War, said Claus von Clausewitz, is politics by other means. The Cold War was war by other means. The USA and the USSR tried to defeat each other by any means short of actively fighting a war against each other. The means ranged from machinations in the UN to wars by proxy to assassinations through to, perhaps oddest of all, chess.
Daniel Johnson is an English journalist and chess amateur. His 2007 book, White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was fought on the chessboard, traces the history of chess as it was used as a tool of politics. For the Soviets, this was a deliberate step. The intellectual nature of the game attracted them to the idea of using it as a way of demonstrating Soviet superiority over the west. (Star Trek uses three-dimensional chess to show Vulcan superiority over human intellect. But I digress.) They threw millions at it, both of money and of hours. Like everything else, it was entirely government controlled from the Grandmasters' championships to local clubs.
And for a long time it worked. The USSR dominated world chess throughout the Cold War. To do this, they relied heavily on non- Russians and Jews, which in the racist, insular, anti-Semitic system that was the USSR rankled with many. But they could overlook that as long as the USSR produced the world champion. And with the exception of Bobby Fischer (himself a Jew, albeit an anti-Semitic one) they did. They rigged competitions, and dominated and bullied the World Chess organisation FIDE to get their way. They lost their dominance for the same reason they lost the Cold War, a ruined economy, a country that was moribund in terms of technology and an oppressed people who finally had enough. Their last champion, and one of the strongest players in history, Gary Kasparov, became a dissident and is currently one of the opposition leaders against the increasingly despotic Putin regime, facing imprisonment or worse. The present world champion is Indian Viswanathan Anand.
Johnson puts this extraordinary campaign in the context of both the history of chess and of the world, with the main focus on 1945-1993. I have little idea of chess beyond the idea of how the pieces move, but I found it fascinating, and easy to follow, even for the chess patzer such as I. It’s a dramatic story with extraordinary characters. Bobby Fischer is not the only madman in the book. Johnson makes a good argument that for Fischer and others like him, it was not chess that made them insane. It was chess that kept them from going insane, and when they abandoned playing, their powerful minds turned on themselves. And certainly the paranoia and neuroses of Fischer was shared by many of the Grandmasters, increasing as the championships become more and more seen as the clash of civilisations.
Like a good non-fiction book should, it made me want to learn more about the subject. And I’m now thinking of trying to learn to play chess properly. And it leads to the broader subject as well. Natan Sharansky was a great player who never become world champion. He did become a cause celebre in the USSR, enduring imprisonment, exile and a decade long separation from his wife because of his religious and political views. After finally being allowed to emigrate to Israel, he pursued a poltical career. He has now written two books (as well as his autobiography) that I feel I must read. One book, The Case for Democracy argues that Western democracy has core values that are strong enough to overcome radical Islam. Another book, Defending Identity, makes the case that strong identity, whether it be religious or nationalistic, can be forces for good and are essential against totalitarian movements. Given the history of the Jews in general, and the Jews and the small countries in the USSR, one begins to see his point.
Emmerson said in every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts. In good writing, we can also recognise the thoughts we have, but have not been quite able to articulate. I have been thinking that in our attempt to be tolerant, pluralistic, non-judgemental, all good qualities, we present a picture to the world that we stand for nothing and care about nothing. And it is this vacuum that fundamentalism and other fanaticisms rush to fill. The other way is to drift into a nihilistic world of the next sensation, the next way to avoid boredom and ennui.
Or to try and put it another way, a functioning society tells a story of where it has come from and where it is going. And members of the society should be in broad agreement with that story. In a healthy society, we will argue, discuss, and try to shift that story one way or the other, but the broad outline must exist. I don’t think we have a story anymore. We must rediscover it.
Wow, how did I get here? From 32 lumps of wood on 64 squares to the future of Western Civilisation as we know it. In a pale safe shadow of the journey of Sharansky and Kasparov I seem to have found a move from chess to politics.
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