Pawns in the great game

WHITE KING AND RED QUEEN

Daniel Johnson
Atlantic, £22



THE 1972 world chess championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky captivated the world. In London pubs, Daniel Johnson recalls, dartboards were neglected in favour of chessboards. In the United States, television coverage of the Democratic Convention was postponed so as not to clash with the games. Such global interest had never happened before, and has never been repeated. Yet, as Johnson notes, the fervour had long been taken for granted in the nation that dominated 20th-century chess: the Soviet Union.

Johnson's enjoyable book is subtitled "how the Cold War was fought on the chessboard", but his historical compass is far broader, skipping quickly through the game's early development into the emergence of the modern tournament system.

The Soviets gave chess the same high priority as other sports, since it provided not only a way of triumphing over the capitalists, but also a distraction for the downtrodden masses. As one dissident put it to Viktor Korchnoi in 1974: "You chess players have a special mission. Football and ice hockey players are needed to make people drink less vodka, but they show you to the public so that they read less Solzhenitsyn."

State involvement in the game went as far as deciding who would win or lose - pressure was put on players to throw matches in order that the right person would emerge to represent the nation. These well-coached Russian champions nearly always won, and it was not until the emergence of Bobby Fischer that they had serious foreign competition.

Yet although the world saw Fischer's match with Spassky in Reykjavik as a symbol of the Cold War itself, its real strategic value was nil. Henry Kissinger briefly intervened to try to persuade the petulant Fischer not to walk out, but Kissinger knew that the communist-hating Fischer represented nobody but himself.

Even more bizarre was the later encounter between Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoi and loyal Party man Anatoly Karpov. Korchnoi, convinced he was being hypnotised by the Russians, wore mirrored sunglasses for protection, and had yellow-robed yogis meditating during games. Even so, he lost.

Karpov's nemesis was Gary Kasparov, the last Soviet and first post-Soviet champion, who also became in 1997 the first world champion to be beaten by a computer. Johnson's fascinating book chronicles an era when chess was brought to such perfection that in the end, humans were no longer necessary.