The curious timing of Chess

The musical Chess is about one or two world chess championships. These are unique events, which from 1948 to 1990 were exclusively under the auspices of the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) or World Chess Federation. In the period 1963-1990 the championship was held regularly every 3 years, with only two exceptions.

The first exception was in 1975. Bobby Fischer had defeated Boris Spassky in 1972, in one of the most famous world championship matches ever (and one of the matches that helped inspire Chess). In the intervening years, Fischer did not play competitive chess, and when FIDE attempted to arrange a match against the winner of the 1974 candidates tournament, Soviet wunderkind Anatoly Karpov, Fischer released a lengthy list of demands. FIDE did not meet these, particularly a specific requirement of a draw with Fischer retaining the title if the match (in a first player to 10 wins format) led to a 9-9 score. Fischer resigned his championship and refused to budge on his demands. No 1975 championship was held, and Karpov was declared World Champion.

Karpov went on to prove he really was World Champion, beating Soviet exile Viktor Korchnoi in 1978 and 1981, in the other matches that inspired Chess. This is where mirror glasses, parapsychologists, games stopped on account of chairs, and so on actually come from.

In 1984 the tournament came around again. This time Karpov was challenged by a new up-and-comer from the Soviet Union, Garry Kasparov. The match was first to six wins, and Karpov won four of the first nine games - seemingly coasting to victory. But a tremendous series of draws would ensue, and Karpov only one a single game, number 27. Kasparov won game 32, and then the pair proceeded to draw 14 more games. Kasparov finally won two games in a row in February 1985, but FIDE president Florencio Campomanes terminated the match with a 5-3 score.

And if you ever doubted that Chess is somewhat more realistic than you thought - well, a 2010 book called The KGB Plays Chess confirmed what Freddie Trumper could only suspect: Campomanes was a KGB asset and was determined that Karpov not lose. Over the objections of both players he wiped the slate clean and began a new match. The 1985 championship was the first to limit the match to 24 games, with ties counting as half of a point and wins as a whole point. Kasparov won, 13-11.

The 1985 match setup had included a rematch clause, so there was a third Karpov-Kasparov championship in 1986. This one was a draw, 12-12, with Kasparov retaining the title. They met again in the regular 1987 championship, with a third drawn result, and finally in 1990, when Kasparov won 12½-11½. The world championship got really complicated after that, but it's out of the time frame for our musical.

The cancellation affair was referenced in the extended version of "The Arbiter's Song" that was used on Broadway: "I control the match, I start it, I can call it off, Kasparov found that out." It's also referenced obliquely in the threat at the start of London "Endgame": "Two weeks ago I gave you a limit of six more games to end this sequence of draws. Five of these have now passed. If today's game does not produce a decision, the match is cancelled."

From a dramaturgical perspective, when did the matches in Chess take place? There is no cancelled 1984 match to drive everything from Karpov-Kasparov, so it makes the most sense for the matches to fall on the regular 3-year schedule. One-year gaps or four-year gaps wouldn't work; FIDE held a whole series of tournaments on a regular schedule to determine the challenger for the title.

In the London production, Freddie is the world champion at the beginning. He wouldn't have taken the championship from Fischer, who was paranoid about the Soviets beating him. What would make the most sense is the following sequence.

1978 - Freddie Trumper beats champion Anatoly Karpov.
1981 - Anatoly Sergievsky beats champion Freddie Trumper.
1984 - Anatoly Sergievsky defends his title from challenger Leonid Viigand.

Conveniently this places the 1981 match (and act one) in Meran, Italy where the real match happened and the lengthy series of draws in the 1984 championship (act two). It's unfortunate for Karpov and Korchnoi whose epic matches never happen.

If you wanted to do the Broadway show, Anatoly is the champion; he would have beaten Karpov in 1981 or 1984, setting the show in 1984 or 1987. For single-match versions where Freddie is the champion, he would have beaten Karpov (who really is the loser in this whole equation; Karpov was a genuinely great chess player)

The time of the Kennedy Center production (1979 and 1983) doesn't work; Freddie won the title in 1978 but the followup matches would have been in 1981 and 1984, inconvenient for the KC book but realistic for our purposes.

