Viktor Kortschnoi's Afterword - A Defector's View of KGB Chess
Viktor Kortschnoi opens his afterword with a quote from Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow: “A monster horrid, hideous, huge, hundred-mouthed, and barking!” That line was originally about Russian autocracy in the 1700s. Kortschnoi uses it for the KGB. Same country, different century, same monster.
What follows is probably the most personal section of the entire book. Gulko gave us the chess history. Popov and Felshtinsky gave us the intelligence files. But Kortschnoi? He gives us what it actually felt like to be the guy they were all hunting.
A Chess Player Who Did Not Care About Politics
Kortschnoi studied history at Leningrad State University. He was in a group studying international relations. They learned Latin, French, English. They were being groomed to become scholars. And he could not have cared less about politics.
He knew anti-Soviet jokes by the dozens. He saw grim, educated-looking people appearing on trains near May 9, when prisoner pardons were handed out. He never read a single line of the fiery Soviet speeches at the United Nations. He was entering the world of chess and did not want to clutter his brain with anything else.
But the world of chess had smart people in it. One grandmaster told him that Soviet politics was shaped by three forces: the party, the army, and the KGB. Usually all three worked together, but sometimes two of them teamed up against the third. When Beria had to go in 1953, the army and party joined forces. When Khrushchev was removed in 1964, the party and KGB did the job.
There is a haunting story Kortschnoi shares. A geologist once visited him and brought hand-carved chess pieces as a gift. The pieces came from a labor camp in Kolyma. Several hundred prisoners had been brought there with enough food for one month. Then the authorities forgot about the camp. When geologists found it half a year later, all they found were hundreds of skeletons and chess pieces.
That is the Soviet Union in one image.
Life After Defection
When Kortschnoi left the USSR in 1976, he started paying real attention to the KGB for the first time. And what he saw impressed him, in the worst way possible. He writes that the KGB’s work abroad was “of the highest order.” They tracked down and murdered former Soviet citizens in dozens of independent countries.
This was not abstract fear. The day after Kortschnoi requested political asylum in the Netherlands, the Dutch government assigned him a special police unit. For an entire year after that, every country he played chess in provided police protection. Germany. Switzerland. Austria. Italy. France. The UK. Think about that. A chess player needing armed guards in six countries.
The KGB watched everyone around him. His naive attempts to send letters to his family in Leningrad through Russian Jews living in West Germany failed twice. Soviet intelligence knew where he was at all times. He was surrounded by informers. He estimates there was just one slip-up: he went to a tournament in Lone Pine from a Manhattan apartment, and the Soviet delegation accidentally showed up at the same event because intelligence did not know about the trip.
After he moved to Switzerland, the very first phone call on his new, unlisted number was from the Soviet embassy, telling him he had been stripped of his citizenship. His number was not even in the phone book yet. That is how connected the KGB was.
The Baguio Match: 17 KGB Officers for One Chess Game
The 1978 world championship match against Karpov in Baguio, Philippines, is where things get scary. Kortschnoi references the Mitrokhin archives, the records smuggled out by a former KGB agent who defected to England in 1999. According to those records, 17 KGB officers were sent to the Philippines specifically to help Karpov beat Kortschnoi.
Kortschnoi says he did not actually see them. But things kept happening. Items disappeared from his group, including a walkie-talkie and a Russian Bible. Some of Karpov’s “official delegation” members had repulsive faces, including one called Pishchenko who, according to other sources, was an expert with firearms.
The KGB even tried to get Kortschnoi’s wife Petra’s fingerprints by slipping her a drink and then collecting her glass. They were looking for her old prison documents from Vorkuta, where she had spent ten years thanks to the KGB. Because there is no “h” sound in Russian, her maiden name Hajny had been recorded with a “g,” which caused them confusion. Small victories.
The parapsychologist Zukhar was there too, sitting in the audience. Kortschnoi’s yogi supporters bothered Zukhar so much that the Soviets eventually got them banned from the hall, with help from FIDE president Campomanes.
And here is the darkest detail. Mikhail Tal, who had been Kortschnoi’s friend for years but was serving as Karpov’s assistant, told him twelve years later that if Kortschnoi had won the match, he would have been killed. Everything had been prepared. The KGB’s orders would have been carried out by people under Campomanes and the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Let that sink in. They were planning to murder a chess player if he won a chess game.
Merano 1981: Everything the KGB Had
Kortschnoi is frustrated that the book says little about his second match against Karpov, in Merano in 1981. He says that everything Soviet intelligence had in its arsenal, all technological, chemical, and psychological methods, was deployed against him, his team, and even his prominent fans. Karpov’s group from Moscow had 43 people, plus reinforcements from the Soviet embassy in Rome. About 70 people total, against one chess player.
A KGB Colonel and a Defector Walk Through London
One of my favorite moments in the afterword is about Litvinov, the KGB colonel who looked after young Kasparov. The other chapters in the book paint KGB officers one way. Kortschnoi paints Litvinov differently.
He met Kasparov and Litvinov together for the first time in 1983 at a tournament in Yugoslavia. Four people sat down to talk about arranging a match. Litvinov made an excellent impression. “KGB or not,” Kortschnoi writes, “I saw a man who looked after Kasparov as after a child, with virtually paternal concern.”
A year later, at a USSR vs. Rest of the World match in London, Kortschnoi pulled Litvinov aside for a walk. He shared his observations about Karpov’s strengths and weaknesses, trying to help Kasparov in the upcoming world championship. A defector and a KGB colonel, strolling through London, talking chess strategy in peace.
Of course, snitches reported Litvinov’s “dubious behavior” immediately. He was reprimanded by his superiors. Kortschnoi apologizes for causing him trouble but hopes the advice was useful to Kasparov.
Coming Back to the Ruins
Kortschnoi’s final paragraph is quietly powerful. After the Soviet Union collapsed, he started visiting its fragments. When he played in front of audiences in Leningrad, Moscow, Ukraine, he felt the emotional warmth of hundreds and thousands of people. More than warmth. He felt that people were apologizing. They were sorry for dancing to the government’s tune. For refusing to support him when the authorities turned him into a punching bag.
And then Kortschnoi asks a question that hangs in the air: was it not the old KGB staff who were responsible for that transformation in sentiment? By attacking him so publicly, they had turned him into a hero.
I grew up in a former USSR country, so I know this feeling. The people who stayed behind had no real choice. The system demanded obedience. When Kortschnoi defected, the press told everyone he was a traitor. The chess world cut him off. His own son was imprisoned. The safe thing to do was to go along with it. Most people did. And then, years later, those same people realized who the real traitors were.
Kortschnoi does not judge them. He just notes the irony. And that is more powerful than any accusation.
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