Borís Vasíl'yevich Spásskiy was born on January 30, 1937 in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). The two-time Soviet Champion and ex-World Champion immigrated to France in 1976, and became a French citizen. He returned to Russia in 2012, where he suffered a major stroke that left him bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Arkady Dvorkovich, the president of FIDE, said: “He was not only one of the greatest players of the Soviet era and the world, but also a true gentleman. His contributions to chess will never be forgotten.”

The general newspapers and chess news outlets will be full of the news of Spassky's passing, with copious descriptions of his career. Read for instance Dylan Loeb McClain's article in the New York Times, published just hours after the news broke. In any case, there are many comprehensive biographical articles, like this one in Wikipedia. I do not want to add to these, but instead describe the Spassky I knew.

On a personal note

In the book Chess Stories, now available in English, there is a chapter by me on my decades-long friendship with Boris Spassky. I will link to it at the bottom of this article. Here's a short summary.

I first met Boris Spassky in the late 1970s, in Hamburg, where he was part of the commercial presentation of a new chess playing computer. Then again in Munich in 1979, where Boris was playing in a GM tournament. My friend Helmut Pfleger, who is a medical doctor, was conducting an experiment to monitor the blood pressure and heart rates of players during a game. Spassky was one of the volunteers, and I assisted in attaching the monitors to his arm each day. We slowly became friends.

In 1988, I travelled to the Candidates Tournament in Saint John, Canada. When the plane landed in Toronto they said we had missed the onward flight, and gave me a very nice room, in a very nice hotel. There I went down to dinner, and suddenly Boris Spassky walks up to me and says, “Excuse me, Mr. Frederic, I recognized you on the plane, but I did not want to disturb you. Maybe we could now have dinner together?” I was stunned that one of the greatest chess players in the world would come to me in such a courteous way. We had a sumptuous dinner, with an endless supply of good Canadian wine. We sat there till four in the morning, and Boris told me eighty percent of everything I know about chess history.

After that night in the hotel restaurant, every time we met, we always spoke at length, and often had dinner together. Twice a year I would get a phone call from him: "I need you to fill my samovar," he'd say. That meant I had to send him new games for his Mega Database.

The next major encounter came many years later, when there was a Candidates Tournament in Elista, Russia. Boris was there doing commentary. We usually took lunch and dinner at the same table, and I witnessed something quite extraordinary: many young players crowded around us, listening to Boris. He was an old man, but everyone was interested in talking to him. He was charismatic and charming, full of stories!

Master Class Vol.17 - Boris Spassky

In this video course, experts including Dorian Rogozenco, Mihail Marin, Karsten Müller and Oliver Reeh, examine the games of Boris Spassky. Let them show you which openings Spassky chose to play, where his strength in middlegames were and much more.

After Boris moved back to Moscow, he became very frail. When I saw pictures or videos of him, I felt sad, because the man with whom I roamed the steppe was so vigorous and healthy. Not so long ago, somebody asked him what he did for his chess preparation. He replied: “I do not prepare for chess. I am preparing for – death! It is a long and difficult endgame.” 

• I have described the weeks we spent together in Elista, and my friendship with Boris Spassky, in this article, which contains pictures and a 16-minute video interview conduced in Arne Kaehler's series Frederic's Mates.
   
• You can also read the full chapter I wrote in Chess Stories.