Boris Gulko, Vladimir Popov,
Yuri Felshtinsky & Viktor Kortschnoi
2010
Russell Enterprises, Inc.
Milford, CT USA
The KGB Plays Chess
The Soviet Secret Police and the Fight for the World Chess Crown by Boris Gulko, Vladimir Popov, Yuri Felshtinsky & Viktor Kortschnoi
ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0
© Copyright 2010
Boris Gulko, Vladimir Popov, Yuri Felshtinsky & Viktor Kortschnoi
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any manner or form whatsoever or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Cover design by Janel Lowrance
Printed in the United States of America
About the Authors
Foreword
Boris Gulko
The KGB Plays Chess
Vladimir Popov and Yuri Felshtinksy
The Letter “Lahmed” Problem
Boris Gulko
1. First Encounters
2. The Weekdays of a Grandmaster
3. Our Game Against the KGB: The Opening
4. The World of a Refusenik
5. The First Battles
6. Lost Battles
7. Years Without Time
8. Games around the Chessboard
9. Moscow Dissidents
10. Storming the Castle
11. Breakthrough
12. Freedom
Afterword
Viktor Kortschnoi
Letter from Vladimir Popov
Vladimir Popov
Index
List of Other eBooks
Boris Gulko, born in Germany in 1947, grew up in Moscow. Gulko graduated from Moscow State University with a major in psychology and worked as a research associate for four years.
In 1975, Gulko became an international master and a professional chess player, and in 1976, a grandmaster. Gulko was USSR chess champion in 1977 and twice champion of Moscow.
For seven years, from 1979 to 1986, Gulko was a “refusenik.” After a difficult struggle, which included three hunger strikes and a month of daily demonstrations and arrests, Gulko and his family emigrated to the United States.
Gulko won the U.S. chess championship in 1994 and 1999. In 1994, he was one of eight candidates for a match for the world championship, and in 2000, one of 16 participants in the 1/8 final for the world championship. Gulko has won numerous international and national chess tournaments, and he has a plus record against Garry Kasparov (three wins, one loss, four draws).
Gulko’s articles and essays, both on chess-related and non-chess-related topics, have been published in the United States, Israel, and Russia.
Vladimir Popov was born on August 8, 1947 in Moscow. In 1966, he was drafted into the Soviet Army, serving in East Germany until 1969. From 1969 to 1972, he worked as a test engineer in Ilyushin’s design office.
From 1972 to 1974, Popov worked in the Tenth Department of the KGB, as a clerk in the Secretariat and junior operative in the Second Division (background checks on individuals traveling abroad). In 1974, he graduated from the All-Union Correspondence Law Institute (now the Law Academy of Russia). From 1974 to 1977, he served as junior operative and then operative in the Second Division of the First Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB (this division oversaw all associations of creative professionals). In 1975, he completed a special course of study at the KGB’s Higher Education School (while continuing to work as an operative).
Between 1977 and 1989, Popov served as operative and then senior operative in the Third Division of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB (this division oversaw international sports exchange channels). In 1986, he graduated from the International Department of the University of Marxism-Leninism, where he had been enrolled as a correspondence student, while continuing to work as an operative.
In 1989 and 1990, Popov served as deputy head of the Twelfth Group of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB (coordinating work with “friends” – the state security services of the Warsaw Pact countries).
In January 1990, Popov tendered his resignation, but was not dismissed immediately. From the beginning of 1990 until October 1991, he served as a consultant for the KGB’s Center of Public Relations (the KGB’s former press office).
During the attempted August Putsch in 1991, Popov refused to go along with the KGB’s activities on the very first day of the putsch, August 19. He was dismissed in October 1991 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1996, he immigrated to Canada, where he lives at the present time.
Yuri Felshtinsky was born in Moscow in 1956. In 1974, he began studying history at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. In 1978, he immigrated to the United States and continued studying history, first at Brandeis University, then at Rutgers, where he received a Ph.D. in history in 1988. In 1993, he defended a doctoral dissertation at the History Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, becoming the first foreign citizen to receive a doctoral degree in Russia. Felshtinsky has compiled, edited, and annotated several dozen volumes of archival documents in Russian history. His own books include The Bolsheviks and the Left SRs (1985), Towards a History of Our Isolation (1988); The Failure of the World Revolution (1991); Lenin and His Comrades (2010); Blowing up Russia (with Alexander Litvinenko, 2007); The Corporation: Russia and the KGB in the Age of President Putin (with Vladimir Pribylovsky, 2008).
Viktor Kortschnoi was born in 1931 in Leningrad. Kortschnoi graduated from Leningrad State University with a major in history. He became first a Soviet, then a Swiss chess player. A grandmaster, Kortschnoi first qualified as a candidate for the world championship in 1962.
