Jonathan Speelman pays tribute to Viktor Korchnoi

Viktor Korchnoi, 1931 – 2016

By Jonathan Speelman

The death last month of the great Viktor Korchnoi marked the end of an era and of a super-grandmaster who was one of a kind. In 1953, the young Korchnoi twice played Grigory Levenfish, making a win and a loss apiece – Levenfish was born in 1889. Fully five decades later, Korchnoi played and defeated the 14-year-old Magnus Carlsen at a tournament in Norway in 2004. Overall he did battle by his own reckoning with six generations of chess players!

Victor Lvovich Korchnoi was born in the then Leningrad on March 23rd 1931 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His father taught him chess at the age of five, he joined the local Pioneers Palace in 1943, and by 1947 he had already won he USSR Junior Championship with a massive score.

But the defining events of his youth were the horrors of the years under Stalin preceding the war and, above all, the 872-day Siege of Leningrad. With his parents divorced, his father dead after one of the early battles of the war, and his grandmother and her brother, whom he helped to bury, both gone, Korchnoi survived it with his stepmother of whom he was clearly very fond as the first chapter of Chess is My Life shows.

After the terrible privations of his childhood, Korchnoi was always a difficult man, but he used it to become one of the (arguably the) strongest chess players ever not to become world champion: with a lifelong devotion to chess and a unique career.

In the weeks since Korchnoi’s death the details of that career have been rehearsed endlessly elsewhere, but I will briefly summarise. Korchnoi began his international chess career in the 1950s with his first tournament abroad in Bucharest 1954 where he was first ahead of Rashid Nezhmetdinov (and Bob Wade was somewhere near the bottom). At that time, the USSR Championship was the world’s strongest annual event and Korchnoi had already made his debut at the end of 1952 when he was sixth and been second in the following championship (there wasn’t one in 1953), at the very beginning of 1954. He went on to compete many times and won four in Leningrad 1960, Yerevan 1962, Kiev 1964-65 and Riga 1970.

Korchnoi playing for the USSR against the Netherlands, The Hague, 1962.
The two interested spectators are the soon-to-be world champion,
Tigran Petrosian, and the top Dutch player, the GM Jan Hein Donner.

Despite these huge successes, numerous further victories in international tournaments and successful appearances for the USSR in the Olympiad and the European Team Championship, Korchnoi was never considered fully ‘reliable’ by the Soviet authorities and in the early to mid 1970s found it almost impossible to travel abroad.

In 1976, however, he was allowed to play in a tournament in Amsterdam and after sharing first place with Tony Miles, asked Miles at the closing ceremony how to spell ‘political asylum’. He defected to the West, living first in Holland, then Germany, and from 1978, Switzerland. His wife Bella and son Igor were eventually also able to leave the Soviet Union, though only after Igor had served two and a half years in a labour camp for ‘evading military service’. However, Korchnoi subsequently divorced and married Petra Leeuwerik who was with him till the end.

Taking on a young Garry Kasparov in a clock simul held in Viktor’s hometown of Leningrad
in 1975. This game, the first of many between Korchnoi and Kasparov, ended in a draw.

Korchnoi’s defection led after he defeated Boris Spassky in the final of the Candidates cycle in 1977 to one of the hardest fought and bitterest matches of all time both on and off the board: the world championship against Anatoly Karpov in Baguio City in the Philippines in 1978. Karpov’s team included Dr. Zukhar, a well-known hypnotist and ‘parapsychologist’, whose presence in the audience greatly worried Korchnoi, who had him sent back several rows, and no fewer than 17 KGB agents! Korchnoi countered with two members of an Indian religious sect, the Ananda Marga, then on bail for murder.

On the board, Karpov took an early lead, but Korchnoi fought back wonderfully winning three out of four consecutive games to equalise before Karpov got him in the decisive 32nd game. They also played a second world championship match in Merano 1981, but it was much so one-sided that it’s sometimes been termed the ‘massacre in Merano’.

Viktor takes a break for a spot of table tennis during the 30th Hoogovens Chess Tournament held in Wijk aan Zee, January 1968. After an amazing run of ten wins from his first eleven games, Korchnoi was the runaway winner, some three points ahead of Portisch, Tal and Hort.

