How Russia Became So Dominant in Chess

A quick history of chess in Russia from tsardom to modern times

Chess was born in India, refined in Persia, and spread across the globe like a vine. But in Russia, it found more than just fertile soil; it found its center of gravity. For centuries, the chess world has tilted on a Russian axis. The grandmasters who defined eras, the theories that reshaped the game, the political dramas that held the world captive - the story always seems to lead back to Moscow, or St. Petersburg, or a quiet dacha outside the city.

I: The Pre-Game Show: Tsars, Bans, and a Very Patient Grandfather

Chess arrived in the lands of Rus’ sometime around the 9th century, carried along the same trade routes that brought silks and spices. It was an exotic import, a game called Shatranj with Persian roots. The name itself, Shakhmaty (Шахматы), is a direct echo of the Persian “Shāh Māt” — the King is dead. ¹

For centuries, chess was a quiet, aristocratic hobby. The Orthodox Church wasn’t a fan, occasionally banning it as a “devilish illusion” alongside dice and other unsavory pastimes. But you can’t keep a good game down. The Tsars, in particular, had a soft spot for it.

There’s a wonderfully ironic legend that Ivan the Terrible, a man who banned chess in 1551, died in 1584 while setting up the pieces for a game. Peter the Great carried a soft leather board with him on military campaigns. Catherine the Great was apparently a player and even owned the “Mechanical Turk,” the world’s most famous chess-playing automaton.²

But this was all just… a game. A high-status hobby. It took until the 19th century for Russia to produce its first real chess thinkers, like Alexander Petrov, who wrote the first serious Russian-language chess manual in 1824. And then came Mikhail Chigorin, the man often called the “Father of Russian Chess.”

Chigorin was the real deal. He was a world-class player who twice challenged Wilhelm Steinitz for the World Championship in the 1880s and 90s. More importantly, he was a promoter. He started chess magazines, founded clubs, and tried, with all his might, to build a self-sustaining chess culture in Russia.

And he mostly failed. His magazines struggled for subscribers. The clubs were small, elite gatherings. Chess was popular, sure, but it was an unstructured, disorganized popularity. The raw material was there, but the machine to process it hadn’t been invented yet.

Then, in 1917, everything changed.

II: The Main Event: The Red Machine Gets a Chessboard

The Bolsheviks who seized power were not, on the whole, a sentimental bunch. They didn’t embrace chess out of a deep love for its elegant beauty. They embraced it because they saw its use.

Vladimir Lenin was a keen player. So was Leon Trotsky. But the true architect of the Soviet chess machine was a man named Nikolai Krylenko. As the People’s Commissar for Justice and, later, the head of the Soviet sports committee, Krylenko saw chess not as a game, but as a tool. A political weapon.

In 1924, he declared, “We must organize shock brigades of chessplayers and begin immediately a five-year plan for chess.” A five-year plan. For chess.

The logic was ruthlessly Soviet:

1. It’s an Intellectual Gymnasium: Chess teaches strategic thinking, discipline, patience, and foresight. These are excellent qualities for a Red Army soldier and a productive socialist citizen. As early as 1920, chess was part of military pre-draft training.
2. It’s an Ideological Proving Ground: In the coming struggle with the capitalist West, victory on the chessboard would be presented as proof of the intellectual superiority of the socialist mind. Every checkmate against a Westerner was a small victory for communism.
3. It’s Cheap Mass Culture: You don’t need expensive stadiums or fancy equipment. A board, some pieces, and you have a tool for “cultured leisure” for the masses, diverting them from less desirable pastimes like vodka and religion.

The slogan was “Chess to the masses!” and the state put its full weight behind it. The struggling little clubs of Chigorin’s era were replaced by a vast, state-funded network. Chess sections were established in every factory, every collective farm, every trade union. The crown jewels were the “Pioneer Palaces,” state-run youth centers where millions of children received free, high-level chess instruction.

This was the machine. A nationwide talent-identification system that could find a promising eight-year-old in a Siberian village and plug them into a pipeline of coaching, theory, and competition that led all the way to the world stage. The state paid the salaries. The state covered the travel. The only thing the player had to do was win. For the glory of the Soviet Union, of course.

The results were staggering. The machine began churning out champions.

First came Mikhail Botvinnik, the “Patriarch.” An engineer by training, he was the perfect Soviet champion: disciplined, scientific, and relentlessly logical. He became the first World Champion produced entirely by the Soviet system in 1948, and his Botvinnik Chess School would later train the next generation of giants, including Karpov and Kasparov.

