It is often asked how chess became so popular in the USSR. My answer is that most areas of creative thought were closely supervised by the state; literature, art and even music, as Shostokovich and Prokofiev found, were subject to government control. Shostokovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was severely criticised by the Communist Party Congress, for instance. Antagonising the state could be fatal.
In chess, though, creative thought could flourish without interference from the commissars. The notion that chess moves could be ideologically unsound was rarely entertained.
My theory for the popularity of chess would have had no currency within the Soviet Union. Soviet writers would have claimed that the obsession with chess was inspired by Mikhail Chigorin, the so-called godfather of Soviet chess, a player who came tantalisingly close to winning the World Championship.
Mikhail Chigorin: the Creative Genius by Jimmy Adams is published by New in Chess.
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