A small row of three beautiful red books takes a prominent place in one of my bookcases. They are the three parts of a series Masterpieces and Drama’s of the Soviet Championships. Written by the Russian chess historian Sergey Voronkov (b. 1954), they were published between 2020 and 2022 by the firm Elk and Ruby. The bright red is the color of Soviet Communism, which does not mean that Voronkov is a supporter of it. With photos, documents and caricatures, the books tell not only about the history of Soviet chess, but also about the often gruesome general history of the country.
Together they have 1582 pages. At the end, Voronkov addresses the question of whether he will continue the series, which is now only about the championships from 1920 to 1953.
He wasn’t quite sure. There were so many other projects, for example a planned series of four volumes about David Bronstein (1924-2006), who had given him his chess archives.
One of those other projects is the first volume of what is to become a four-part series about Alexander Alekhine: The Russian Sphinx: Volume 1 (1892-1921), published by Elk and Ruby earlier this year.
It has been translated from Russian by Alexei Zakharov, who was also responsible for combing through the digital archives.
This has been done in an impressively thorough way. I was pleased that in the introduction, an article by me was quoted from the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad of October 31, 1992, in which I had written about a remark attributed to Botvinnik that so much had been written about Alekhine by Kotov and Flohr, that the truth no longer had a chance. I think Voronkov used my quote to emphasize that he was more conscientious than Alexander Kotov.
I also saw a quote from the Groene Amsterdammer, a magazine in which I have a weekly chess column. One of my great predecessors there was Savielly Tartakower.
On June 1, 1935, Salo Landau, who would be Alekhine’s second in his match for the world championship against Max Euwe, wrote in the Groene:
I remember that I once sat at his table as a chess journalist during a tournament, while Mrs. Alekhine had taken a seat on the other side of the table. The master, who knew me as a chain smoker, had prepared a large box of cigarettes for me. I noticed how, in the heat of the battle, he stole glances at the box, as if he could get help from there in the difficult dilemma. Perhaps unconsciously, his hand suddenly shot in the direction of the forbidden fruit, but Mrs. Alekhine immediately warned: Leave that alone, Sasha! And obediently as a child, the great man submitted.
This concerns the fourth Mrs. Alekhine. The fifth would come shortly afterwards. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 were there between 1918 and 1921. That quote from Landau is from 1935 and the book was supposed to be about the period from 1892 to 1921. It shows that it often goes off in all directions. Readers may sometimes feel lost in the abundance of material and are not helped by the fact that there is no index. But there is a lot to make up for that.
Alekhine was not a nice person. That was already known from chess literature and in this new book, it is amply confirmed, for example by testimonies of pupils who had sat next to him at school.
Nice or not, Alekhine had the most sensational life story of all the world champions. In 1914 he played in an international tournament in Mannheim when World War I broke out. The Russians in Mannheim were arrested as enemy citizens. Alekhine managed to convince a German doctor – who didn’t care all that much – that he was weak and on the point of death, so that he was allowed to return to Moscow via a long detour.
From 1916 onwards he worked at the front for the Russian Red Cross and was seriously wounded. He then fulfilled various other functions for the Russian government, but in 1918, a year after the Bolshevik revolution, he suddenly left for the Ukraine, which was still in the hands of supporters of the old regime.
According to Voronkov, he did this because in September 1918, the Red Terror had been declared in Russia. I always thought this expression had been minted by opponents of that terror, but that was not the case.
A photo in the book shows a procession with a large banner with the text: “Death to the Bourgeoisie and its henchmen! Long Live the Red Terror!!” The banner had a skull on it, and it was indeed the beginning of mass executions.
Alekhine, an almost aristocratic representative of the upper class, was a strong candidate to become a victim of the terror. Ukraine was also conquered by the Bolsheviks and in 1919 Alekhine was arrested there and sentenced to death.
Because of his chess connections he was spared, he was allowed to return to Moscow and there he was given all kinds of functions in the service of the new regime. As a translator for the Comintern, the Communist International, he travelled to the Urals and Siberia.
On that journey he met Anneliese Rüegg, a Swiss writer who had started the journey as an admirer of the Communist revolution but would change her views drastically.
She became pregnant from Alekhine, they married, and thanks to his marriage to her (wife number 3, while according to Voronkov he was also still married to number 2) he was able to leave Russia in 1921.
In the meantime, in 1920, he had won the tournament, then called the All-Russian Olympiad, which was later considered the first championship of the Soviet Union, although that Union was not officially founded until 1922.
Three more volumes to go, about the rise and fall of a man with great gifts and great flaws. In this first volume Voronkov already hinted at the rumor that Alekhine may have been murdered, but without showing his cards. I can hardly wait for the sequels.
Click here to view the game Rabinovich-Alekhine, 1st USSR Championship, Moscow 1920