Then the machine produced Mikhail Tal, the “Magician from Riga.” Tal was the system’s beautiful glitch, a chain-smoking, electrifying genius who played with a kind of chaotic, intuitive brilliance that defied logic. He would sacrifice pieces for attacks so complex that even he wasn’t sure they worked, but they would terrify his opponents into submission.

There was Tigran Petrosian, “Iron Tigran,” a defensive fortress so solid that attacking him was like punching a mountain. And Boris Spassky, the universal player, the suave, handsome champion who would become one half of the most famous chess match in history.

From 1948 until 1991, the World Chess Championship was an almost exclusively internal Soviet affair. The only interruption was Bobby Fischer.

The 1972 Fischer-Spassky “Match of the Century” in Reykjavik was the Cold War distilled onto a chessboard. It was the lone American genius against the entire Soviet chess establishment. When Fischer won, it was a cultural earthquake.

The Soviets needed the title back. And the machine had the perfect man for the job.

III: The K-Era: When the Machine Turned on Itself

Enter Anatoly Karpov. He was, in many ways, a new Botvinnik. Calm, positional, and relentlessly technical, he would squeeze his opponents like a boa constrictor. He was also an ethnic Russian and a loyal member of the Communist Party. He was the establishment’s golden boy.

Karpov became champion in 1975 when Fischer refused to defend his title. His reign was immediately defined by a series of incredibly bitter matches against Viktor Korchnoi, a brilliant but prickly grandmaster who had defected from the USSR in 1976.

The Karpov-Korchnoi matches were pure Cold War theater. The Soviets saw Korchnoi as a vile traitor; Korchnoi saw himself as a dissident fighting a totalitarian empire. The matches featured accusations of hypnotism, protests over the color of yogurt being delivered to Karpov (was it a coded signal?), and entourages that included parapsychologists and orange-robed gurus.³ It was less a chess match and more a spy novel written by a madman.

Karpov won, and the Soviet establishment breathed a sigh of relief. He was their champion. But then, the machine produced one last, terrifyingly brilliant product.

Enter Garry Kasparov. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother, Kasparov was everything Karpov was not. He was fiery, aggressive, and fiercely independent. He was a force of nature, a new generation challenging the old guard. The rivalry that followed was one of the greatest in sports history.

Their first match in 1984 was an epic of attrition. The first to six wins would be champion. Karpov stormed to a 5-0 lead. He needed just one more win. But Kasparov dug in, fighting for draws, conserving energy. After 48 games and five months, with the score 5-3 and both players visibly exhausted, the FIDE President controversially terminated the match without a result.

The establishment, Kasparov claimed, was protecting its favorite son. A new match was set for 1985. This time, the 22-year-old Kasparov won, becoming the youngest World Champion in history. Their five matches, totaling 144 games, were a titanic struggle that wasn’t just about chess; it was about the soul of the dying Soviet empire. The loyal company man versus the dynamic, individualistic upstart.

In the end, the upstart won. Kasparov would hold the title until 2000, his reign bridging the gap between the Soviet Union and the new Russia. The machine had built its own destroyer.

IV: The Ghost in the Rusted Machine

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so did the state funding for the chess machine. The Pioneer Palaces emptied out. The stipends vanished. A “brain drain” began, as many of Russia’s top coaches and players sought better opportunities in the West.

Simultaneously, technology democratized the game. The “Soviet advantage”—a near-monopoly on high-level analysis and information—was erased by powerful chess engines and online databases. Any dedicated kid with a laptop in India or Norway could now access the same knowledge that was once the exclusive domain of the Botvinnik school.

Russia is still a chess powerhouse. The cultural roots run too deep. It continues to produce world-class players like Vladimir Kramnik, who dethroned Kasparov, and Ian Nepomniachtchi, a two-time World Championship challenger. But the dominance is gone. The world has caught up. The age of a single country producing champion after champion like an assembly line is over.

Footnotes

1. Though some linguists now argue the original Persian meant something closer to “the king is ambushed” or “the king is helpless,” and “the king is dead” was a later, more dramatic folk etymology. Which is less punchy, but probably more accurate. ↩

2. The Mechanical Turk, we should be clear, was a magnificent fraud. It was a clever cabinet with a hidden human chess master inside. Still, owning the 18th-century equivalent of a chess supercomputer was a serious power move for Catherine. ↩

3. Seriously. Korchnoi’s camp accused Karpov’s resident psychologist, Dr. Zukhar, of staring at him to disrupt his concentration. Korchnoi retaliated by bringing in two Ananda Marga yogis who were on bail for attempted murder to meditate in the front row. You cannot make this stuff up. ↩