Kortschnoi was a four-time USSR chess champion (1960, 1962, 1964, 1970), a two-time winner of interzonal tournaments (1973, 1987) and candidates tournaments (1977, 1980), and a five-time European champion. Kortschnoi participated in world chess matches in 1978 and 1981 (both times against Anatoly Karpov), and in a candidates final in 1974 (also against Karpov).
Because of restrictions placed on him by the KGB and the Soviet government, he defected from the Soviet Union after a tournament in Amsterdam in the summer of 1976, settled in Switzerland, and obtained a Swiss citizenship in 1994. Kortschnoi plays for Switzerland in international competitions.
by Boris Gulko
For Soviet people, chess was a source of things that were in extremely short supply in the former superpower: freedom of expression without ideological control and honest competition whose outcome was determined not by membership in the Communist Party and the “right” ethnic profile, but by individual merit. For the lucky ones who were able to earn a living by playing chess, the game meant a decent income and even – the prize most coveted by those who were cut off from the world by the Iron Curtain – trips to matches abroad. In return for relative freedom, chess players brought international prestige to the Soviet regime: Soviet chess players were the strongest in the world.
And being as mindless as it in fact was, the Soviet regime provided this form of competition and recreation that it found to be so “profitable” for itself not only with a chess federation, and not only with its own department at the Sports Committee of the USSR, but also with constant supervision by the “armed wing of the Communist party,” the KGB.
Because of the clandestine nature of the KGB’s activities, accounts of its work with leading Soviet chess players have been few and far between, and above all, one-sided, coming mainly from chess players who had the unpleasant experience of running up against the KGB’s “nurturing care” in their professional lives. We now have a unique opportunity to become acquainted with the KGB’s work on the “chess front” from inside this organization itself, since former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Popov – one of the fighters on the KGB’s “chess front,” who has relocated to the West – and the historian Yuri Felshtinsky have written an account of the KGB’s activities among athletes, and in particular, chess players.
Before talking about their book, let me say a few words about the history of the relationship between the Soviet Union’s leading chess players and its government.
Mikhail Botvinnik, the founder of the Soviet school of chess and the first Soviet world champion, was an ideological Communist, although an idiosyncratic one. From his youth, he set himself the goal of bringing the world championship title to his country. And as is well known from Communist theory and practice, the ends justify the means. Thus, while it was Grigory Levenfish, the chess champion of the USSR, who was invited to attend the AVRO chess tournament in the Netherlands in 1938 – one of the most celebrated tournaments at which the world’s eight top chess players competed to determine a challenger for the world champion – it was Mikhail Botvinnik, not Levenfish, who actually ended up going to this tournament (the Soviet government did not trust Levenfish and was afraid to allow him to leave the country).
Did the government make it easier or harder for Botvinnik to win? Evidently, it did both. In the middle of the 1948 world championship tournament, which brought Botvinnik the world title, the grandmaster was summoned to a meeting of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Andrey Zhdanov, one of Joseph Stalin’s closest collaborators, told Botvinnik:
“We are afraid that Reshevsky (the great American grandmaster) will become world champion. How would you like it if the Soviet participants lost to you on purpose?”
“I lost the ability to speak,” Botvinnik recalled. “Why did Zhdanov have to humiliate me? When I regained the ability to speak, I categorically rejected his offer.”
Naturally, such an upheaval could not have passed without having any effect, and Botvinnik lost his next game in the tournament – against none other than Reshevsky.
Vasily Smyslov, who took the world championship title away from Botvinnik for one year in 1957, was not the “Soviet man” that the Communist Party imagined him to be. In 1977, when I was barred from all tournaments for one year for refusing to sign a letter against Kortschnoi, I served as Smyslov’s coach at a competition in Leningrad, held on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Bolshevik putsch. Smyslov, a religious Christian, described the Soviet government to me as “demonic” during our walks around the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. However, in an age when the possibility to travel to a major tournament was decided not by an invitation from its organizers or by one’s titles, but by the decree of bureaucrats at the Sports Committee, Smyslov made shrewd use of this “demonic government.” He wrote letters to his fans in the upper echelons of the government, got his rivals withdrawn from tournaments, and took their places for himself.
Tigran Petrosian, the ninth world champion – the next in age after Smyslov, although not the next in chronological order – was not a member of the party, as far as I know, but actively collaborated with the KGB. The fact that Petrosian was an informer for the KGB is mentioned in this book.
