Pawns of cold war warriors

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The opening of the match. The audience has since dwindled to 75 Chess spread to Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries from India where it was already several hundred years old.

The feudal style of chess has survived the capitalist epoch-kings have not nor pawns workers.

And even in the workers' states, where for the first time in history chess has become a genuinely popular game, knights on horseback have not given way to political commissars.

Innovations

But both the game itself and its players have fundamentally changed.

Early chess was a rather tedious game compared with the modern one. It was not until the early 16th centüry that a series of innovations were made to the game in Europe which was to make it much more fast-moving and challenging Continuous tension It was this which created the special quality of the modern game which as any player knows is one of continuous tension resulting from the continuous possibility of imminent defeat if a mistake is made.

Modern chess is a game of incredible complexity.

If all the human beings who have ever lived had done nothing but play chess then they would not have played between them more than an infinitessimal fraction of the number of possible games.

This is why while computers can easily be programmed to become perfect players of noughts and crosses and unbeatable draughts players, no-one has yet programmed a computer ic re more than a mediocre chess player wwhich is itself ::e achievement).

The popularity of chess did not really spread widely until the capitalist epoch turned the game into one of Korchnoi international competition with sponsors and, of course, profits.

Appropriately the first significant international tournament was staged • as part of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

After that tournaments became very frequent and in 1886 the world champion system (organised very much like the World Champions of boxing) was established, though at first the world , champions played whoever and whenever they liked.

It was not until 1948 that The International Chess Federation brought order to the world championship and opened an era of 20 years undisputed Soviet dominance.

The first of this generation of great Soviet players was Botvinnik, who at the age of 25 shared first prize with the veteran Cuban player Capablanca in a tournament in Nottingham in 1936.

Soviet chess first received official encouragementalong with many other sports- after the October revolution. The Third International even established a 'Sportsintern'.

Easy to produce

But chess was especially privileged for many reasons -its exceptional intellectual qualities (some argued it helped dialectieal thinking), and because the equipment required was very easy to produce.

In the Soviet Union in 1923 there were 1,000 registered chess players. By 1934 this number had risen to 500,000 and is now several millions.

Stalin encouraged hothouse cultivation of the best players- including material privileges- to gain international prestige; a policy which bore fruit at just the right moment to divert attention from the Stalin purges of the late 30s.

Botvinnik. "sent" a telegram to Stalin saying:

"Dearly beloved teacher and leader . ... 1 am infinitely happy to be able to report that a representative of Soviet Chess has shared first place in the tournament with ex-world champion Capablanca . . . Inspired by your great slogan "catch up and surpass" I am glad that I have been able to realise it"

In 1948 Botvinnik became the first World Champion under the new rules co-ordinated by the FIDE.

And from then until 1972 not only all holders of the world championship but also all the challengers were Soviet citizens.

"Medieval battles"

But in 1972 it was an Bobby Fischer, who won the right to challenge the champion Spassky.

For the capitalist media in the USA Fischer's battle against Spassky in Iceland took on the same kind of significance as the spacerace-or a modern version of the medieval battles of king's champions.

And the Soviet chess Karpoy authorities took the sami attitude.

Fischer won in 1972 but then three years later failed to turn up to defend his title against the new Soviet challenger Anatoly Karpov, who consequently took the World Championship by default.

The battle for the right to challenge Karpov resolved itself into a famous match, held last year in Yugoslavia, betwee en the exchampion Boris Sp assky and Victor Korchnoi, who had both been leading players in the Soviet Union' for many years.

Korchnoi had in 1976 defected to the west and Spassky had, more quietly, done the same, though his residence in Paris was officially sanctioned by the Soviet bureaucracy.

The Soviet chess authorities decided to back the semi-defector against the total defector. But as in Iceland, their support turned out to be the kiss of death.

Erratic play

After three weeks of eccentric behaviour from Spassky, paranoia from Kor= chnoi and erratic play on both sides, Korchnoi won the right to challenge for the championship.

This is being staged in Baguio City in the Phillipines, sponsored financially by the Marcos dictatorship and a number of capitalists.

Up to August 17 11 games had been played and each player had one win.

The prevalence of draws is already alarming the sponsors who, it is reported, are finding the whole thing much less profitable than they expected.

Once again in Baguio City it is the cold war atmosphere and the psychological battle which is overshadowing the chess.

Korchnoi has continually protested, for instance, that he is being hypnotised by a Soviet "para-psychologist"

who is one of Karpov's supporters.

Encouraged by their seconds, the players have already reached an extreme level of personal bitterness.

They have, for instance, abandoned shaking hands before games and now only communicate through the referee.

Hysterical

The main responsibility for this atmosphere, which is designed to upset the usually phlegmatic Karpov, seems to lie with the small group • of hysterical anticommunist seconds* with whom Korchnoi has surrounded himself-the leading one being the British grandmaster Raymond Keene.

They organised a provocative party to celebrate the anniversary of Korchnoi's defection from the USSR and have kept up a revolting stream of vitriolic abuse against Karpov and his seconds.

In a series of undistinguished games Korchnoi has had more positional advantages but has failed to carry them through to victories.

But Karpov lost the 11th game through an elementary error which can only be explained by severe psychological pressure from the hysterical antics of the Korchnoi camp and from his own anxious backers in the Soviet chess establishment.

After Karpov, still only 27, The Soviet Union have no younger players capable of beating Korchnoi, Fischer if he returns, or even the best European players.

After a golden age on the world stage Soviet chess looks to be heading for stalemate.

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SOCIALIS Wedi 23 Aus age

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