Karpov vs Kortschnoi and the KGB's Role in World Chess Championships
The 1980 Moscow Olympics and the Gulko Problem
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.
The 1980 Moscow Olympics were coming up. The KGB was terrified that Boris Gulko and his wife Anna Akhsharumova, both chess grandmasters and refuseniks, would stage a protest in front of foreign journalists. They could not throw chess players into a psychiatric hospital for wanting to emigrate. That was a step too far, even for them. So KGB Colonel Tarasov came up with a plan.
First, Karpov (who had the KGB code name “Raul”) spread disinformation through grandmasters Sosonko and Razuvaev, hinting that Gulko’s emigration might get approved. The goal was simple: keep Gulko quiet for a few weeks. Then, using his agents Bach and Roshal, Tarasov got Gulko invited to a sports facility in Eshery, Abkhazia. A vacation, basically. Except the room was bugged before the Gulkos arrived. And two KGB agents were sent along to watch them.
They even tried to recruit chess coach Mark Dvoretsky while they were at it. He refused. So they banned him from traveling abroad for a year. That was the price of saying no.
The plan worked. The Gulkos stayed quiet through the Olympics. The games went off smoothly, at least on the surface. What most people did not know was that behind the scenes, Soviet athletes’ positive drug tests were being swapped for clean ones, and the Central Committee was spending US dollars to bribe foreign judges. After the Olympics, KGB officers got medals and promotions. Colonel Tarasov received a medal “For Valiant Labor.” For bugging a chess player’s room.
Bugging the Gulkos and Preparing for Merano
With the Olympics done, the KGB turned to its next mission: making sure Karpov beat Kortschnoi in the 1981 World Championship in Merano, Italy. Karpov met twice with KGB chief Andropov at the Lubyanka. Multiple KGB directorates were involved. It was treated like a military operation.
The KGB gave Gulko a new apartment in the Strogino district of Moscow. Sounds nice, right? The reason was that the new place could be bugged before the Gulkos moved in. The old apartment, where Gulko’s disabled war veteran father was always home, was too hard to wire up.
The book describes the surveillance setup in ridiculous detail. Transmitters sealed inside brick walls. Wires running across rooftops between buildings. A safe house apartment in the next building where female KGB operators worked week-long shifts, locked inside, processing recordings around the clock. Food was delivered to them. They could not leave or communicate with the outside world.
The daily cost of surveillance on Gulko was “equivalent to the cost of a car.” All this to monitor a chess player who wanted to move to Israel.
The Merano World Championship: Poison, Spies, and Parapsychology
The 1981 World Championship in Merano is where the story gets really dark.
On Andropov’s orders, the KGB shipped a secret device called “Tent” to Italy by diplomatic mail. It weighed several tons and was designed to block eavesdropping. Italian customs officials were alarmed by the size of the shipment but backed down when the Soviet ambassador got involved.
The “Tent” was set up in the private house Karpov used during the match. The house was guarded 24 hours by KGB officers. Not even Karpov’s own wife was allowed inside, even though her father was a deputy head at a KGB foreign intelligence directorate.
But shielding Karpov from bugs was only half the job. The KGB also broke into lodgings used by Kortschnoi’s team and planted their own bugs. A young European grandmaster’s wife, code name “Amigo,” had been recruited by KGB officer Pishchenko. Through her husband’s friendship with Kortschnoi, the KGB got daily reports on Kortschnoi’s preparations.
And it gets worse. The operational group included “poisonous substances experts.” Their official job was to monitor Karpov’s food. But they also had special chemicals that caused anxiety, sleep problems, and high blood pressure. KGB agents secretly entered Kortschnoi’s lodgings and applied these substances.
Here is the part that really makes your stomach turn. If Karpov started losing badly, the plan was to give Kortschnoi a toxic substance that would cause fatal heart failure. The book states this plainly: it was considered “a last resort.”
On top of all that, the KGB brought parapsychology experts. Dozens of Soviet research institutes studied how to influence the human mind at a distance, and the KGB used their best techniques on Kortschnoi’s group.
Kortschnoi survived because he lost. That is the simplest and most chilling sentence in this section. Karpov kept his title. Kortschnoi lived.
