A blog post devoted to the Soviet (later Israeli & U. S.) grandmaster Leonid Shamkovich, featuring some brief biographical information and a short selection of his games with a translation of Shamkovich’s own annotations from the Soviet chess press.
Leonid Shamkovich (1923-2005) was a player whose career spanned the central and latter decades of the last century. He took part in six Soviet and four U.S. championship finals, one Interzonal tournament and numerous other events that occupy a significant part in the history of 20th-century chess. He was also prolific writer of theoretical articles and books; among his works Zhertva v shakhmatakh (‘The Sacrifice in Chess’), which was published in the USSR in 1971 and subsequently translated into English as ‘The Modern Chess Sacrifice’, is particularly well known.
The present writer had the privilege, when aged just 17, of facing Shamkovich in a clock-simultaneous display in Scotland in July 1984. On many occasions since, I have reflected on the fact that the hand which I shook that evening in a hotel in Glasgow’s Ingram Street was the same one that had shaken the hands of players such as Salo Flohr, Grigory Levenfish and Andor Lilienthal in the early part of his career. My memories of him are of a quiet-spoken, respectful man who despatched his young opponents convincingly and with a minimum of fuss. I was not surprised to later learn that he was known amongst his peers as “Prince” on account of his manners and aristocratic bearing.
Throughout his career, Shamkovich’s play was marked by exceptional tactical ingenuinty. Looking at his games, one is struck by how full of content and – for want of a better word – ‘interesting’ they are. That he did not gain the GM title until he was 42 years old can be put down to the fact that norm opportunities were relatively few in those days, and this was of course even more true for players in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. Sosonko has described him as belonging to the “second tier” of international grandmasters, but this was at a time when the holders of that title were far fewer in number than today. And
…he was a real grandmaster, with his own identity and playing style, and he was more than once a prize-winner and winner of international tournaments, albeit not the most imposing ones. When he was in the mood and got his type of position, he was dangerous and could beat anyone. He had wins over Tal, Spassky, Bronstein, Larsen, Taimanov on his record.
Genna Sosonko, in the essay ‘Knyaz’ (‘Prince’), written on Shamkovich’s death.
Leonid Aleksandrovich Shamkovich (pronounced Sham-KOV-ich) was born in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in the summer of 1923. His father, Aleksandr Isaakovich (1893-1973), was a short-story writer & playright whose fame, under the pseudonym of Sergei Zvantsev, extended well beyond his native Taganrog. Leonid’s paternal grandfather, Isaak Yakovlevich, was a famous doctor who held title of ‘Hero of Labour’ and who, as a child, had sat in the same classical gynmasium classroom as Anton Chekhov. As the Rostov chess historian Arkady Bushkov puts it “that is how rich [Shamkovich’s] pedigree is”.
As Bushkov explains on his superb website, during the 1930s Rostov-on-Don gradually became one of the leading chess centres of the Soviet Union; the chess ‘wave’ culminated in 1940 with the Rostov master Igor Bondarevsky sharing 1st-2nd place in the 12th USSR Championship (defeating, amongst others, Mikhail Botvinnik in their individual encounter); thus the young Lenya Shamkovich took his first steps in chess in a healthy creative and competitive environment. When the war came he was evacuated along with his family to Tbilisi; the records show him taking part in the open Georgian championship of 1943. With the return of peace in 1945 he immediately made his debut in the All-Union arena, taking part in a tournament of 1st-category players & Candidate Masters in Gorky (present-day Nizhny Novgorod) after qualifying from a semi-final event in Yerevan. His score in Gorky (7/15) was hardly successful, but as Bushkov points out, he drew attention to himself with his style of play, and received praise from such an authority as Pyotr Romanovsky, who (in Shakhmaty v SSSR, № 2, 1946) paid tribute to the “depth” and “ingenuity” of Shamkovich’s style, while highlighting an evident lack of opening knowledge.
The lack of theoretical knowledge was something that Shamkovich set out to rectify, and indeed in his later career he was to become renowned for his expertise in this area. Thus, for instance – as Bushkov points out – the famous trap in the Accelerated Dragon variation of the Sicilian Defence, with which Bobby Fischer caught Sammy Reshevsky in the U.S. Championship of 1958/59 (i.e. 8…Na5? 9.e5! Ne8 10.Bxf7+!) was pointed out by Shamkovich & Borisenko in a theoretical review published in Shakhmatnyi Byulleten (№ 10, 1958). It was no accident that Mikhail Tal invited him to be his second for his 1965 Candidates’ final match v. Boris Spassky. Later, in 1972, he was coach to the world-class grandmaster Leonid Stein.
At around the same time as the event in Gorky, Shamkovich moved to Leningrad to study at the city’s renowned Polytechnical Institute, but in Sosonko’s words “by mentality he remained a humanitarian, and chess became his profession”. According to his son Andrei, he left the institute in his final year, so as to concentrate full-time on the game.
