The KGB Plays Chess: The Soviet Secret Police and the Fight for the World Chess Crown

KGB.

The KGB Plays Chess

by Vladimir Popov & Yuri Felshtinsky

In the days of the USSR and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there existed an organization whose name to this day terrifies both the citizens of the country where it was created and operated for many decades, as well as the inhabitants of other countries. The name of this organization was the Committee for State Security (KGB). In the documents of the Soviet Communist Party, the KGB was referred to as the armed wing of the party. This organization, like its predecessors the VChK, the OGPU, the NKVD, and the MGB, was created by a party that controlled the government of the USSR – the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – for the express purpose of fighting against its adversaries, both inside the country and abroad. The party named its enemies, and the state security organs – as instruments of battle – ruthlessly disposed of them. To show pity for the enemies of the party was dangerous. He who was not sufficiently ruthless with the enemies was either their accessory or himself an enemy. And it was Stalin, the great leader of all peoples, who taught how enemies were to be dealt with: If an enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has had different enemies during different periods in its history, but the most dangerous among them were the ideological opponents of the regime. The party feared them above all others and was always ready to wage an uncompromising and merciless fight against them. The strategy of this fight was worked out by the main organ of the Communist Party of the USSR, the Central Committee, and in particular by the Department of Agitation and Propaganda. This was the agency that controlled all of the country’s ideological organizations, including the media. The latter, carrying out the assignments of the CPSU, which was the governing and directing power in the country, filled the minds of Soviet citizens and the international community with vast amounts of false information, whose purpose was to extol the Communist regime in the Soviet Union and the leaders of the Communist Party.

Anything that furthered this goal was useful. One of the powerful factors in the ideological struggle with the West was the international sports arena. In the opinion of the leaders of the CPSU, the victories of Soviet athletes in various kinds of sports, in world championships and in the Olympics, were supposed to vividly demonstrate to the whole world the superiority of the Soviet system over Western democracies.

From the mid-1970s until the beginning of the perestroika years, the Department of Propaganda at the Central Committee of the CPSU was headed by the former first secretary of the central committee of the Komsomol, Yevgeny Tyazhelnikov. His deputy was an experienced party functionary named Marat Gramov who came from the same part of the country and was a personal friend of the man who started perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev.

The personalities of the ideologues Tyazhelnikov and Gramov merit more detailed descriptions. As the second ranking ideologue in the country (after the famous long-term survivor in the party pantheon, Suslov), Tyazhelnikov became so fond of high art that in seeking to develop a deeper appreciation of it, he carried over his fondness for art to specific artists. It was mainly men that attracted him – in particular, ballet dancers from the famous Bolshoi Theater. Once, one of the principal ballerinas at the Bolshoi Theater received a telephone call during rehearsals from an unknown man, who described himself as a friend of her husband. Her husband was also a ballet dancer, and no less well-known in the USSR and abroad than his famous wife. The mysterious caller told the ballerina that he was calling at her husband’s request. Her husband had suffered a heart attack and wanted her to come home at once. The loyal wife rushed home and found her husband in the arms of Tyazhelnikov. A big scandal ensued and Tyazhelnikov was immediately dispatched as an ambassador to Romania, far away from the scene of his shame.

Tyazhelnikov’s deputy, Gramov, was distinguished neither by a superior intellect nor by elitist tendencies. He was an ordinary and mediocre apparatchik, just like his and Tyazhelnikov’s boss, the Central Committee’s secretary of ideology, Mikhail Suslov, who was nicknamed A Man in a Case, after the Chekhov story. Suslov had a pathological fear of catching a cold and was therefore permanently overdressed. When it was cold, all of the buttons on his coat were buttoned, including the top one, at the neck, while a pair of galoshes was perpetually on his feet. The personnel from Ninth Directorate of the KGB who provided security for the Central Committee’s facilities and were familiar with Suslov’s quirks knew that, when he went in or out of the building, they had to hold the doors open for him one at a time; heaven forbid that they should open the doors all at once – this might produce a draft of air. Ignorance of this rule cost one of them his career. Trying to please Suslov, he threw open both the inside and the outside doors simultaneously – and was instantly fired.

Only mediocre and faceless people could survive under such a boss. It was not for nothing that Gramov was nicknamed Ogurtsov (Mr. Cucumber) by the people who knew him, after one of the characters in Eldar Ryazanov’s 1960’s comedy Carnival Night. Ogurtsov, a bumbling and obtuse Soviet bureaucrat, was played by the wonderful actor Igor Ilyinsky. After the movie came out, Ogurtsov became a common nickname.

For many years, Gramov nurtured the hope of becoming the head of the Soviet sports movement. He was attracted by the opportunity to travel abroad, to serve as a representative in international sports associations, and also to obtain access to the considerable monetary resources that that the USSR spent to achieve victories in sports. As someone who had for many years managed elite sports in the Soviet Union for the Central Committee, Gramov better than anyone else appreciated all the advantages of such a position. Standing between Gramov and his dream was Sergei Pavlov, an exceptional and charismatic man, the former first secretary of the Komsomol’s central committee and subsequently the head of the State Sports Committee. Like any exceptional personality, he had powerful and cunning enemies. After the end of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, in which Soviet athletes won a record-breaking number of medals because of the boycott of the Olympics by the world’s leading athletes, Pavlov was to everyone’s surprise, unexpectedly sent as Soviet ambassador to Mongolia. This was a shameful exile for this energetic and ambitious man that ended up costing him his life. He became gravely ill and died soon after.

