A blog post featuring a selection of games by the outstanding grandmaster and theoretician Efim Geller, with translations of his annotations to them in the contemporary Soviet press. Geller in play at Beverwijk, 1965. (Photo: Noord-Hollands Archief) Efim Geller is a player who needs little introduction. Born in 1925 in Odessa, his chess development was…
A blog post devoted to the games of the outstanding Soviet grandmaster and theoretician, Mark Taimanov (1926-2016). All my life I have worked a lot. I have often said that when I was playing chess I was resting from music and if I was making music I was taking a rest from chess. In other…
A brief blog post devoted to one of the giants of 20th-century chess. As with the recent post on Boris Spassky, the purpose of this page is to present a number of individual games by a player whose career feature heavily elsewhere on the pages of this blog in the context of tournaments and especially…
A brief blog post dedicated to selected games of the tenth World Champion. This blog has already featured several matches in which Boris Spassky took part, as well as tournaments and individual games (for instance, here, here and here). While Spassky did not write any books during his career, he was in fact a more…
A blog post to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the ‘training tournament’ held in the Estonian city of Pärnu during the summer of 1947. During July and August of 1947, a very strong tournament was held in the coastal city of Pärnu, in the Estonian SSR. Billed as the ‘Tournament of the Strongest Masters of…
A short blog post dedicated to the Yuri Balashov, with some brief biographical information and a selection of his games, with translations of his annotations from the Soviet chess press. This game [ v. Biyiasas, Lone Pine 1977] is typical of Balashov’s style. His moves are not especially exciting or ingenious – just consistently strong.…
A blog post dedicated to the outstanding Soviet theoretician Viacheslav Ragozin. Featuring brief biographical details and translations of his annotations to a selection of his games. An earlier blog post on this site was dedicated to two magnificent games by Ragozin with the defence that today bears his name. Indeed, his name has become so…
A brief blog post dedicated to the third World Champion’s win v. two leading Soviet masters in a 1936 exhibition game, with a translation of the contemporary annotations to it by one of the players. A few days after winning the 3rd Moscow International, José Raúl Capablanca was in Leningrad, where he played an exhibition…
A short blog post dedicated to the tournament book of the 10th USSR Championship, which was won by Grigory Levenfish. The 10th USSR Championship took place in Tbilisi in 1937. The last championship had taken place more than two years previously; the intervening period had seen the organisation of major international events in the Soviet…
A blog post devoted to the little-known international tournament held 40 years ago in the city of Minsk. Exactly 40 years ago, final preparations were under way for the first-ever international tournament to be held in the capital of the Belorussian Republic. The invitees were: From the Soviet Union: grandmaster & Soviet Champion Lev Psakhis…
A blog post dedicated to the world’s oldest living grandmaster, Yuri Averbakh, on the occasion of his centenary. Yuri Lvovich Averbakh – a key figure in the Soviet chess movement during the second half of the 20th century – was born on 8th February 1922, in the city of Kaluga, where his father was employed…
A short blog post featuring translations of Sergey Dolmatov’s annotations to some of his games from the Soviet chess press, and some brief biographical information on the famous grandmaster and trainer. Sergei Viktorovich Dolmatov was born in the town of Kiselyovsk, in the Kemerovo region of Western Siberia, on 20th February 1959. At the time…
A short blog post featuring a selection of games and some brief biographical information on the outstanding Soviet (later German) grandmaster Artur Jussupow. Artur Mayakovich Jussupow (or, as it was customarily spelled in the days before he became a German citizen, ‘Yusupov’) was born in Moscow on 13th February 1960. He learned to play chess…
A blog post dedicated to the first of Karpov’s Candidates’ matches on the his path to the World Championship. The draw for the 1974 Candidates’ matches paired Anatoly Karpov with Lev Polugaevsky at the Quarter-final stage. Karpov had qualified by confidently sharing 1st-2nd place in the Leningrad Interzonal the previous summer. Lev Polugaevsky had a…
A short blog post dedicated to Grigory Levenfish’s book on the event in which he became Soviet champion for the first time. The outstanding Soviet grandmaster Grigory Levenfish was a prolific writer and also a renowned analyst. His work on rook endgames, co-authored with Vasily Smyslov, is regarded as one of the most important endgame…
Soviet Chess History 