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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice story but it's wrong, Russia has had a strong reputation in Chess since the 1700s several hundred years before Krylenko's chess schools.

Merim Bilalić's team did an extensive study that was published by the Royal Society to find out why there are so few strong female chess players. Their study concluded it was purely statistics, less female players overall meant that there were less female outliers (i.e great players).

I imagine something similar is at play here.

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I used to play chess a little as a kid and what I know is in more agreement with the article than with what you say. Prior to the Soviet chess explosion there used to be great Russian players (Chigorin, Petrov) but also many great players from other countries (Philidor, Anderssen, Morphy, Zukertort.) If you look at the official list of world champions, there was only one Russian champion (Alekhine) before 1948 and only one non-Soviet champion between 1948 and the collapse of the Soviet Union (Bobby Fischer, and I read he learned Russian to have access to first-class chess literature.)

In the SU the chess players enjoyed privileges unavailable to the general population, e.g., they could travel abroad (at least as long as they were winning, I read that Taimanov had his passport confiscated after losing to Fischer in the Candidates Match.) They also were favored at the higher education institutions, i.e., as a successful chess player you didn't have to study much to pass and get a degree.

As an aside, I heard from a guy who knew David Bronstein personally that Bronstein could have easily won the World Championship from Botvinnik in 1951, but it was made clear to him that it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik. Bronstein according to my friend was a broken man after that, became excessively extravagant and never played with the same strength again.

You say: "it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik". What, Botvinnik was not Jewish? That's news to me. I am sure there may have been some pressure, perhaps a lot of pressure, but Jewishness is unlikely to have played a role.

He was? That's news to me but you well may be right. I could have confused the details it's been a while. I remember there was a game in that match which was interrupted till the next day (they used to do it after I believe 40 moves) at the endgame stage and Bronstein made an elementary mistake the next day. Anything's possible but it's hard to believe that a player at this level would have made such mistake after having the whole day to analyze the position.

Just with pure Wikipedia-ing... Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik was an assimilated Jew. Bronstein might have seemed "more Jewish" for all I know and so not have been considered desirable.

Also, terrible mistakes aren't unheard of in this level of play - I remember an account of the Karpov/Korchnoi match mentioning a few. The pressure in such a high level match is intense. Remember, no one has a day to analyze their next move. One player seals their move and it isn't revealed till the next day. True, they each get to think about the position in general but that's harder.

I think this is politics, not racism. Botvinnik was a stone communist and the party's fair haired boy. That's why the fix was in.

I actually met him in Toronto in 1977.

Actually, if chess strength is judged by chess champions, the US was stronger than Russia in the 19th century.

Further, a quick look at Wikipedia shows that modern Chess as such did not really even exist in the 1700s. Modern Chess theory, based on position and piece value, originated in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century. Chess strength of any sort before that is irrelevant.

So basically, the article is right.

It's farcical to say that without modern chess theory you can't measure chess ability.

Russia had a strong reputation because strong players from other countries played against Russian players and lost. Have a look at Murray's A History of Chess (1913) it mentions a few accounts of Russia's strong chess abilities significantly pre-dating positional/piece value theory.

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