Life as a Refusenik Chess Player Fighting the Soviet System
Continuing the retelling of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0), Chapter 2 by Boris Gulko. Last time, Gulko described his early career and the decision to apply for emigration. Now comes the hard part. What happens when the Soviet Union says “no” but won’t let you live a normal life either.
What It Meant to Be a Refusenik
The word “refusenik” sounds almost cute in English. It was not cute at all. Refuseniks were people who applied to emigrate, mostly to Israel, and got refused. But the Soviet government didn’t just say no and leave you alone. They fired you from your job. They cut you off from professional life. And they still wouldn’t let you leave.
By the early 1980s, tens of thousands of refuseniks lived in the USSR. Before the invasion of Afghanistan shut the door in 1980, many Jews rushed to apply, hoping the government would push out “undesirables” before the Moscow Olympics. There was a joke: “What will you call a Jew in the Soviet Union after the Olympics? Idiot!”
Gulko’s brother-in-law was a nuclear physicist. He ended up working in a boiler plant. That was normal. Surgeons became janitors. Engineers became elevator operators. The system punished you for wanting to leave but wouldn’t let you go.
For seven years, from 1979 to 1986, Gulko and his wife Anya lived in this limbo.
The Refusenik Underground
When you strip highly educated people of their careers but leave them in a city together, they build their own world. Moscow refuseniks organized house concerts in apartments. Scientists ran underground seminars. Painters sold work privately.
Gulko gave a talk called “Chess as a Cultural Phenomenon” at one of these apartment seminars. A cardiologist told him: “It’s been a long time since I derived such pleasure from the genre of conversation.” A chess lecture in someone’s living room was the highlight of your intellectual week. That was refusenik life.
But the KGB could shut it down at any moment. Once, Gulko got invited to a math seminar organized by Professor Viktor Brailovsky. Before going, he heard on Voice of America that Brailovsky had been arrested the night before. They wouldn’t meet for years.
Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I remember these stories from older relatives. The randomness of it. You go to sleep planning a lecture and wake up to learn the lecturer is in prison.
Gulko’s First Fight Back
More than a year passed after Gulko submitted his emigration application. No response. Silence was the answer. So the Gulkos decided to fight.
Their first move was a week-long hunger strike in November 1980, timed to the World Chess Olympiad in Malta. Gulko sent letters to chess federations asking for support, but regular mail abroad went straight to the KGB. The dissident writer Georgi Vladimov helped send them through diplomatic channels.
The hunger strike produced two unexpected results. First, the authorities allowed Gulko back into official tournaments. Second, it gave him renal colic. A young doctor told him he had appendicitis. Gulko pointed out his appendix had been removed ten years earlier.
The Gulkos decided to play in tournaments again. Keep winning, embarrass the officials, and maybe they’ll let us go just to get rid of us.
Winning the Tournament Nobody Wanted Him In
Anya played first. She entered the Moscow women’s championship in early 1981 and won easily.
Then Boris. The Moscow men’s championship in May 1981 had thirteen grandmasters. The organizers did not want Gulko in. He wrote a complaint letter to the Central Committee. He got in. During his refusenik years, Gulko wrote so many complaint letters he calls himself “a consummate master” at writing them.
And he ruined their tournament. He won convincingly. Sovetsky Sport covered each round by describing seven of eight games, skipping Gulko’s. But they had to print the standings. Gulko’s name was always first.
The real show was the closing ceremony. Officials sat behind a long table praising each other. After they finished, Gulko walked up and read an open letter about Igor Kortschnoi.
Viktor Kortschnoi’s son Igor had been arrested to pressure his father before the 1978 world championship match against Karpov. A second match was coming up in Italy, and Igor was still in prison. Gulko’s letter called it “humiliating for Karpov” and ended with: “The shadow of prison bars must not fall on the chessboard.”
Dead silence. One official managed to say: “Unclear.” People filed out without speaking. On the stairs, an old man silently shook Gulko’s hand. Voice of America reported the speech that evening. The New York Times ran it on the front page.
Karpov’s manager told Gulko that “Anatoly is furious” because he had “ruined everything.” It apparently never occurred to Karpov that chess could be played with opponents on equal footing.
The KGB Tries to Stop Him (and Fails)
In autumn 1981, the KGB accidentally helped Gulko win a tournament. The First League of the USSR Championship in Volgodonsk was a qualifier. Two officials arrived with instructions to stop Gulko.
They found a player named Rashkovsky who had never been allowed to travel abroad. The deal: beat Gulko, get sent to a tournament in Romania.
Rashkovsky was so nervous he lost both his “insurance” game and his final round against Gulko. Gulko won the tournament. Rashkovsky asked the Central Committee of Kazakhstan to include him in the USSR Championship since he’d been “struck down defending the motherland against a visa applicant.” They said no. No Romania either.
Gulko kept the 800-ruble first prize. A nice sum for a refusenik household.
Lost Battles
In 1982, the Gulkos escalated. Demonstrations and hunger strikes, the only weapons refuseniks had.
They planned a demonstration at the Interzonal tournament in Moscow. The KGB moved the tournament to the Sport Hotel, surrounded by a high fence with one entrance. They deployed an entire battalion of troops. Closed the tournament to the public for the first time in Soviet history. All to stop two chess players with a sign.
On demonstration day, the Gulkos left at 5 a.m. They’d learned to write plans on paper, then flush them down the toilet. (Gulko wondered if the KGB would fish the paper out, but decided “such malodorous work was not in their line of duty.”)
They unrolled their poster, “Let us go to Israel.” An enormous, bald KGB agent came running “in giant leaps” like “a running orangutan,” tore up the poster, and dragged them to a police car. At the station, the investigator wanted to know about a second poster. They’d discussed making one but were too lazy. The KGB knew about it anyway, the apartment was bugged.
The next day, Gulko got a pass to the tournament from a friendly chess master. At the entrance, a smaller bald KGB agent appeared and started punching him. He used his briefcase as a shield but didn’t hit back, because assaulting a government official carried prison time.
A district prosecutor warned Gulko about criminal charges. Walking home, he reflected. No hatred for the prosecutor, the informants, or the KGB man who punched him. They were doing their jobs. He hated the anonymous people at the top who decided his fate. And the system that made him their slave since birth.
“One could feel one’s slavery only by trying to act like a free person,” he writes.
The 38-Day Hunger Strike
In October 1982, Gulko began an open-ended hunger strike timed to the World Chess Olympiad in Lucerne. Anya joined ten days later. The KGB disconnected his parents’ phone. His father, a war veteran, couldn’t get the line restored for six months.
A prolonged fast is brutal. Gulko lost one kilogram per day for fifteen days. His vision deteriorated. He couldn’t read or watch TV. His arms and legs became sticks. On the bright side, he could easily get into the lotus posture.
Kortschnoi wore a T-shirt with “BORIS GULKO” on it at a press conference during the Olympiad. The Dutch grandmaster Van der Wiel wore one while playing against the Soviet team.
Then on day twenty, Brezhnev died.
The world forgot about the hunger strike. Friends advised using Brezhnev’s death as an excuse to stop. But Gulko couldn’t waste twenty days of suffering. He continued to day thirty-eight, approaching the point where the body starts consuming brain proteins.
Brezhnev’s replacement, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief, was even harder to deal with. Neither demonstrations nor hunger strikes had produced results. The battle was lost. The war continued.
Previous: Boris Gulko’s First Encounters