What happens when Soviet chess players lose

Workers building the Kolyma Highway in the GULAG system

In the recent Kennedy Center production of Chess, using a modified version of the London book written by Danny Strong, it is outright stated that Anatoly Sergievsky will be killed if he doesn't win the chess championship, and that the previous loser, "Boris Ivanovich", was killed for losing to Freddie Trumper. Set in 1979, this is a stretch of the imagination that appears to have confused the Brezhnev-era USSR for its earlier Stalin-era counterpart, or perhaps to rumors about modern-day North Korea.

Soviet grandmasters in the 1970s were, as a rule, not killed or sent to Gulags for failure. The latter is impossible; the Gulag system was closed down by the 1960s, although there were still prison camps in Siberia, and political dissidents were still mistreated. Brezhnev was notorious for putting public opposition figures in mental hospitals. None of this should be downplayed or under-estimated as violations of human rights; it's simply a question of getting the history right. A Soviet threat in 1983 to send someone to a Gulag is like a threat from an American to send someone to Alcatraz in the same period - great for symbolism but it just wouldn't have happened. And Svetlana in this version is threatened with the Gulags.

The one Soviet grandmaster who did lose the championship to an American was Boris Spassky, who lost the high-profile 1972 championship to Bobby Fischer. In fact, Spassky had the opportunity to claim a forfeit in the 1972 tournament, and was ordered by Soviet officials to claim that Fischer had forfeited the match and the championship remained his. (See 2016 interview with Boris Spassky.) Of course Fischer, who was the prototype of the raving anti-communist American champion, took the title for the United States. Spassky was back playing competitive international chess the next year.

But there really was a Soviet player severely penalized for losing to Bobby Fischer. Only the year prior, Fischer beat Mark Taimanov in the Candidates tournament, winning six games and losing none. The humiliation was so complete that the Soviet authorities thought that Taimanov had lost on purpose as a political act. When Taimanov returned to the Soviet Union, he was found to have illegal literature by dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was stripped of his salary as a grandmaster and his right to travel internationally. It was only because he had the right to play in an Interzonal tournament in Leningrad in 1973 that Taimanov would be "rehabilitated" by the Soviet authorities.

(There's a line in the Sydney rewrite of "US vs. USSR" that probably references Taimanov, when Molokov says, "Though it could mean foreign travel has to stop.")

The other player who came under the ire of Soviet authorities was Viktor Korchnoi. He was a slightly different case; Korchnoi was a player who the Soviet chess world conspired against in the 1974 Candidates' Final to determine who would face Bobby Fischer in the 1975 World Championship match that never happened. The Soviet Chess Federation, led in this matter by Tigran Petrosian, wanted to promote the younger generation - in the person of Anatoly Karpov - over Korchnoi's older generation that had been beaten by Fischer.

In 1976 Korchnoi defected in the Netherlands, ultimately ending up in Switzerland. This wasn't impulsive; he had taken care to get his chess library out of the USSR. His family was not allowed to join him, though. Korchnoi bedeviled the Soviet chess system by qualifying twice in a row for the World Championship. He lost both times, in 1978 (Baguio, Philippines) and 1981 (Merano, Italy), to Karpov, who proved himself to be the rightful champion. Korchnoi was hated by the Soviets and they did in fact resort to tricks, such as having a parapsychologist seated in the front row, to undermine him psychologically.

Korchnoi's son, Igor, was actually sent to prison in Siberia when he refused to serve in the army. (He feared that military service would complicate his ability to leave the Soviet Union.) But he served a 30 month sentence and was allowed, along with Korchnoi's wife Bella, to join Korchnoi in exile a year after the Merano match. This proved somewhat awkward as Korchnoi already had a lover and divorced Bella shortly after their reunion. But this is as close as we come to someone actually being thrown in a Gulag over chess.

The level of threat and pressure at work in the original libretto of Chess are roughly historically accurate. Strong is trying to increase the stakes but it comes at the expense of making the Soviets seem strangely maniacal in a period when they were infamous as the sclerotic gerontocracy who presided over a corrupt, suffocating, bureaucratic system in a slow decline. Or to put it another way - no one's life is threatened by a flop.