The unforgettable Mikhail Tal, the eighth world champion, did not collaborate with the KGB, was apolitical, and took a lot of grief from the government, the party, and the KGB. The only thing that he strived for in life was to participate in tournaments. But the government, for some reason, needed to have the genius from Riga not participate in tournaments. Tal accepted compromises in order to satisfy his “all-consuming passion for self-expression,” as Gennadi Sosonko characterized Tal’s attitude toward chess in his sketch about him. Tal signed a dirty philippic against Kortschnoi when the latter defected. Before that, Tal had already become a coach to the “party’s darling,” Karpov, giving him a great deal of help in his world championship matches against Kortschnoi. This allowed Tal to play in several significant tournaments and to win not a few wonderful games.
It is said that Tal’s work with Karpov came to a sudden end. In responding to a questionnaire, when asked to name the best chess player of 1983, Tal wrote “Kasparov” – and instantly became Karpov’s enemy. The unprecedented fight between Karpov and Kasparov was in its initial stages, and Karpov no longer trusted Tal as his coach.
The KGB Plays Chess answers an interesting question that has been the subject of discussion in chess journals. During the Chess Olympiad in Novi Sad in 1990, Tal told Kortschnoi that if Kortschnoi had defeated Karpov in the world championship, the KGB would have killed Kortschnoi. Tal found out about this while working as Karpov’s coach. When Kortschnoi published the contents of this conversation, the editor of the journal 64 – Chess Review (Shakhmatnoye obozreniye) Alexander Roshal (mentioned in this book as an agent of the KGB) wrote in his journal that Tal was evidently joking and that all rumors concerning preparations for the physical elimination of Kortschnoi were “absurd and far from reality.” The KGB Plays Chess confirms that Kortschnoi’s murder was indeed being prepared.
The first outstanding dissident chess player was the tenth world champion, Boris Spassky. While he held the title, there was a hysteria in the Soviet press over the trial of Angela Davis – a member of the American Communist Party charged as an accomplice in the murder of a judge. Spassky did not sign a letter in defense of the “progressive” activist. In those days (I know from my personal experience after not signing a letter censuring Kortschnoi), the refusal to sign an official letter was severely punished.
Spassky did not conceal the fact that he was a dissident, however. As an artistic personality, he derived particular enjoyment from saying things that were insulting to the Communist government or mockingly imitating Lenin in the presence of highly-placed Soviet officials who were formally or clandestinely collaborating with the KGB.
Spassky told me that his defeat in the famous world championship match against Bobby Fischer was partly explained by the bungling leadership of the party and the KGB, the “care” foisted upon him and his colleagues during the preparation for the games. “They destroyed me” was how Spassky described his experience.
The KGB actively persecuted Spassky when he decided to marry Marina, an employee of the French embassy in Moscow, and later, when he wanted to join her in France. It was during this period that the KGB made the odious, fortunately unsuccessful, attempts to infect the French woman’s underclothes with venereal disease, as described in this book.
As he told me, Spassky feared that his fight against the Soviet system would result in his death, and only the energetic and effective help of Egon Evertz – the West German steel casting magnate and chess sponsor – made it possible for Spassky finally to leave the USSR.
One of the central figures in this book is the twelfth world champion, Anatoly Karpov. There was evidence that Karpov collaborated with the KGB even before this book was written. Now we know even the secret code name given by the KGB to the twelfth champion of the world – “Raoul.”
Possessing a powerful intellect, a great player and a great manipulator, Karpov made splendid use of the opportunities which opened up before him as an agent of the KGB. He forced some chess players to become his assistants. In this way, as I was told by mutual acquaintances, it was explained to Tal that after the denunciation that Petrosian had written against him, Tal would once more be denied permission to travel abroad, and that the only way for him to “clear himself” and to preserve the possibility to continue playing was to become a coach to “the darling of the Soviet people, the party, and the KGB,” Anatoly Karpov. One wonders whether such a denunciation by Petrosian really existed.
In any event, many prominent chess players eagerly volunteered to coach Karpov since the latter was in possession of the kind of currency that chess players valued most: he was in a position to decide who got to travel to international tournaments. In June 1979, Karpov’s manager, Alexander Bakh, made me an offer on behalf of the world champion to take part that very autumn in what was at that time the most prestigious of all tournaments, in Tilburg, if I withdrew my request for permission to emigrate. Since there were no other opportunities to use me “for the good of the cause,” my request to emigrate was simply denied for seven long years – I became a “refusenik.” Actually, as this book reveals, it was only for the first three and a half years that my wife and I were not released from the Soviet Union “for the good of the cause.” The next three and a half years we remained “refuseniks” because Karpov was upset that we had spoken out in defense of Viktor Kortschnoi’s son Igor, who had been imprisoned for nothing, as a hostage.
