A Soviet destiny – Liberation
At the time when victory in the Cold War was symbolically played around a chessboard, Boris Spassky, who died Thursday, February 27 at 88, experienced a model of destiny made in USSR. From idol to pariah. Of cursed icon. Because he had lost the match he was not allowed, in the eyes of the Soviet regime, to lose. It was in 1972 in Reykjavik. Iceland was not yet a land that produces thrillers And attracts tourists, just a point lost in the North Atlantic, on which the eyes of diplomats and chess enthusiasts then leaned.
Arnaldur Indridason, the most famous Icelandic polardeux has also chosen as a backdrop of one of his novels What will then be called the match of the century. On the one hand of the chessboard, Boris Vasilyevich Spassky, born in 1937 in Leningrad, a monster of precocity, becoming at 18 years old junior world champion and, at the time, the youngest grandmother in history, world champion since 1969. He said he learned to play chess at five years in an orphanage, after being able to flee with his family Leningrad, Terrible seat by the Nazis during the Second World War. After the war, his aggressive style of play without fear of sacrifices is noticed by his peers and encouraged by the Communist regime, which provides him with a scholarship and a coach.
Faced with Spassky, the American Bobby Fischer, Still considered by some as the best chess player of all time. Beyond the geostrategic issues, it is the eternal history of sport that is written in the Icelandic capital: the good against the villain, the genius against the robot, the free-thinner against the prohibition of speaking, the eccentric against the mutic.
While the USSR dominates the failures without sharing Boris Spassky must win it is the opposite: after a disastrous beginning for Bobby Fischer, the American ultimately defeated his opponent, ending an uninterrupted suite of Soviet world champions since 1948. For Moscow, it's a slap, but Spassky is delighted to be rid of a « Colossal responsibility ». « You cannot imagine how relieved I was when Fischer withdrew the title to me. I freed myself from a very heavy burden and I was breathing freely ”said the grand-master almost forty years later.
This emblematic duel of the Cold War has been the subject of many films, books and documentaries and inspired the novel by Walter Tevis « The Lady's Game », adapted in 2020 in an acclaimed series on Netflix.
He settled in 1976 in France after marrying a Frenchwoman of Russian origin. He obtained French nationality two years later. He only found public attention many years later, In 1992 in Yugoslavia, during an unofficial revenge against Bobby Fischer, that he also loses. He gradually disinterested in failures. The last years of Boris Spassky's life have been marked by a mysterious family conflict and a return to Russia in troubled conditions. Victim of two brain attacks in 2006 and then in 2010, he disappeared two years later from his French home and found himself in Moscow, where he appeared old and weakened on Russian television, white hair and drawn lines. « I have to start all over again, but I'm not afraid »he says, evoking a mysterious « sponsor » having helped him to flee France against the advice of his wife and sister. In 2008, he went to the grave of his former rival, Bobby Fischer, who died the same year and buried in an Icelandic cemetery. « Do you think the neighboring place is available? » He had then launched to journalists.
“A great personality is gone, generations of chess players have studied and study his parts and his work, said the president of the Russian failure federation, Andrei Filatov, quoted by the agency TASS. It is a great loss for the country. « No doubt not as great as the loss of the title of world champion by the USSR in 1972.
Update at 9:44 p.m. with additional biographical elements