Ray Keene and Michael Stean were Korchnoi’s seconds in Baguio and I also briefly occupied that position. It happened at the 1985 Montpellier Candidates tournament, which I went to as first reserve. When nobody had the good grace to fail to appear or fall sufficiently ill, I worked for Victor for several rounds. But disappointed not to be playing myself, I doubt I was much use and he soon fired me, though we maintained perfectly reasonable relations thereafter.

I first played Victor in the Phillips and Drew Kings tournament in London 1980 – a draw – and went on to face him about 18 times in total with a smallish but respectable minus score. He was famous, of course, for the tirades he would unleash after losing – some I later learned apparently rehearsed in advance depending on the result! – but I don’t remember anything exceptional the few times I did win.

In any case ‘Viktor the Terrible’ needed fury to play his best. Sometimes, as against Karpov, it was surely real, but other times more artificial. And I would urge readers who haven’t seen it before to watch his wonderful self parody in an advertisement for the Swiss Milk Marketing Board, in which he starred opposite Lovely the cow. After a sequence of agonised facial expressions, he resigns dramatically to a screaming chord and storms from the board to the message “Milk works wonders each and every day”. She swishes her tail, turns to the ecstatic audience and appears to wink.

Korchnoi actually effectively played three world championship matches against Karpov since the final of the Candidates in 1975 produced the next world champion when Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title. Korchnoi never regained the absolute heights after Merano, but he still had a huge part to play when in 1984 he was paired against Garry Kasparov in the Candidates.

A smiling Viktor pictured in February 1978 with the head of FIDE and former world champion, Max Euwe. Eagle-eyed readers will note the blackboard in the background which shows the bids to host the 1978 World Championship match between Karpov and Korchnoi. Of the seven bids received, Karpov’s first choice was Hamburg as it was “the nearest to Leningrad”, while Korchnoi chose Graz. The Philippine bid of Baguio City was accepted as a compromise.

This match was originally scheduled to be in Pasadena in California, but after fractious negotiations with the Soviet Chess Federation broke down, Korchnoi was declared the winner. Very nobly, he refused to accept this and they later played in London. Korchnoi won the first game, but in the end Kasparov was too strong for him and went on to face Karpov in the first of their many matches, the ‘Moscow Marathon’.

In his later years, Korchnoi softened somewhat and he was an energetic and amusing presence in the VIP room at the first few editions of the London Classic where, with myself and John Nunn as chief sub-barrackers, he punctuated Julian Hodgson’s commentary, reserving particular opprobrium for those who chose to defend the King’s Indian. He loved the space advantage that White gets in such lines and aimed for total control. In defence he was a lion (living up to his name of ‘lion’s son’), and in the endgame at his best, tremendous.

Playing chess was Victor’s life and at the age of 79 he ventured forth in London from the VIP room to face the public in a simultaneous display which lasted more than five hours. Wheelchair-bound at the beginning of last year, he nevertheless played a four-game rapidplay match against Wolfgang Uhlmann in Zurich which they drew 2-2, and when he was invited back to Zurich at the beginning of this year, he complained when they only wanted him as a guest of honour rather than in battle. He was a truly great warrior.

I’ve chosen a crucial and beautifully played endgame to finish. It comes from what turned out to be the penultimate game in Baguio, as Korchnoi, who had trailed 2-5 in the race to six wins, hauled himself back to 5-5 only to lose everything in game 32.

To help me, I dug our Ray Keene’s book of the match, and apart from concentrating on this game, reread the introduction and the appendix at the end with selected documents. These comprise Korchnoi’s open letter to President Brezhnev requesting that his family to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union and then a succession of protests from the two camps during the match. They brought back sharply the vitriol of the proceedings and the extreme level of enmity at the time.

The above article appeared in the July 2016 of the British magazine CHESS

CHESS Magazine was established in 1935 by B.H. Wood who ran it for over fifty years. It is published each month by the London Chess Centre and is edited by IM Richard Palliser and Matt Read. The Executive Editor is Malcolm Pein, who organises the London Chess Classic.

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