His career progressed steadily; the record shows him competing in semi-final events for the 18th & 19th USSR Championships (in Tartu, 1950 and Baku, 1951 respectively), before a breakthrough came in the summer of 1953 in Vilnius. There, he finished in 3rd-4th place in the semi-final of the 21st USSR Championship, together with Viktor Korchnoi but behind Ratmir Kholmov & Aleksei Suetin; all four players qualified for the final, which took place in Kiev in 1954. He finished that event in 17th-18th place out of 20 players, though he did score fine wins against grandmasters Efim Geller & Viacheslav Ragozin. Later that year in his native Rostov he won the championship of the Russian republic, finishing a point clear of Rashid Nezhmetdinov in the 17-round all-play-all event. He would go on to repeat his victory in this event in 1956 in Kislovodsk. After moving to Moscow in 1959, he finished =1st in the championship of the Soviet capital in 1961 (though he lost the subsequent playoff match against David Bronstein).
Shamkovich’s best result in Soviet championship finals was at the 32nd (Kiev, 1964/65), where he finished 5th. A few months later he gained the grandmaster title after finishing 3rd (behind Paul Keres & Vlastimil Hort) in the international tournament in Mariánské Lázně in Czechoslovakia. At the end of 1966 he was permitted to cross the ‘iron curtain’ for the first time, competing in the international tournament in Palma de Mallorca. He would do so again (taking part in the IBM international Amsterdam in 1968) before his application to emigrate was granted in 1974; it seems that he was the first Soviet chessplayer to be given official permission to do so.
From the point of view of many of my relatives and friends, this was a completely crazy step: at the age of 51, people are already thinking about retirement, not about radically changing their lives. But I still decided to emigrate. There were reasons for this, not only material ones.
Leonid Shamkovich, quoted by Genna Sosonko in the essay ‘Knyaz’.
According to Shamkovich’s close friend Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the anti-Semitism that he had experienced in the Soviet Union was a major factor. At first he settled in Israel (immediately winning the open championship of that country), then in 1975 he moved to Canada, repeating the feat by winning the Canadian Open Championship in Calgary. In 1976 he emigrated again, this time permanently, to the United States. Remarkably, he shared 1st place in the next two Open Championships of his new adopted homeland (in Fairfax, 1976 and Columbus, 1977).
Shamkovich in play v. Miguel Najdorf at the tournament in Lone Pine, 1976. (Photo via Sergey Kim of chesspro.ru.)
Despite being in his sixth decade of life, he was still a force to be reckoned with. Finishing =3rd-4th (along with Edmar Mednis) in the 1978 U.S. Championship, which that year was a ‘zonal’ event, he qualified for the 1979 Interzonal tournament in Rio de Janeiro. He finished on 50% in that event, tied for 10th-11th place along with the Czech GM Jan Smejkal, but ahead of the likes of Rafael Vaganian and Dragoljub Velimirović. The following year he was a member of the U.S. team that finished in 4th place in the Olympiad in Malta.
Shamkovich ultimately settled in Brooklyn. During his life, he was married and divorced three times. After his marriage to his wife Mila broke up in 1989, he lived alone in a two-bedroom appartment about 15 minutes’ walk from Brighton Beach, an area known for its high proportion of Russian-speaking immigrants. Though he lived in the United States for more than 30 years, according to Sosonko, “most of his memories and stories were connected with Russia”. For a time he wrote a column in Novoe russkoe slovo, the most popular Russian-language magazine then published in New York.
[Shamkovich] loved chess unconditionally. He would analyse for hours, forgetting about everything else; enjoying this activity. Unlike many grandmasters, who also passionately love chess, the positions that Shamkovich analysed could be completely abstract, having nothing to do with the opening, and the practical benefit of such an analysis was zero. He could spend hours over a position from a game that interested him, played next to his own at some Open event, or over a position from a game Tarasov-Nezhmetdinov at which a half-century-old ‘yearbook’ he had taken from the shelf was opened, or simply over a diagram he had just seen in a magazine that he had received. He always rejoiced at a beautiful, original idea: this was the main thing for him in chess, and in his books and articles he often paid attention to the aesthetic side of the game.
Genna Sosonko, ‘Knyaz’
Leonid Shamkovich passed away at his home on 22nd April 2005, at the age of 81, from complications resulting from Parkinson’s Disease and cancer. He was survived by his son Andrei, as well as a grand-daughter and a great-grandson. In 2003, on his 80th birthday, he had been inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame – a fitting tribute to a remarkable career in the game.
A selection of Shamkovich’s games, with translations of his contemporary annotations from the Soviet chess press, may be downloaded via the links below.
REFERENCES:
Much of the biographical information on Shamkovich has been taken from Arkady Bushkov’s page on Shamkovich, and from Genna Sosonko’s essay ‘Knyaz’.
The information on Shamkovich leaving his studies to concentrate on chess is from the obituary article published in the New York Times on 7th May, 2005.
Soviet Chess History 
Once I had a small conversation with GM Anton Korobov about Yuriy Sakharov. He admitted that knows very few Sakharov games but the most impressive one fo him was the lost game against Shamkovich played at USSR 32nd Championship: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1122099
Special impression made the sucrifice 18.e3! with effective usage a weakness of a1-h8 diagonal in spite that this continuation was not completely correct. In his annotations in the tournament bulletin Shamkovich reminds the famous Isaac Lipnitsky article: “Attention: diagonal a1-h8!”
Thanks for this, Mykola. I will have a look at that game. I hope all is well with you and your family!
Thanks, we are quite well.
Misprint: “for him”