Storming Fortresses A Political History Of Chess In The Soviet Union 1917-1948

423 Pages·2013·1.543 MB·English

by  Hudson Michael

Electronic Theses and Dissertations
UC Santa Cruz
Peer Reviewed
Title:
Storming Fortresses: A Political History Of Chess In The Soviet Union, 1917-1948
Author:
Hudson, Michael Andrew
Acceptance Date:
2013
Series:
UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Degree:
Ph.D., HistoryUC Santa Cruz
Advisor(s):
Kenez, Peter
Committee:
Beecher, Jonathan, Goldfrank, Walter
Permalink:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0s71f0cw
Abstract:
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA CRUZ

STORMING FORTRESSES:
A POLITICAL HISTORY OF CHESS IN THE SOVIET UNION, 1917-1948

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

HISTORY

by

Michael A. Hudson

September 2013

The Dissertation of Michael A. Hudson is
approved:

______________________________________
Professor Peter Kenez, chair

______________________________________
Professor Jonathan Beecher

______________________________________
Professor Walter Goldfrank

______________________________
Tyrus Miller
Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies
i
Copyright © by
Michael A. Hudson
2013

ii
Table of Contents

Abstract ....................................................................................................................... iv

Acknowledgments....................................................................................................... vi

Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1

Chapter One: Chess in Pre-revolutionary Russia....................................................... 12

Chapter Two : Karl Marx’s Chess Problem ............................................................... 33

Chapter Three: Lenin’s Game .................................................................................... 48

Chapter Four: Il’in-Zhenevskii and the Origins of Soviet Chess .............................. 69

Chapter Five: The First Soviet Championship........................................................... 96

Chapter Six: The Struggle for the Soul of Soviet Chess: 1920-1924 ...................... 108

Chapter Seven: The Spectacle of 1925 .................................................................... 129

Chapter Eight: Retrenchment and Expansion .......................................................... 164

Chapter Nine: Soviet Chess and the Workers’ Chess International ........................ 185

Chapter Ten: Botvinnik: The New Soviet (Chess)Man ........................................... 212

Chapter Eleven: The Classical Land of Chess ......................................................... 234

Chapter Twelve: The Terror of Chess ..................................................................... 270

Chapter Thirteen: Soviet Chess and the Great Patriotic War .................................. 301

Chapter Fourteen: Storming the Fortress ................................................................. 339

Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 380

Appendix .................................................................................................................. 396

Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 399

iii
Abstract

Michael A. Hudson
STORMING FORTRESSES:
A POLITICAL HISTORY OF CHESS IN THE SOVIET UNION, 1917-1948

From the end of the Second World War through the demise of USSR, Soviet
chess players dominated world chess. Not only did they control the world champion
title after 1948 (except for the Fischer interlude), they also monopolized all other
areas of international chess competition. When the Soviets captured the world title in
1948, this was the culmination of a long, carefully cultivated program to foster a
chess community in the Soviet Union. The rationale for this initiative, which engaged
the attention of the highest levels of the Soviet state, had deep ideological roots.
This dissertation explores the social/political history of chess in the Soviet
Union, particularly its utility to Party and State. The story of Soviet chess begins in
the Civil War, when chess was enlisted as a training tool for military recruits. After
the Bolshevik victory, a very similar rationale was used to promote chess as an
instrument for training Party cadre in the burgeoning Communist Party. The same
attributes desired in soldiers were also desired in Party activists, and chess was seen
as a tool for nurturing these attributes.
In the early 1920s, the state-sponsored chess program was greatly enlarged,
and at the same time its ideological rationale shifted. Faced with the reality of
building socialism in a backward country, the Party believed that chess could be of
great utility in raising the cultural level of the laboring masses. A culturally developed
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proletariat was one of several prerequisites for socialism that the Soviet Union lacked.
Chess became closely tied to the State labor organizations, although officially
attached to the government’s sport and physical education bureaucracy. Whether
chess refashioned Soviet society is debatable, but official encouragement refashioned
chess, which became a significant cultural component in the lives of Soviet citizens.
Chess achieved a stature in Soviet society that was entirely without precedent.
One outcome of the popularity and status of chess was, by the mid-1930s, the
cultivation of a generation of world caliber players. Soviet ability to stand toe-to-toe
with the world’s best exemplified by the Stalinist slogan, “catch up and overtake.”
Soviet chess now reinvented itself as a propaganda device for touting the superiority
of Soviet culture. The world championship was conquered in 1948, and Soviet
domination of world chess was a very important weapon in the cultural front of the
Cold War.
Although this concept of three stages–martial emphasis, chess for the workers,
and Cold War chess–is a convenient way to divide up the formative period of Soviet
chess, the shifting emphases do not supplant their predecessors. Chess continued to be
an important part of military culture, while the wide dissemination of chess in Soviet
society remained a priority of the Soviet chess organization, even as the top Soviet
players dominated international chess. All of these aspects of Soviet chess have
outlived the Soviet state, and chess can be seen both as a positive achievement by the
Soviet state and as a positive legacy of Soviet rule.

