Chess in the USSR. Illustrated History

This album proposes to consider the panorama of the seventy -year chess history of the Soviet period in all its diversity, to feel the movement of time, to see how thousands of fans of the game become millions, how the era of dumb cinema, telegraph game and circles in working clubs grows up in the era of the champions known throughout the country, Chess School ”on central television, sessions of simultaneous play on a thousand boards. It allows you to evaluate chess in the USSR, as a unique cultural phenomenon of the 20th century, to trace the transformation of the skillful fun of intelligent people into a powerful tool for the country"s cultural development. To see a successful example of how the efforts of interested people received public interest, how over time the whole world, regardless of political addictions, realized the need to study Soviet experience in this area.
In the recently published book “Good luck of the 20th century”, historians who tried to systematize the positive experience of our country in the past century, took a separate chapter to chess. But back in 1951, the adviser G. Schwartz, critically configured to Russia, in his desire to reveal the “secret of Soviet chess” admitted that “one can make fun of Soviet claims to the championship in the world, but at least one region, the Soviets really went around everyone : in chess. Their successes bring a tangible prestige to the Soviet Union and destroy the idea of ​​the Russians, as a semi -cybated people - an idea that was earnestly propagated by the Nazis before and during the Second World War. ”

In the era of warming of relations between Russia and the West, British professor D. Richards set out to study Soviet chess so that, as he writes, not to glorify and not defeat the Soviet regime, but to analyze in a small field of intellectual history . He tried to determine the place of the chess movement in the USSR between two extreme poles, on one of which the history of Soviet chess is an “example of the wisdom and good deeds of the Soviet regime”, and on the other gives an example of a “triumph of human genius over totalitarian control”. The professor drew attention to the paradox showing that the development of a chess culture does not fit into the political and ideological framework of the state. Indeed, in the USSR, prominent statesmen from Lenin and Kalinin to Brezhnev and Minister of Defense of Malinovsky, and, on the other hand, such symbols of the opposition of the authorities as the future Minister of Internal Affairs of Israel, Lithuania Landsbergis, were paid tribute to the USSR.
Among hundreds of photographs, documents, exhibits, rare and unfamiliar experts are presented here: in this book they are published for the first time. A significant part of the materials of the “illustrated history” is based on the collection of the Chess Museum and the Archive of the Russian Chess Federation. However, with all the variety, this is not a comprehensive encyclopedia and not a reference: all wealth accumulated in those years cannot be exhausted even by a multi -volume edition