The building up of Karpov as the only defender of the Soviet fatherland has a interesting history. After the first match between Kortschnoi and Karpov in Moscow in the autumn of 1974, Kortschnoi was hounded in the press and stripped of the honorary title “Distinguished Master of Sports.” His stipend was lowered and he was temporarily denied permission to travel abroad. Then Kortschnoi was released in order to take part in a foreign tournament. And when Kortschnoi did not come back, the Soviet fatherland was left with only one Soviet contender for the title of world champion, who was propped up on all sides with assistance from the party and the KGB, Anatoly Karpov. Only Karpov himself can tell us whether this was the outcome of a brilliantly played gambit on his part or simply a lucky accident for him. But why should he tell us that?
Karpov’s relations with his next rival – another major character in this book, the thirteenth world champion, Garry Kasparov – developed along similar lines. Why did Kasparov not defect from the Soviet Union after the KGB called off his match with Kortschnoi in the summer of 1983 and effectively disqualified him? Why did he not do so after charges of spying were brought against several of his assistants, or when Karpov obtained information that could, in Kasparov’s opinion, have been obtained only through KGB channels? I don’t know.
With respect to Kasparov’s disqualification... In his multi-volume work about world champions, Kasparov recounts how Karpov invited him to his house – when he was still young and inexperienced – and talked him into consenting to call off his match with Kortschnoi. In return, Kasparov was promised that the Soviet Chess Federation would sooner break up the World Chess Federation than allow him to be harmed. After Kasparov’s disqualification, these promises were forgotten.
With respect to spies and agents... The charges put forward by Kasparov were discussed and questioned in the chess world. The account in this book makes it clear that direct spying could have been accompanied by wiretapping, “penetration D,” “penetration T,” surveillance, and who knows what else. Although straightforward spying – i.e., agents – could have been used as well, of course.
The contest between Karpov and Kasparov took place on two battlefields – on the chess board and among the top officials who decided how Soviet people should live and work. Two events in this great conflict between these two no less great chess players stand out: the organized disqualification of Kasparov during his match with Kortschnoi in 1983 (and the subsequent, remarkable rescue of this match) and the scandalous suspension of the first match for the world championship between Karpov and Kasparov in 1984 in Moscow. What forces were involved in the behind-the-scenes struggle between these two great chess players, and who was making the fateful decisions in this battle? My impression has always been that some of these decisions were made by members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. The present book claims that these decisions were made by the KGB. Judging by the ease with which KGB operatives soon replaced the functionaries of the Communist Party within the Russian government, it is indeed quite possible that the KGB was already making all the decisions in 1984. And, therefore, that the authors of the account presented here are correct. The exact facts will become known to us when some former member of the Politburo of that time, say, Mikhail Gorbachev, moves to the West and publishes his memoirs here.
Fate put my wife and me on the list of chess players who ended up on the receiving end of the KGB’s aggression. For seven long years, they “worked on our file.” Apparently, the attempt of two recent champions of the USSR to emigrate legally from the Soviet Union had undermined some of the basic foundations that supported the government and its guardian, the KGB. As I read this book about the KGB and chess now, I am astonished at the amount of resources that the former superpower invested in the fight against me: how many people contributed their professional and emotional energy to the attempt to keep us down! Thank God, these are things that I could only guess at in those years. Had I known then that, during that whole time, every sound in our apartment was recorded, transmitted, and analyzed by the KGB’s “experts,” would I not have gone crazy? How would it have felt always to live “in public,” in front of an interested audience from the KGB?
Much of the psychological work done by the KGB’s operatives, however, was wasted. I simply did not understand its subtleties. This book describes how I was delivered to the office of a big boss at the Lubyanka, the KGB’s headquarters. The purpose was to impress me and to scare me. The official to whom I was brought, General Abramov, for some reason of his own, introduced himself as a colonel. It was all the same to me at the time – colonel, general, anything. And as for fear... the only thing I remember feeling is curiosity.
It is only now that I experience a kind of pride when I read in this book that, after our first demonstration near the Hotel Sport in 1982, the orangutan-like creature who dragged Anya and me to the police car was not a run-of-the-mill KGB thug, as I believed at the time, but the head of some department at the agency, Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Davnis.
In any case, when things got serious, despite the round-the-clock wiretapping, the surveillance, the agents’ informers, the KGB pretty often blew it. The account in this book indicates that, in working on my case, “all of the resources available to the operational subdivisions of Soviet state security were put to use. After Gulko was denied permission to emigrate, Lieutenant Colonel Perfiliev, the deputy head of the eleventh department, insisted that the eleventh department of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate continue working on his case. He initially believed that this work would give him a chance to display his achievements before the leadership of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate with victorious reports about his fight against Gulko. In actual fact, work on Gulko’s case every day brought more and more problems and more and more examples of Perfiliev’s bungled setbacks.” His setbacks were our victories.