v
Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to the History Department–faculty and staff–for its
boundless, collective patience with me in this enterprise. In particular, I want to thank
Professor Jonathan Beecher for his persistent support. I also want to thank my advisor,
Professor Peter Kenez, who made himself available whenever I requested his
assistance. And thank you, Professor Wally Goldfrank, who stepped in on short
notice to read and comment so helpfully.
The staff at the White Collection at the Cleveland Public Library was always
helpful, courteous and kind. The director of the St. Petersburg Chess Club, who
remembered me from the “old days,” helped me obtain access to private collections in
Petersburg, and I am in his debt. Friend of my youth, Sasha K., now an official at the
Lenin Library, allowed me to access parts of the collection closed to the public at that
time.
On a personal note, I want to thank my wife, Natnicha, and our son, Fluke,
who granted me the incredible gift of a year to write this paper. I will make it up to
you. I am also very grateful to my sister, Chris, for her herculean efforts in receiving,
storing, repacking and shipping my research library. Guess what, Chris, I’m send it
some of it back to you! Finally, I dedicate this work to my late mother, Theola
Kennicott, a life-long educator who played an enormous role in shaping my
intellectual habits. She instilled in me the habit of finishing my work, and that is
probably the principal reason I couldn’t rest comfortably until this work was finished.

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Introduction

The title of this work, “Storming Fortresses,” comes from a claim made in
1927 by Soviet economist, Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilin (1877-1974), who wrote:
“Our task is not to study economics, but to change it. We are bound by no laws. There
are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm.”1 Strumilin was a powerful influence
on Stalin, who used very similar phrases in his speeches and writing.2 In each case,
the meaning was the same: Bolsheviks could disregard objective material realities and
reach their objectives by the application of human will.
Strumilin played a leading role in the Soviet Union’s planned economy in the
1920s. Lenin appointed him to Gosplan, the central economic planning committee, in
1921, and he would later become a leading figure in the development of the first five-
year plan.3 Strumilin was a founder of the “teleological” school of planned economics,
maintaining that economic planning should be guided by the goals of the state and
should not by limited by the possibilities seemingly dictated by material reality. In
other words, production goals should serve as the starting point in economic planning.
Goals, he believed, should be based on the desired political, economic and social

1. S. Strumilin, “Industrializantsiia SSSR” [Industrialization of the USSR],
Planovoe khoziaistvo [Planned Economy] 7 (1927), quoted in Robert Vincent Daniels,
The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 349.
2. Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist
Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 349.
3. Vincent Barnett, The Revolutionary Russian Economy, 1890-1940: Ideas,
Debates and Alternatives (London: Routledge, 2004), 87.
1
benefits. Once the goals were set, then the necessary means could be developed to
reach them.4
Strumilin’s economics highlighted one of the principal tensions that permeate
Marxism: the conflict between determinism and voluntarism. Marx postulated laws of
historical development that suggested a kind of economic determinism, where human
will seemed largely or even completely irrelevant. And yet, in one of Marx’s best
known aphorisms, he admonished the crude determinists with his observation:
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it.”5 Classical Marxists generally reconciled these divergent strains by arguing
that material realities certainly determined what was possible, but, since people
created material reality, it was malleable, and the realm of the possible was greatly
enlarged.
Leninism, the founding ideology of the Soviet Union, was a variant of
Marxism that was based much more on voluntarism than determinism. Lenin took the
idea of telescoping history, an idea found in embryonic form in classical Marxism,6
and made it the centerpiece of his revolutionary theory. In Leninism, telescoping
history meant skipping a stage of historical development–specifically, moving

4. Peter John de la Fosse Wiles, The Political Economy of Communism
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 47.
5. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1845/theses/index.htm (assessed June 8, 2013).
6. Martin E. Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman
to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999), 266.
2
directly from a bourgeois to a proletarian revolution. When Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized
power in Russia in 1917, they were consciously acting outside the laws of economic
determinism. Material realities (Russia’s relatively low level of industrial
development) ruled out a proletarian revolution in the classical Marxist sense. But
since material conditions are malleable, Lenin realized that, given the proper
historical situation, a vanguard Party, largely through an act of will, could seize
power on behalf of the proletariat.
The Bolshevik seizure of power was predicated on the assumption that when
Russia, the weakest link in the capitalist chain, succumbed to revolution, other
European countries would follow like dominos. This supposition, of course, proved
faulty; the expected wave of revolutions failed to materialize, laying bare the flaw in
Lenin’s telescoped history. The resulting dilemma was resolved by the awkward
concept of socialism in one country.
The solution was awkward because the Bolsheviks, by opting to retain power
and press ahead, were attempting to build a socialist society on a foundation that had
not been properly prepared by mature capitalism. This was contrary to classical
Marxism, which postulated the emergence of a socialist society only when capitalism
had exhausted it productive potential and become a fetter to production. Therefore,
the creation of socialism in Russia was itself an act of human will rather than
historical development–an epic example of voluntarism that not just disregarded, but
even defied, material realities. The Bolsheviks inverted the historical process,
employing forced industrialization to build a developmentally-appropriate economic
3