Boris Gulko's First Encounters With Soviet Chess and the KGB
A New Voice in the Book
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.”
Gulko was born in early 1947 in Germany, where his father served as a Soviet occupation officer. He jokes that the KGB probably had a file on him before he was even born. The pregnancy of a Soviet officer’s wife would not have gone unregistered. But his first real face-to-face meeting with the KGB happened in the summer of 1966.
The First Trip Abroad
The Soviet chess team was going to the World Student Olympiad in Sweden. Before the trip, they took the team to the Central Committee offices on Staraya Square to read classified instructions on how to behave in a capitalist country. By reading the document, you made a promise to the KGB not to reveal its contents.
Gulko went against those instructions immediately. He secretly read banned novels by Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. He smuggled back a paperback copy of “Doctor Zhivago” from Stockholm, printed on extremely thin paper.
This was the era of samizdat. Some people read more literature typed on a typewriter than published in actual books. Bookstores were full of unreadable ideological garbage. Gulko kept improving his reading situation through foreign chess trips.
1968 Changed Everything
The year 1968 was the turning point. The Moscow Sports Committee sent Gulko to a tournament in Havirov, a small Czech town. Getting permission to travel was torture. Every day he went to the party committee. Every day they sent him away. Something was happening in Czechoslovakia.
Then came the Brezhnev-Dubcek meeting in Bratislava. “Eternal friendship,” “fraternal nations.” Gulko finally got his papers and spent ten days in Czechoslovakia.
What he found there blew his mind. People actually loved their country. They saw their leaders not as scarecrows but as men of ideas. A factory union activist explained to him: “We are not against socialism. But we want socialism with a human face.”
Gulko writes one of his best lines here. He says he did not care about socialism either way. “Chess is a capitalist game. The winner gets one point, the loser zero. There is no hint of egalitarianism.” But with a human face! Not Brezhnev’s face, not Khrushchev’s face, a human face. Could such a thing be possible in the USSR?
On August 21, he was woken by airplanes overhead. The Soviet army was invading. He felt burning shame for his country. He asked the Czechs where their guerrillas were signing up. They had no guerrillas.
He returned home anti-Soviet to the core. After a lecture at the psychology department, they shut the auditorium door and he told his entire class what he had witnessed. Every group of MSU students had an informant. Several reports went straight to the KGB. He also showed up at the Supreme Court during the appeals hearings for Pavel Litvinov’s group, the seven people who protested the invasion on Red Square. Another page for his file.
Becoming a Grandmaster Without Permission
Here is how the Soviet system worked. To become an International Grandmaster, you had to play international tournaments. To play international tournaments, you needed Sports Committee permission. The Sports Committee answered to the KGB.
Gulko found a way around this. In 1975, he shared first in the USSR Zonal Tournament and took second in the USSR Championship, the strongest tournament in the world. These results were so far above normal requirements that he earned the Grandmaster title through pure domestic results, without ever playing enough international events.
He was not alone. Five years later, Lev Psakhis won the USSR Championship twice without even receiving his grandmaster title. As Gulko puts it: “At the time, there was no injustice that the authorities could not surpass.”
The Letter Against Kortschnoi
The final break with the KGB came because of Viktor Kortschnoi. In July 1976, while Gulko was playing at the Interzonal Tournament in Biel, Switzerland, photos of Kortschnoi appeared in newspapers with the caption: “Another man who chose freedom.”
After the defection, KGB minders spent every evening in Gulko’s hotel room for the rest of the tournament. He could have stayed in the West too. But his family was back home, effectively hostages. And he had naive optimism that when the time came, he would just file papers and leave normally. He was wrong.
Two months later, all Soviet grandmasters were ordered to sign a public letter condemning Kortschnoi. The chess players were being pulled out of their apolitical corner. If you did not sign, you were against the Party and against the KGB.
Among active grandmasters, only two refused: David Bronstein and Boris Gulko. Bronstein’s refusal ended his brilliant career. He was banned from foreign travel and only returned to international chess 15 years later, during perestroika, well over 60 years old.
Gulko had a principle he lived by: “I don’t have to say everything that I think, but I must not say what I don’t think.” He was immediately barred from a tournament in East Germany and from prestigious Soviet events. But, as he says, “the preservation of my soul was worth it.”
I grew up in a place where people had to make these choices. Sign the paper and keep your career. Or refuse and watch everything you built get taken away. Most people signed. I do not judge them. But I have enormous respect for the ones who did not.
The Championship They Tried to Steal
At the end of 1977, Gulko was leading the USSR Championship in Leningrad. He discovered he was not just playing against 15 opponents. He was playing against the system. Colonel Baturinsky, the chess czar, could not let a “non-signer” become Soviet champion.
Baturinsky called Gulko’s opponents before their games. He called Karen Grigorian and told him it was “very important” to go all out. He called Sveshnikov with a similar pep talk. He told Dorfman that experts believed Dorfman had the best chances of stopping Gulko. Everyone got the message.
Gulko’s comment on this is perfect: “A person cannot run faster, throw farther, or think better because this is important for the triumph of an ideology. One can order someone to lose. But one cannot order anyone to win.”
Despite all of it, Gulko tied for first. Then Baturinsky announced a playoff match that violated the championship rules. Both co-winners should have been declared champions. Eventually Gulko and Dorfman protested to the head of the Sports Committee, Sergei Pavlov. He surprised them by asking: “Why didn’t you complain earlier?” As if to say, we tried to take advantage of you, and you should have fought back sooner. Both were declared co-champions.
The Decision to Leave
In Buenos Aires at the 1978 Chess Olympiad, Gulko hit his breaking point. Half the delegation were KGB agents. They had a translator who did not know Spanish. A doctor who was an informant. The women’s team coach told them not to leave the hotel because “the city was full of rabid dogs.” Midway through, both coaches went on a drinking binge and disappeared.
Gulko decided he wanted to be a normal human being. No more depending on his wife’s pregnancy for permission to travel. No more handing over prize money to a state that maintained the Gulag. He would go home and start the emigration process.
On May 15, 1979, Boris and his wife Anya filed their papers to emigrate to Israel. A seven-year fight for freedom was about to begin.
Karpov tried to stop it. He sent his manager, Alik Bach, to offer a deal: withdraw the emigration request and Karpov would make sure Gulko got treated well. Gulko refused. He was applying to leave in order to become free, not to become more of a slave.
Then the KGB called. Colonel Abramov repeated the same offer in his spacious Lubyanka office. Gulko still said no. Abramov threatened: “We might not release you.” Gulko replied: “You’ll release me.” Both turned out to be right. They did not release him for a long time. But they released him in the end.
The opening of the game against the KGB was complete. The middlegame was going to last seven brutal years.
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