I think that the painful victory that we achieved at the end of our seven-year standoff with the KGB was owed not just to the knack for fighting that we acquired playing chess. Anya and I were parts of a mystical process, in which many thousands of Soviet Jews – one of the most disenfranchised and harassed parts of the population of the Soviet empire – boldly became involved in a seemingly hopeless undertaking: the attempt to obtain the possibility to leave the Soviet Union. And despite the might of the KGB, which opposed this attempt and persecuted us, the Jews achieved their goal. During the most difficult moments of our campaign, we still managed to outplay the KGB every time, to stage our demonstrations, and to avoid our persecutors.
At the heart of this book are the fates of six chess players. Five of them opposed the KGB. All of them attained their goals. Boris Spassky was able to marry a French woman and to leave the USSR. Viktor Kortschnoi, five years after fleeing from the USSR and after two and a half years of his son’s imprisonment, was able to obtain permission for his family to emigrate. Garry Kasparov, despite the fact that Karpov had the KGB for an ally, won and valorously retained the title of world champion. Even after ending his career in chess, he continues to fight against the KGB-FSB, which has currently taken over the government of Russia. My wife, Anya, and I, after only seven years of struggle, won our most important prize: the freedom not to live in the land of the KGB.
Of course, these victories at times had to be paid for with years of imprisonment for people who were close to us, with ruined careers and nervous systems, with disappointments in various friends. But victories, as chess players know, must always be paid for.
The sixth major character in this book, Anatoly Karpov, fought on the other side of the barricades. And he, too, was successful. He managed to play two world championship matches with Viktor Kortschnoi when his organization was holding his opponent’s son in prison as a hostage. The list of Karpov’s achievement in his “political” fight with Kasparov is too long to be repeated anew. One can only marvel at the fact that Kasparov was nonetheless able to win the world championship title from Karpov. Our seven years as “refuseniks” were also the achievement of Karpov and his colleagues from the KGB. Now, when the leadership of the KGB has partly privatized Russia, Karpov has also received his piece of the pie.
Anatoly Karpov playing Viktor Kortschnoi in the 1974 Candidates Match
I conclude by saying that command over the strategic techniques of chess, mental and psychological, can help one in confrontations with the KGB, no matter in what era these confrontations take place. In 2007, Garry Kasparov was arrested for... Well, for nothing, really, he was simply arrested and placed in solitary confinement for five days at the Moscow Directorate of Internal Affairs on Petrovka Street. Anatoly Karpov paid a visit to this directorate and brought Kasparov a chess journal to make his stay in jail less tedious. This episode could serve as a symbol of the care that chess players have received from the KGB.
by Vladimir Popov & Yuri Felshtinsky
In the days of the USSR and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there existed an organization whose name to this day terrifies both the citizens of the country where it was created and operated for many decades, as well as the inhabitants of other countries. The name of this organization was the Committee for State Security (KGB). In the documents of the Soviet Communist Party, the KGB was referred to as the “armed wing of the party.” This organization, like its predecessors the VChK, the OGPU, the NKVD, and the MGB, was created by a party that controlled the government of the USSR – the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – for the express purpose of fighting against its adversaries, both inside the country and abroad. The party named its enemies, and the state security organs – as instruments of battle – ruthlessly disposed of them. To show pity for the enemies of the party was dangerous. He who was not sufficiently ruthless with the enemies was either their accessory or himself an enemy. And it was Stalin, the “great leader of all peoples,” who taught how enemies were to be dealt with: “If an enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed.”
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has had different enemies during different periods in its history, but the most dangerous among them were the ideological opponents of the regime. The party feared them above all others and was always ready to wage an uncompromising and merciless fight against them. The strategy of this fight was worked out by the main organ of the Communist Party of the USSR, the Central Committee, and in particular by the Department of Agitation and Propaganda. This was the agency that controlled all of the country’s ideological organizations, including the media. The latter, carrying out the assignments of the CPSU, which was the “governing and directing” power in the country, filled the minds of Soviet citizens and the international community with vast amounts of false information, whose purpose was to extol the Communist regime in the Soviet Union and the leaders of the Communist Party.
Anything that furthered this goal was useful. One of the powerful factors in the ideological struggle with the West was the international sports arena. In the opinion of the leaders of the CPSU, the victories of Soviet athletes in various kinds of sports, in world championships and in the Olympics, were supposed to vividly demonstrate to the whole world the superiority of the Soviet system over Western democracies.
From the mid-1970s until the beginning of the perestroika years, the Department of Propaganda at the Central Committee of the CPSU was headed by the former first secretary of the central committee of the Komsomol, Yevgeny Tyazhelnikov. His deputy was an experienced party functionary named Marat Gramov who came from the same part of the country and was a personal friend of the man who started perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev.