The Gulko Protests and the KGB’s Crumbling Control
Back in Moscow, the Gulkos were not giving up. In September 1982, an interzonal chess tournament was held in Moscow. The KGB knew from their bugs that the Gulkos planned to protest. Lieutenant Colonel Perfiliev, desperate to prove himself after a separate blunder involving a defecting synchronized swimmer, went overboard with security. He moved the tournament from an open venue to a fenced hotel. He required special passes for entry. Dozens of riot police guarded the perimeter.
None of it worked.
Gulko and Akhsharumova stood across the street on Leninsky Prospect holding a poster: “Let us go to Israel.” A KGB colonel named Davnis sprinted across the avenue, tore up the poster, and turned them over to police. The torn poster was filed into the Gulkos’ case file as a “trophy.”
The next day, the Gulkos came back with a second poster. When Perfiliev ordered two officers to physically stop them, one of them, Major Popov, demanded written orders first. Popov knew from past experience that Perfiliev would deny giving oral instructions if things went wrong. Perfiliev backed down and called the police instead. Regular cops intercepted Gulko, beat him, and delivered him to a precinct. The beating made international news. The KGB blamed the police. The police took the fall.
Then came a hunger strike. The KGB disconnected the Gulkos’ phone. Other refuseniks visited in solidarity. The KGB raided the apartment, arrested everyone, including their own agents to maintain cover. They even forged anonymous letters accusing Akhsharumova of infidelity, a classic KGB disruption tactic.
Karpov vs Kasparov: The Championship the KGB Could Not Control
By 1984, the KGB’s chess problems were multiplying. Garry Kasparov was rising fast. The KGB had tried to prevent his candidates match against Kortschnoi from happening in Pasadena, California, by arguing that security conditions were unacceptable. They succeeded in getting the match cancelled. Kortschnoi won by default. But when the match was rescheduled to London, Kasparov won.
Then came the 1984 World Championship in Moscow. Karpov vs Kasparov. The KGB went all in. They bugged Kasparov’s room in the Columned Hall. They recorded all his phone calls, including conversations with his mother and coaches. Perfiliev was personally present in the hall every single day, running operations from morning to evening.
Karpov jumped to a 4-0 lead. The KGB was celebrating. Then Kasparov started winning. The score shifted to 5-3. Karpov was falling apart physically and emotionally.
The KGB panicked. On Perfiliev’s orders, Pishchenko pushed FIDE president Campomanos, a KGB agent bought with thousands of dollars in gifts, to find a way to stop Kasparov from winning. A memo signed by General Bobkov went to the Central Committee proposing to cancel the match and start a new one from 0-0. The Central Committee agreed. Campomanos ended the match.
The chess world was shocked. The decision violated every existing rule. But when the KGB and the Central Committee want you to win, rules stop mattering.
The book says that on this day, “Kasparov was born.” The Kasparov we know today, the uncompromising fighter.
The End of the Game
The Gulkos kept protesting. Year after year. During Gorbachev’s rise, they organized hunger strikes during a CPSU congress. They held press conferences for foreign journalists. Every time, the KGB tore up their posters, arrested them, shuffled them between police stations to extend detention time.
But the Soviet Union was changing. In April 1986, a European conference was scheduled in Bern, Switzerland. A chess tournament called “Salute to Gulko” was being organized there by human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky. The KGB could not explain to Gorbachev’s administration why it was holding two chess players hostage.
About two weeks after their last arrest, the Gulkos received a summons to the Visa Office. Their departure was approved.
The book puts it beautifully: “The opponent had surrendered. Gulko had won the game.”
I grew up in a place shaped by this system. Reading about the KGB spending the daily cost of a car just to listen to a chess player’s conversations, it sounds insane. But it was real. This is what happens when a state decides that a board game is a matter of national security. The resources they threw at chess were staggering. And in the end, two people with a poster beat all of it.
This is Part 3 of a retelling of Chapter 1 from “The KGB Plays Chess” by Boris Gulko, Vladimir Popov, Yuri Felshtinsky, and Viktor Kortschnoi (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0).
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