about the details, such as who had accompanied Stalin–seems to me it was Krylenko. However, the gist of this encounter remains quite clear in my mind. Capa said to Stalin: “Your Soviet players are cheating, losing the games on purpose to my rival, Botvinnik, in order to increase his points on the score.” According to Capa, Stalin took it good-naturedly. He smiled and promised to take care of the situation. He did. From then on the cheating . . . stopped and Capablanca . . . won the tournament all by himself.

“Capablanca’s charges of collusion were not ungrounded. Botvinnik’s friend, the Leningrad master Ragozin, participated in both Moscow 1935 and 1936.”

Flohr and Ragozin, with a clear view of the BFII pieces. Ragozin won. Photographer unknown.

“Although his overall results were mediocre, Ragozin later (in 1946) revealed in his Party biography that he had received a special, secret prize in each tournament for the best score against foreign participants. No such prize was mentioned in the official tournament books.”

Nikolai Krylenko, Political Chess, and the 1935 Second Moscow International Tournament

In our recent post showcasing photos from the 1935 Second Moscow International Tournament, we mentioned the significance of the tournament to the Soviet program of Political Chess. In the Preface to the official tournament book, Soviet chess tsar Nikolai Krylenko elaborates:

“The Second Moscow International Tournament of 1935 took place in conditions of a colossally expanding Soviet chess movement and essentially turned into a struggle at the chess board between the USSR and the capitalist countries. That was how the matter stood objectively in historical and political terms; that was how it was understood and perceived not only by us, but also by bourgeois chess circles.

“In the ten years since the Moscow International Tournament of 1925 the USSR has grown both politically and economically, and has become at once a leading industrial nation and a great international power. For this reason every contact the USSR has with the bourgeois world, including the Moscow International Tournament of 1935, is already inevitably analyzed abroad from more than just a narrow sporting point of view.

“Up until a well-known point the USSR was an enigma for wide circles of the foreign bourgeoisie, an enigma which suddenly converted itself politically into a powerful force, directly influencing the fate of the world. From the specific point of view of foreign chess players, the same question arose for them: what on earth is the significance of the USSR for chess? Even for non-chess players who are aware of what is going on in chess, and for several first-class masters known to us such as Lasker, Capablanca, Euwe and Flohr, the tournament was also of interest from this point of view-what, then, can the mysterious Soviet Union give to chess culture?”

Propaganda poster depicting the struggle between Soviet workers and Capitalists and religion, Capital’s minion. D. Moor 1920.

“Only the workers of capitalist countries understood the enigma of the USSR. But for them the chess tournament had again to give an answer to that eternal historical question: who is the greater?”

Of course, this question was quite important to Krylenko as well. After all, as a good Marxist-Leninist, he already had cast the tournament “objectively in historical and political terms” as a “struggle… between the USSR and the capitalist powers.”

“There is no need to speak about the way the tournament was perceived by the broad mass of workers of the USSR. Highly developed politically and culturally, the millions of workers of our Union awaited the encounter with bourgeois masters most of all to answer this question: how will our players acquit themselves? What will our players be able to give in the struggle with recognized authorities of the bourgeois chess world? In order to find this out they followed the progress of the tournament from the very beginning to the last round.”

The 1935 tournament was not the first international event the Soviets had held in furtherance of their political program. The original event was the 1925 First Moscow International Tournament. Krylenko does not mention it, perhaps because he found it difficult to recite that it was won by Bolgolyubov, who had moved to Germany, taken a German wife, been declared a “renegade,” and tossed from the Soviet chess organization in 1926. Krylenko details other events where the struggle against the capitalist nations was prosecuted.

Before being declared a “renegade,” Bogolyubov represented the USSR at the 1925 First Moscow International Tournament, here playing Rubenstein. Public domain photo.

“The enormous interest in the tournament was inspired to a considerable extent by encounters between Soviet masters and foreign grandmasters which were a kind of prelude to it: the Flohr-Botvinnik match in 1933, which demonstrated the equal strength of the two players, and the Leningrad tournament in 1934 which Euwe and Kmoch participated in, suffering an extremely painful defeat at the hands of Soviet masters. True, these achievements were a little tarnished by Botvinnik’s unsuccessful appearance at Hastings. But this failure merely heightened interest in the tournament. The international tournament had to settle the question once and for all: was Botvinnik’s failure accidental, or had the entire Soviet Union fallen behind the capitalist countries with their international chess forces.

“These were the basic factors which turned the second Moscow Tournament of 1935 into a major political event, causing great excitement amongst the broad masses of our society and the chess circles of Western Europe.”

Krylenko pivots to his characterization of the tournament’s results, which he goes to great lengths to spin as a major Soviet victory despite that four of the top five finishers represented capitalist powers.

“So what were the results of this encounter? They already belong to history are now widely known and generally acknowledged both here and abroad.

Capablanca, at the 1935 Second Moscow International Tournament, with a good view of the pieces used. Photographer unknown.