The personalities of the ideologues Tyazhelnikov and Gramov merit more detailed descriptions. As the second ranking ideologue in the country (after the famous long-term survivor in the party pantheon, Suslov), Tyazhelnikov became so fond of high art that in seeking to develop a deeper appreciation of it, he carried over his fondness for art to specific artists. It was mainly men that attracted him – in particular, ballet dancers from the famous Bolshoi Theater. Once, one of the principal ballerinas at the Bolshoi Theater received a telephone call during rehearsals from an unknown man, who described himself as a friend of her husband. Her husband was also a ballet dancer, and no less well-known in the USSR and abroad than his famous wife. The mysterious caller told the ballerina that he was calling at her husband’s request. Her husband had suffered a heart attack and wanted her to come home at once. The loyal wife rushed home and found her husband in the arms of Tyazhelnikov. A big scandal ensued and Tyazhelnikov was immediately dispatched as an ambassador to Romania, far away from the scene of his shame.
Tyazhelnikov’s deputy, Gramov, was distinguished neither by a superior intellect nor by elitist tendencies. He was an ordinary and mediocre apparatchik, just like his and Tyazhelnikov’s boss, the Central Committee’s secretary of ideology, Mikhail Suslov, who was nicknamed “A Man in a Case,” after the Chekhov story. Suslov had a pathological fear of catching a cold and was therefore permanently overdressed. When it was cold, all of the buttons on his coat were buttoned, including the top one, at the neck, while a pair of galoshes was perpetually on his feet. The personnel from Ninth Directorate of the KGB who provided security for the Central Committee’s facilities and were familiar with Suslov’s quirks knew that, when he went in or out of the building, they had to hold the doors open for him one at a time; heaven forbid that they should open the doors all at once – this might produce a draft of air. Ignorance of this rule cost one of them his career. Trying to please Suslov, he threw open both the inside and the outside doors simultaneously – and was instantly fired.
Only mediocre and faceless people could survive under such a boss. It was not for nothing that Gramov was nicknamed “Ogurtsov” (“Mr. Cucumber”) by the people who knew him, after one of the characters in Eldar Ryazanov’s 1960’s comedy Carnival Night. Ogurtsov, a bumbling and obtuse Soviet bureaucrat, was played by the wonderful actor Igor Ilyinsky. After the movie came out, “Ogurtsov” became a common nickname.
For many years, Gramov nurtured the hope of becoming the head of the Soviet sports movement. He was attracted by the opportunity to travel abroad, to serve as a representative in international sports associations, and also to obtain access to the considerable monetary resources that that the USSR spent to achieve victories in sports. As someone who had for many years managed elite sports in the Soviet Union for the Central Committee, Gramov better than anyone else appreciated all the advantages of such a position. Standing between Gramov and his dream was Sergei Pavlov, an exceptional and charismatic man, the former first secretary of the Komsomol’s central committee and subsequently the head of the State Sports Committee. Like any exceptional personality, he had powerful and cunning enemies. After the end of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, in which Soviet athletes won a record-breaking number of medals because of the boycott of the Olympics by the world’s leading athletes, Pavlov was to everyone’s surprise, unexpectedly sent as Soviet ambassador to Mongolia. This was a shameful exile for this energetic and ambitious man that ended up costing him his life. He became gravely ill and died soon after.
After Pavlov fell out of favor and was exiled to Mongolia, the directorship of Soviet sports passed to Gramov, who had a powerful protector in his friend – by this time, a lieutenant general and head of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB – Ivan Abramov. Gramov took Vyacheslav Gavrilin, a sports writer for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and an agent at the First Department of the Third Directorate of the KGB (later this directorate was renamed the Third Main Directorate of the KGB), as his deputy. From a simple newspaper worker, Gramov elevated Gavrilin to the position of deputy head of the State Sports Committee of the USSR.
When the first vice president of the International Olympic Committee, Vitaly Smirnov, learned about this strange appointment, he asked: “Is this the same Gavrilin who cuts salami at Gramov’s dacha?”
Vyacheslav Gavrilin, deputy head of the State Sports Committee of the USSR, was recruited into the First Department of the Third Main Directorate of the KGB (military counterintelligence) while working as a correspondent for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. Gavrilin’s handler was Vladimir Popov, an officer of the Third Division of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.
Vitaly Smirnov, the vice president of the International Olympic Committee and head of the National Olympic Committee of the USSR, was recruited in 1978 by the deputy head of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, Major General Ivan Abramov.
