Final Thoughts on The KGB Plays Chess - Why This Book Still Matters
This is the twelfth and final post in my series retelling The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0, Russell Enterprises, 2010). Over the past eleven posts we covered every chapter, every author, every story in this book. Now I want to step back, take a breath, and talk about what all of it means.
What We Covered
Here is the full list, in case you missed anything or want to go back:
- The KGB Plays Chess - Intro
- How Chess Became the Soviet Union’s Favorite Political Weapon
- How the KGB Controlled Soviet Athletes
- Spies, Defectors, and Chess Players
- Karpov vs Kortschnoi and the KGB
- Boris Gulko’s First Encounters
- Life as a Refusenik Chess Player
- Years Without Time and Moscow Dissidents
- Storming the Castle and Finding Freedom
- Viktor Kortschnoi’s Afterword
- A Letter From the KGB Officer
We went through the whole thing. From the KGB’s sports machine to individual spy operations. From rigged world championship matches to Gulko’s seven years as a refusenik. From Kortschnoi’s defection to Popov’s quiet confession.
What Makes This Book Unique
I have read a lot of chess books and a lot of Cold War books. This one stands apart for one simple reason: it has four authors, and they come from four completely different sides of the same story.
Boris Gulko was inside the system. He was USSR champion, had a comfortable career ahead of him, and chose to fight for his right to leave. He paid for it with seven years of his life.
Vladimir Popov was the system. He was a KGB lieutenant colonel who spent his career watching over athletes and chess players. He saw the machine from the control room.
Yuri Felshtinsky is the historian. He co-authored a book with Alexander Litvinenko, the FSB officer who was poisoned with polonium in London. Felshtinsky knows how to work with intelligence sources and put them into context.
Viktor Kortschnoi broke free from the system. He defected, played two world championship matches against the Soviet state’s chosen champion, and lived to tell about it. The KGB held his son hostage while he played.
No other book I know of puts all four perspectives together. You get the victim’s story, the oppressor’s confession, the historian’s analysis, and the rebel’s account. All in one place.
The Moments That Stuck With Me
Some things from this book I keep thinking about months after finishing it.
The story of how the KGB planned to kill Kortschnoi if he won the world championship. Not maybe, not hypothetically. They had a plan. Mikhail Tal told Kortschnoi about it years later, almost casually, at a Chess Olympiad.
Gulko sitting in his bugged apartment for seven years, knowing every word was being recorded, and still refusing to give in. The KGB threw everything at him. Surveillance teams, threats, arrests. He beat them by simply not breaking.
Popov’s letter at the end. Here is a man who spent decades as a KGB officer, moved to Canada, and then sat down to write about what he did. Not to justify it. Not really to apologize either. Just to say: this is what happened. I was part of it. That takes something.
And Karpov visiting Kasparov in prison in 2007 with a chess magazine. The KGB’s chosen champion, bringing reading material to a political prisoner. That scene is so perfectly Soviet it almost feels like fiction. But it happened.
Why It Still Matters
You might think this is all ancient history. The USSR collapsed in 1991. The KGB was officially dissolved. The Cold War ended. Why should anyone care in 2019?
Because the patterns never stopped.
State control of sports did not end with the Soviet Union. We saw it with Russia’s systematic doping program that got exposed before the 2016 Olympics. An entire country’s sports apparatus was rigged, just like the chess world was rigged decades earlier. Different sport, same playbook.
Political interference in competitions still happens. Athletes from authoritarian countries still get pressured to lose, to boycott, to make political statements. Iranian judokas have been ordered to withdraw from matches rather than face Israeli opponents. Chinese athletes face consequences for speaking out. The details change. The dynamic does not.
And the thing about individuals standing up against the system, that is timeless. Gulko could have withdrawn his emigration application and gone back to a comfortable life as a top grandmaster. Kortschnoi could have stayed in the USSR and kept his head down. Popov could have stayed silent. None of them did.
Who Should Read This Book
If you are into chess history, this is essential reading. Full stop. The Karpov-Kortschnoi rivalry makes a lot more sense when you understand what was happening behind the scenes.
If you are interested in Cold War history or how authoritarian systems work, this book gives you a ground-level view that no academic history can match. These are the people who lived it, on both sides.
If you grew up in a post-Soviet country, like I did, you will recognize things. The bureaucratic cruelty. The absurdity of the system. The way people found small ways to resist. It will feel familiar in ways that are both funny and not funny at all.
And if you just like a good story, honestly, this book delivers. It has spies, defections, hunger strikes, bugged apartments, world championship drama, and people risking everything for the right to make their own choices. You cannot make this stuff up.
My Final Take
The KGB Plays Chess is not a perfect book. The writing is uneven because it has four different authors with four different styles. Some sections are dense with names and dates. The translation from Russian can feel stiff in places.
But none of that matters. What matters is that four people who were there, on opposite sides of one of the strangest chapters in sports history, sat down and told their stories. Together. In one book.
Gulko fought the system and won his freedom. Kortschnoi defected and survived. Felshtinsky documented it all. And Popov, the KGB man, broke his silence.
That combination will probably never happen again. If you care about chess, or history, or just about what happens when ordinary people refuse to cooperate with power, read this book.
Thank you for following this series. It was a long ride. Twelve posts. But this book deserved it.
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Back to the beginning: The KGB Plays Chess - Intro