“The USSR, in the person of Mikhail Botvinnik, defeated bourgeois chess culture, as his only rival, finishing in first place with him, Flohr, did not actually win this first place, but received it as a kind of gift from the Soviet masters Kan and Bogatyrchuk, who beat Botvinnik and thus allowed Flohr to draw equal with his rival. These defeats which Botvinnik suffered were also important in the sense that they demonstrate something else, a quality which is characteristic of our chess players-their sporting honesty, which does not permit them to go a single iota against their conscience during the fight, not even out of a false understanding of patriotism. This, unfortunately, cannot be said of all the bourgeois masters-participants in the tournament, who in their games more than once gave cause for doubt that they were playing at full strength (for example, the Spielmann-Flohr game)-although, of course, everyone was well aware of the significance of a half-point in this tense struggle.”

Salo Flohr. Photo provided by Sergey Dubodel.

“True, bourgeois Europe may point to the fact that the runners-up were all foreigners: Lasker, Capablanca, Spielmann. But, in the first place, these were ex-world champions Lasker and Capablanca, and in the second place, Spielmann won his place in the very last rounds, while Levenfish was confidently catching up with him. We do not yet expect, by the way, that Soviet masters should occupy all of the top places, although, without unnecessary modesty, we have reason to think that such a moment will come in the not-too-distant future. In support of this we have the more than modest places which were occupied by Pirc, Stahlberg and even Lilienthal, and the extraordinarily high quality of play demonstrated by the Soviet masters: Ruumin, Ragozin, Levenfish, Romanovsky and Kan. Goglidze, Lisitsin, Rabinovich and Alatortsev also had certain achievements which cannot be doenied, and only Bogatyrchuk played below his ability, whilst only Chekover persistently showed a ‘chess spirit’ which was inappropriate for such a serious test.”

1935 Moscow Second International Tournament book. Photo provided by Sergey Dubodel.

One tenet of Political Chess was that masters owed an obligation to teach chess to the masses. The 1935 tournament book is a fine example, containing detailed annotations of the events games authored by participating masters.

“In publishing this collection which summarizes the achievements of the tournament, we consider it a major contribution not only to the of chess creativity in the USSR, but also to world chess literature. The broad mass of Soviet chess players will use it for study, further increasing and deepening their achievements in the sphere of chess art.”

“Nikolai Krylenko
Moscow, 14 November 1935”

From Moscow 1935 International Chess Tournament (N. Krylenko and I. Rabinovitch eds., Caissa Ed. 1998) (Jimmy Adams and Sarah Hurst Trs.).

Photos of the 1935 Second Moscow International Tournament

Our friend Sergey Dubodel, from Belarus, recently forwarded photos of the 1935 and 1936 Moscow International Tournaments. Both tournaments were held in furtherance of the Soviets’ program of Political Chess. In this context, the tournaments were intended to provide forums where top Soviet players could compete against leading Western players, both to gauge the progress of Soviet player development, and with good results, to demonstrate the superiority of socialism in an important arena of cultural competition. In this post, we’ll look at photos from the 1935 event.

Leading the 1935 Soviet contingent was Mikhail Botvinnik, whom Soviet chess tsar Nikolay Krylenko and others saw as the Soviets’ best hope to become world champion. Among the Western players were former world champions Emmanuel Lasker and Jose Raul Capablanca, and Salo Flohr, then viewed as a leading contender for the world crown. Flohr and Botvinnik drew their game and shared first place.

1935 Second Moscow International Tournament participants, with Nikolay Krylenko. Krylenko is in the middle right foreground, with the oversized head and jackboots. To his right (our left) is Emmanuel Lasker. To his left (our right) is Salo Flohr. Second from our left in the front row is Jose Raul Capablanca. Botvinnik is in the rear row to our far left. Photographer unknown.

The tournament is significant for collectors of Soviet chess sets for three reasons. First, it is an important manifestation of Political Chess, the engine driving the train for the growing production of Soviet chess sets and the evolution of their design towards simpler, more easily mass-produced pieces. We have explored these relationships here. Second, it showcased the pieces used, a design that became a workhorse for Soviet chess at its highest levels through decades in its evolving forms, as we have reviewed here. Finally, it is the event whose joint winners’ names have come to describe the pieces used for reasons we have discussed here , here, and here.

Botvinnik Flohr II chess pieces, c. 1935. Steven Kong photo.

Flohr and Botvinnik. Source: 1935 Tournament Book.

The Botvinnik-Flohr game can be found here.

Capablanca and Lasker. Photographer unknown.

Lasker beat Capablanca to edge him by half a point for third place. Their game can be found here. Capablanca finished in fourth place. Lasker finished half a point behind Botvinnik and Flohr.

Capablanca and Botvinnik. Photographer unknown.

Capablanca and Botvinnik drew. Their game can be found here.

Spielman and Alatortsev. Photographer unknown.

Austrian Rudolph Spielman beat Vladimir Alatortsev in this game and finished in fifth place, one point behind Capablanca.

Flohr and Alatortsev. Photographer unknown.

Flohr and Alatortsev drew this game. Alatortsev finished in 11th place.

Vera Menchik was the only woman participant. She finished in last place, scoring three draws, including this game with the White pieces against Flohr.

Many thanks to Sergey Dubodel for sharing these photos with us.