Gavrilin’s salami-slicing skills compensated for his general lack of culture and inability to communicate with people. He would shock international sports representatives who visited Moscow before the Goodwill Games in 1984 and in later years by taking a greasy newspaper out of his briefcase, in the car on the way from the airport, and extracting from it a salami, which he would then proceed to slice. After that, his guest would be invited to split a bottle of vodka.
Gavrilin and Gramov stole whatever they could get their hands on. They began to create various commercial schemes that brought them enormous profits and thus they can legitimately be considered the founders of corruption in Soviet sports. In addition, they left behind them a legacy as persecutors of a number of outstanding Soviet chess players.
While he was still deputy head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda at the Central Committee of the CPSU, Gramov, a convinced anti-Semite, directed the brunt of his hatred against one of the Soviet Union’s leading grandmasters, Viktor Kortschnoi. With his powerful personality and intellect, Kortschnoi was an exceptional and outspoken figure, distinguished by the bluntness of his opinions, including his views on Soviet reality, the state of affairs in the Chess Federation of the USSR, and its members.
For many years, the Central Chess Club in Moscow was headed by the deputy head of the Chess Federation of the USSR, Viktor Baturinsky.
Viktor Baturinsky, director of the Central Chess Club, head of the Chess Directorate at the State Sports Committee of the USSR, was recruited into the MGB (the predecessor to the KGB) in 1947. During the 1970s and 1980s, Baturinsky’s handlers were officers Anatoly Smaznov and Vladimir Lavrov of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.
The head of the Chess Federation was Vitali Sevastyanov, cosmonaut and two-time Hero of the Soviet Union, whose duties consisted mainly of public relations. Baturinsky became the head of Soviet chess after spending a number of decades on a completely different form of activity. He had served as an official in the military prosecutor’s office and subsequently as military prosecutor. During Stalin’s rule, he had been one of the active implementers and supporters of Stalin’s repressions. For this reason, his career had been successful – awards, positions, and titles followed one after another. The success of his career was facilitated by another factor: Baturinsky’s long-term collaboration with the organs of state security. As an agent of the MGB-KGB, Baturinsky regularly informed on his colleagues at the prosecutor’s office, denouncing their negative pronouncements and attitudes, and thus surreptitiously eliminating his rivals at work. That was why Baturinsky’s career growth, to the envy of many of his colleagues, was so remarkably rapid and successful.
After working for the allotted number of years, Baturinsky retired. But Baturinsky’s talents as an agent and a provocateur were not forgotten by his overseers from the state security apparatus. He was appointed director of the Moscow Chess Club. Baturinsky looked after his daughter Marina, too, securing for her a place in the international directorate of the State Sports Committee. She was soon recruited, with her father’s recommendation, as an agent of the KGB by Captain Vladimir Lavrov of the First Division of the First Department of the Fifth Directorate. From that time on, Marina Baturinskaya had no difficulty traveling abroad in the capacity of translator for Soviet teams.
Could Baturinsky, as an agent with many years of experience, have failed to notice Kortschnoi’s blunt pronouncements about himself and the state of affairs in the chess federation? Of course not. And the reports that Baturinsky submitted to officer Smaznov – his handler in the First Division of the First Department of the Fifth Directorate – skillfully underscored Kortschnoi’s negative attitude toward Soviet reality. At the same time, the State Sports Committee and the Department of Propaganda received information through official channels from the Soviet Chess Federation about Kortschnoi’s critical attitude toward Soviet reality.
As a result of Baturinsky’s reports to state security organs, the KGB opened an “operational check file” on Kortschnoi to document instances of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” on his part. Such files were kept for up to six months, and their purpose was to obtain accurate facts about the anti-Soviet attitudes of the person under investigation (the “target of the file,” in KGB terminology). After sufficient information confirming the “target’s” anti-Soviet pronouncements was gathered, a new file was opened, “an operational development file,” for collecting concrete materials pertaining to the “target’s” unlawful activities with accompanying documentation for subsequently bringing criminal charges against him, conducting preliminary hearings, and transferring the case to a court of law.
It should be noted that quite a number of Soviet grandmasters were state security agents. Tigran Petrosian, Lev Polugaevsky, Yuri Balashov, Rafael Vaganian, Eduard Gufeld, and Nikolai Krogius, the head of the Chess Directorate at the State Sports Committee, had extensive experience in collaborating with the KGB as covert agents. The same was true of the long-time editor-in-chief of the magazine 64 – Chess Review, Alexander Roshal.
Tigran Petrosian, world chess champion, was recruited in 1973 by officer Anatoly Smaznov of the First Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.
Lev Polugaevsky was recruited in 1980 by Lieutenant Colonel Igor Perfiliev of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.
Rafael Vaganian was recruited in 1983 by the Fifth Department of the Armenian KGB. Vaganian worked with Soviet grandmasters, including during trips abroad.
