Boris Spassky, Soviet chess champion and Cold War symbol, dies at 88

Boston Globe

28-02-2025

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After that win in 1969, chess master Leonard Barden wrote presciently that Mr. Spassky's 'future problem can be stated in two words: Bobby Fischer.'
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Fischer was an unlikely chess genius, a brash Brooklyn native almost as well known for his chronic complaining about lighting and spectators and anything else as for his fierce talent. He had failed to beat Mr. Spassky in five tries, but in the run-up to the championship match he had racked up 20 straight victories against some of the world's best players — an unparalleled feat.
Mr. Spassky, a former child prodigy, refused to join the Communist Party and had a playboy reputation. Nevertheless, when he arrived at Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to play Fischer in the summer of 1972, he carried with him the burden of his country's expectations.
The Soviet Union boasted an unbroken streak of world chess champions that stretched back to 1948. It seemed unimaginable that there could be a serious challenger hailing from any other nation.
Even the movies offered a nod to Mr. Spassky's brilliance. A tactic used in a 1960 victory over countryman David Bronstein, in which Mr. Spassky sacrificed a rook to open an attack on Bronstein's king, was copied in a chess scene early in the 1963 James Bond film 'From Russia with Love,' in which a Soviet secret agent plays a Canadian.
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A small army of journalists descended on Reykjavik to cover the match, which was delayed when Fischer did not show up. He refused to play unless the prize money was increased, then balked after his demands were met. He hid in an apartment in Queens until President Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, phoned and persuaded him to fly to Iceland.
Fischer's antics continued throughout the competition, which lasted 21 games over more than six weeks. Mr. Spassky, who at one point recognized a clever move by his opponent with applause, won fans for his unflappable patience and sportsmanship.
For the first match, Fischer arrived nearly a half-hour late and was hustled into the domed Laugardalshöll. Mr. Spassky was waiting. Fischer had flown in an exact duplicate of a chair he used when he beat Petrosian in Buenos Aires in 1971.
The first game unfolded on familiar territory — move for move the same as one of Mr. Spassky's draws with Nikolai Krogius during the Soviet championships in 1958. Fischer knew it by heart. After 28 moves, the game also seemed destined for a draw. Some spectators began to shuffle out.
Then Fischer broke the mold. His bishop took Mr. Spassky's pawn, a completely unexpected move that visibly stunned Mr. Spassky and left commentators scrambling to figure out Fischer's new strategy.
'In sixty seconds every entrance to the hall was choked with people charging back in,' Brad Darrach wrote in 'Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World' (1974). ' 'Bobby's attacking! Bobby took a poisoned pawn! Bobby busted the game wide open!' '
The match resumed the following day. Fischer resigned on move 56. But Krogius said Fischer knew he had no chance of doing better than a draw and made the surprising bishop move for 'psychological reasons.'
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'He wanted to show Spassky that he, firstly, didn't fear him at all,' Krogius wrote in his diary, 'and, secondly, that he was going to fight him to the end in every game, without any compromises.'
Fischer forfeited the second game after arguing over the position of television cameras trained on the chessboard. When Fischer threatened to stay away again, Soviet officials ordered Mr. Spassky to return home. He refused.
'To Spassky, it was a matter of honor,' noted a World Chess Hall of Fame remembrance of the showdown in Iceland. 'As world champion, he owed his public a world championship match.'
In the third game, played in a ping-pong room away from the main hall, Fischer was on the attack from his opening gambit, known as the Benoni Defense. By the 31st move, Fischer was bearing down on Mr. Spassky.
Move 41 was Mr. Spassky's last. He resigned — and never fully recovered. 'In this game I essentially signed my capitulation of the entire match,' he later wrote. Fischer won 12½ to 8½ (half points are awarded for draws), and Mr. Spassky conceded his loss by telephone on Sept. 1.
Mr. Spassky went home to a cold reception in the Soviet Union, where he had become a national disappointment. He was wealthy by Russian standards, having won $90,000 in prize money at Reykjavik. But he said he was not allowed to leave the country and persecuted by the KGB. Mr. Spassky's marriage, his second, fell apart.
'I was in a state of depression,' he told The New York Times in 1985.
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A turning point came in 1973, when Mr. Spassky won the Soviet chess championship again, regaining his confidence as he regained his place among the country's best players. He fell in love with Marina Stcherbatcheff, a secretary in the French Embassy, and they married in 1975, moving to Paris the following year. Mr. Spassky became a French citizen and continued to play chess, though never at the same high level.
Fischer, on the other hand, retreated from worldwide fame. He lived hermit-like in various countries, refusing to defend his title in 1975 and emerging from solitude only occasionally to issue ranting antisemitic attacks.
One of his rare public appearances came in 1992, when he agreed to meet Mr. Spassky for a rematch at a resort on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, not far from battlefields in the country's raging civil war.
The competition began 20 years to the day after Fischer won the Match of the Century, and again it received widespread media attention. The level of play had sunk considerably, however, as the two men appeared to have lost their verve.
'It was a war of attrition,' grand master Jon Speelman wrote in Britain's Guardian newspaper.
Fischer again emerged victorious, 10 wins to five. He pocketed $3.35 million in prize money; Mr. Spassky took home $1.65 million.
After the match, the United States issued an arrest warrant for Fischer, whose decision to play in Yugoslavia had violated US sanctions against the war-torn country. In 2004, Fischer was detained in Japan after presenting his revoked US passport.
Mr. Spassky defended his rival, writing an open letter describing Fischer as a 'tragic personality' and calling for mercy. (Fischer died in 2008 in Reykjavik at 64 while still quarreling with US authorities.)
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'Bobby and myself committed the same crime,' Mr. Spassky wrote. 'Put sanctions against me also. Arrest me. And put me in the same cell with Bobby Fischer. And give us a chess set.'
Boris Vasilyevich Spassky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) on Jan. 30, 1937. During World War II, he lived for several years in an orphanage, where he learned the rules of chess before he learned to read and write.
He continued to study chess after returning to postwar Leningrad, and at 10 he won a game against Soviet champion Mikhail Botvinnik in a simultaneous exhibition (with Botvinnik playing other games at the same time). By 18, he had become a grand master. Mr. Spassky also graduated from the University of Leningrad in 1950 with a degree in journalism.
He was known as a well-rounded player whose 'secret strength,' according to Yugoslav grand master Svetozar Gligoric, 'lay in his colossal skill in adapting himself to the different styles of his opponents.'
Mr. Spassky won the Soviet championship in 1961 and, five years later, made his first bid for the world championship, narrowly losing to Petrosian, whom he defeated three years later.
In addition to a son from his marriage to Stcherbatcheff, Mr. Spassky had a daughter from his first marriage, from 1959 to 1961, to Nadezda Konstantinovna Latyntceva; and a son from his second marriage, from 1967 to 1974, to Larisa Zakharovna Solovyova. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Spassky lived in France for decades before returning to Russia in 2012. He was once asked where he felt more at home: Moscow or Paris?
'I feel at home at the chessboard,' he was quoted as saying in a recollection of the Reykjavik match published by the World Chess Hall of Fame in 2022. 'Our chess kingdom does not have borders.'