How Chess Became the Soviet Union's Favorite Political Weapon
The foreword of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written by Boris Gulko. He’s one of the very few people who held both the USSR and US chess championships. And he spent seven years as a “refusenik,” trapped in the Soviet Union, fighting the KGB just for the right to leave. So when he writes about chess and Soviet power, he knows exactly what he’s talking about.
Why Chess Was Different in the USSR
For regular Soviet citizens, chess was one of the few honest things in the country. Think about it. In a system where your career depended on Communist Party membership and your ethnic background, chess was purely about skill. Nobody could fake a win on the board.
And for the lucky ones who made it as professional players, chess meant a decent income. But here’s what really mattered: it meant travel abroad. In a country sealed behind the Iron Curtain, getting to play in a foreign tournament was the ultimate prize.
In return, chess players brought international prestige to the regime. Soviet players were the strongest in the world, and the government loved showing that off. So it was a deal. Players got relative freedom. The state got propaganda wins.
But here’s the problem. The Soviet government wasn’t satisfied with just having a chess federation. They assigned the KGB, the secret police, to supervise chess players full time. Every top grandmaster had the KGB watching over their shoulder.
Botvinnik and the Government’s Helping Hand
Gulko starts the history with Mikhail Botvinnik, the first Soviet world champion. Botvinnik was a true believer in communism. He wanted to bring the world title to the USSR. And the government wanted that too.
So when the famous AVRO tournament in the Netherlands came around in 1938, the original invite went to Grigory Levenfish, the USSR champion. But the government didn’t trust Levenfish enough to let him leave the country. They sent Botvinnik instead.
During the 1948 world championship tournament, things got even stranger. Botvinnik was called to a meeting with Andrey Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s top men. Zhdanov basically asked Botvinnik if he’d like the other Soviet players to lose to him on purpose, so that the American grandmaster Reshevsky wouldn’t win.
Botvinnik was so shocked he couldn’t speak. When he recovered, he refused. But the stress was real. He lost his very next game, to Reshevsky of all people.
World Champions and the KGB Dance
Gulko goes through the world champions one by one, and the picture is fascinating.
Vasily Smyslov, who beat Botvinnik in 1957, privately called the Soviet government “demonic.” But he also wrote letters to powerful fans in the government to get his rivals pulled from tournaments so he could take their spots. You do what you have to do.
Tigran Petrosian, the ninth world champion, actively worked as a KGB informer.
Mikhail Tal, the genius from Riga, didn’t want anything to do with politics. He just wanted to play chess. But the government kept blocking him from tournaments. To keep playing, he signed a nasty letter against Kortschnoi when Kortschnoi defected, and became a coach for Karpov. It was the price of doing what he loved.
Boris Spassky was the first real dissident among world champions. He refused to sign propaganda letters. He openly mocked Lenin in front of KGB-connected officials. He told Gulko that his loss to Bobby Fischer was partly caused by the KGB’s meddling with his preparation. “They destroyed me,” Spassky said. When Spassky wanted to marry a French embassy employee, the KGB tried to infect her underclothes with venereal disease. Yes, really. That’s in the book.
Karpov, Kortschnoi, and the Political War
Here’s where things get really heavy. Anatoly Karpov, the twelfth world champion, was a KGB agent with the code name “Raoul.” The book confirms this. Karpov used his KGB connections brilliantly. He could decide which players got to travel abroad, so other grandmasters had to work as his coaches and assistants if they wanted careers.
Viktor Kortschnoi was the opposite. After losing to Karpov in 1974, Kortschnoi was attacked in the press, stripped of his title, had his income cut, and was banned from traveling. When they finally let him go abroad for a tournament, he never came back.
And here’s the darkest part. During a Chess Olympiad in 1990, Mikhail Tal told Kortschnoi that if Kortschnoi had actually beaten Karpov for the world championship, the KGB would have killed him. When this conversation was published, a KGB-connected editor dismissed it as a joke. But the book confirms it. Kortschnoi’s murder was actually being planned.
When Kortschnoi defected, the KGB imprisoned his son Igor as a hostage. Karpov played two world championship matches against Kortschnoi while his own organization held his opponent’s child in prison. Think about that for a moment.
Gulko’s Own Battle
Gulko’s personal story is wild. In 1979, Karpov’s manager offered Gulko a spot in the most prestigious tournament of the time, in Tilburg. The condition? Withdraw his emigration request. Gulko refused.
So began seven years as a refusenik. The KGB went all in. They bugged his apartment around the clock. They assigned surveillance teams. They threw all their resources at breaking one chess player and his wife Anya.
At one point, Gulko was dragged to the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, to meet a general who introduced himself as a colonel (apparently to seem less threatening). The whole point was to scare him. Gulko says all he felt was curiosity.
What makes this funny, in a dark way, is that with all their wiretapping and surveillance, the KGB kept failing. Gulko and his wife staged demonstrations and outmaneuvered their watchers again and again. The KGB officer assigned to his case, Lieutenant Colonel Perfiliev, expected easy victories. Instead, he collected one bungled failure after another.
After seven years, Gulko and his wife won. They got out.
Why This Book Is Different
Here’s what makes The KGB Plays Chess special. Most stories about the KGB and chess came from the players’ side. They could tell you what happened to them but not why, or what was being said in KGB offices.
This book has a former KGB lieutenant colonel, Vladimir Popov, as one of its authors. He actually worked on the “chess front.” Combined with historian Yuri Felshtinsky’s research and Kortschnoi’s firsthand experience, you get the story from both sides for the first time.
Gulko ends his foreword with a small but telling story. In 2007, Garry Kasparov was arrested and thrown into solitary confinement for five days. For nothing, really. Just political activity. And who came to visit him in jail? Anatoly Karpov, his old rival, the KGB agent. Karpov brought Kasparov a chess journal to pass the time.
As Gulko puts it, this “could serve as a symbol of the care that chess players have received from the KGB.”
Five of the six main chess players in this book fought against the KGB. All five achieved their goals, whether it was leaving the USSR, winning a championship despite rigged conditions, or simply surviving. The victories cost years of imprisonment for loved ones, ruined careers, and shattered nerves. But as chess players know, victories always come with a price.
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