Eduard Gufeld was recruited in 1981 by Igor Perfiliev.
Nikolai Krogius, head of the Chess Directorate at the State Sports Committee of the USSR from 1980 until 1990, was recruited in 1980 by the deputy head of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, Lieutenant Colonel Igor Perfiliev. Code name: Endgame (Endshpil).
Alexander Roshal, editor-in-chief of the journal 64 – Chess Review, was recruited in 1978 by the deputy head of the Third Division of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Davnis.
The KGB made use of all of these people in working on the case of Kortschnoi and his circle. Those who were close to Kortschnoi acquired first-hand knowledge of the power of the Soviet repression machine. Among them was Kortschnoi’s son, Igor, who was put in prison on trumped-up charges, as well as the grandmaster Boris Gulko – Kortschnoi’s putative helper – who spent many years fighting for the right to leave the USSR and being subjected to all kinds of molestations and privations, along with his family, before they were finally allowed to emigrate.
With respect to Kortschnoi, the Soviet government pursued a policy of outright harassment, and he was left with no other choice than to leave the Soviet Union forever. The Soviet government machine placed its bets on Anatoly Karpov, a rising star in the chess firmament, who was obedient and easily manageable. Kortschnoi, an emotional nonconformist and a Jew, was of no use to the Soviet system. In 1976, while attending an international chess tournament in Holland, Kortschnoi requested political asylum, which he soon received in Switzerland. Leaving behind the country where he was born and raised, and whose glory in the world of chess he had greatly advanced, Kortschnoi, whose family was still in the USSR, had little notion of how many trials and battles with the Soviet system he would still have to endure.
In the early 1970s, a young man of average height, with a pleasant appearance, joined the ranks of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB. This was Vladimir Pishchenko, whose name would appear in many newspapers around the world in only a few years. He began his career, however, in the same, ordinary way as most of his colleagues. His first appointment was in the Third Department of the Fifth Directorate, and his job was to oversee Moscow State University and Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University. State security officers who oversaw these institutions were tasked with identifying foreign security agents who had come to the Soviet Union to study as undergraduate and graduate students and recruiting foreign students for collaboration with the KGB and their subsequent embedding in foreign countries. In order to facilitate the investigation of undergraduate and graduate students from foreign countries, the KGB pursued a policy of intensively recruiting agents among Soviet professors and students as well.
As a Moscow State University graduate with a major in economics, Pishchenko became the overseer of a department at his old school and thus found himself in familiar surroundings. But his reappearance at his Alma Mater in a new capacity, as a state security officer, was accompanied by another development in his life.
After completing his secondary schooling, Pishchenko had been drafted into the Soviet Army. He served as a truck driver, and after being discharged, he worked for a couple of years as a driver for the Inturist car fleet. His parents were professional drivers as well. Seeing their existence, he understood that the only path to a decent life in the USSR was to acquire a higher education. At Moscow State University, Pishchenko married a young woman named Lyudmila. Lyudmila, like her mother, worked in the central apparatus of the KGB, as a secretary in one of the departments of the Second Main Directorate. Not without help from his wife’s relatives, Pishchenko was sent on an internship to Cuba while he was still only an upperclassman. In half a year there, he managed to become proficient in Spanish. After graduating from Moscow State University, once again with help from his wife’s relatives, he was hired by the KGB and sent to attend two years of courses that included intensive study of a foreign language. His second language was English. After completing his studies, Pishchenko became an officer in the KGB’s Fifth Directorate.
In 1977, a group of Cuban state security officers arrived in the Soviet Union for training. In Cuba, these officers handled questions similar to those handled by the Fifth Directorate of the KGB in the USSR. Senior Lieutenant Pishchenko of the Fifth Directorate’s Third Department was assigned to work with this delegation as a translator. After the Cuban officers completed their training, they were treated to a luxury cruise on the Volga. They were accompanied by two officials from the KGB’s Fifth Directorate: Pishchenko and Vladimir Strunin, the head of this directorate’s First Department, whose colleagues had nicknamed him “Drunken Hedgehog.” He always wore a crew cut (called a “hedgehog cut” in Russian), and the telltale patchwork of blood vessels that embellished his nose and cheeks left no doubt as to his partiality for alcohol. It should be pointed out that neither the typical characteristics that marked him as a drunkard nor his embarrassing nickname prevented him, thanks to the support of General Abramov (a.k.a. “Vanya Palkin”), to attain the rank of general, although in a completely alcoholized and debilitated state. Years later, Pishchenko followed in Strunin’s footsteps – without, however, attaining the rank of general. The two of them first found common ground during their trip down the Volga, in their passion for excessive consumption of alcohol.