Chapter 2 of “The KGB Plays Chess” is where Boris Gulko takes over the storytelling. The previous chapter was the insider account from the KGB officer. This one is deeply personal. Gulko titles it “The Letter Lahmed Problem” and dedicates it to his sister Bella, “my loyal companion on the road to freedom.”
This section of the book shows what the KGB was willing to do when they felt threatened. And the threat was not some foreign spy or military secret. The threat was a chess player and his wife who wanted to leave the country.
Continuing my retelling of The KGB Plays Chess by Boris Gulko, Vladimir Popov, Yuri Felshtinsky, and Viktor Kortschnoi (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0). This part covers the KGB’s grip on individual athletes, the hunt for defectors, and how chess became a battlefield for Soviet intelligence.
Chapter 1 of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written by Vladimir Popov, a former KGB officer, and Yuri Felshtinsky, a historian. And it starts with a bang. No slow warm-up. Just a blunt description of how the Soviet secret police turned sports into a branch of intelligence operations.
The foreword of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written by Boris Gulko. He’s one of the very few people who held both the USSR and US chess championships. And he spent seven years as a “refusenik,” trapped in the Soviet Union, fighting the KGB just for the right to leave. So when he writes about chess and Soviet power, he knows exactly what he’s talking about.
I just finished reading one of the wildest books about chess I have ever come across. It is called “The KGB Plays Chess: The Soviet Secret Police and the Fight for the World Chess Crown” (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0, Russell Enterprises, 2010). And I want to walk you through it.
So that was Gateway.
31 chapters. One man sitting on a couch talking to a machine about why he can not be happy. And somehow it is one of the best science fiction novels ever written.
This is it. Thirty-one chapters. Hundreds of pages. Years of therapy. And now we are here, at the end.
Rob Broadhead is still in the chair. Sigfrid is still across from him. The same room. The same machine. The same conversation they have been having since page one. Except this time, there is nowhere left to hide.
This is the chapter. The one the entire book has been building toward. Thirty chapters of therapy sessions, of Rob dodging and lying and breaking down, of Sigfrid patiently waiting. All of it was leading here.
This is it. The chapter everything has been building toward. Twenty-eight chapters of dodging, deflecting, joking, and screaming. Twenty-eight chapters of Sigfrid waiting. And now Rob finally arrives at the place he has been running from since the first page.