After Pavlov fell out of favor and was exiled to Mongolia, the directorship of Soviet sports passed to Gramov, who had a powerful protector in his friend – by this time, a lieutenant general and head of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB – Ivan Abramov. Gramov took Vyacheslav Gavrilin, a sports writer for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and an agent at the First Department of the Third Directorate of the KGB (later this directorate was renamed the Third Main Directorate of the KGB), as his deputy. From a simple newspaper worker, Gramov elevated Gavrilin to the position of deputy head of the State Sports Committee of the USSR.

When the first vice president of the International Olympic Committee, Vitaly Smirnov, learned about this strange appointment, he asked: Is this the same Gavrilin who cuts salami at Gramov’s dacha?

Vyacheslav Gavrilin, deputy head of the State Sports Committee of the USSR, was recruited into the First Department of the Third Main Directorate of the KGB (military counterintelligence) while working as a correspondent for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. Gavrilin’s handler was Vladimir Popov, an officer of the Third Division of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.

Vitaly Smirnov, the vice president of the International Olympic Committee and head of the National Olympic Committee of the USSR, was recruited in 1978 by the deputy head of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, Major General Ivan Abramov.

Gavrilin’s salami-slicing skills compensated for his general lack of culture and inability to communicate with people. He would shock international sports representatives who visited Moscow before the Goodwill Games in 1984 and in later years by taking a greasy newspaper out of his briefcase, in the car on the way from the airport, and extracting from it a salami, which he would then proceed to slice. After that, his guest would be invited to split a bottle of vodka.

Gavrilin and Gramov stole whatever they could get their hands on. They began to create various commercial schemes that brought them enormous profits and thus they can legitimately be considered the founders of corruption in Soviet sports. In addition, they left behind them a legacy as persecutors of a number of outstanding Soviet chess players.

While he was still deputy head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda at the Central Committee of the CPSU, Gramov, a convinced anti-Semite, directed the brunt of his hatred against one of the Soviet Union’s leading grandmasters, Viktor Kortschnoi. With his powerful personality and intellect, Kortschnoi was an exceptional and outspoken figure, distinguished by the bluntness of his opinions, including his views on Soviet reality, the state of affairs in the Chess Federation of the USSR, and its members.

For many years, the Central Chess Club in Moscow was headed by the deputy head of the Chess Federation of the USSR, Viktor Baturinsky.

Viktor Baturinsky, director of the Central Chess Club, head of the Chess Directorate at the State Sports Committee of the USSR, was recruited into the MGB (the predecessor to the KGB) in 1947. During the 1970s and 1980s, Baturinsky’s handlers were officers Anatoly Smaznov and Vladimir Lavrov of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.

The head of the Chess Federation was Vitali Sevastyanov, cosmonaut and two-time Hero of the Soviet Union, whose duties consisted mainly of public relations. Baturinsky became the head of Soviet chess after spending a number of decades on a completely different form of activity. He had served as an official in the military prosecutor’s office and subsequently as military prosecutor. During Stalin’s rule, he had been one of the active implementers and supporters of Stalin’s repressions. For this reason, his career had been successful – awards, positions, and titles followed one after another. The success of his career was facilitated by another factor: Baturinsky’s long-term collaboration with the organs of state security. As an agent of the MGB-KGB, Baturinsky regularly informed on his colleagues at the prosecutor’s office, denouncing their negative pronouncements and attitudes, and thus surreptitiously eliminating his rivals at work. That was why Baturinsky’s career growth, to the envy of many of his colleagues, was so remarkably rapid and successful.

After working for the allotted number of years, Baturinsky retired. But Baturinsky’s talents as an agent and a provocateur were not forgotten by his overseers from the state security apparatus. He was appointed director of the Moscow Chess Club. Baturinsky looked after his daughter Marina, too, securing for her a place in the international directorate of the State Sports Committee. She was soon recruited, with her father’s recommendation, as an agent of the KGB by Captain Vladimir Lavrov of the First Division of the First Department of the Fifth Directorate. From that time on, Marina Baturinskaya had no difficulty traveling abroad in the capacity of translator for Soviet teams.

Could Baturinsky, as an agent with many years of experience, have failed to notice Kortschnoi’s blunt pronouncements about himself and the state of affairs in the chess federation? Of course not. And the reports that Baturinsky submitted to officer Smaznov – his handler in the First Division of the First Department of the Fifth Directorate – skillfully underscored Kortschnoi’s negative attitude toward Soviet reality. At the same time, the State Sports Committee and the Department of Propaganda received information through official channels from the Soviet Chess Federation about Kortschnoi’s critical attitude toward Soviet reality.

As a result of Baturinsky’s reports to state security organs, the KGB opened an operational check file on Kortschnoi to document instances of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda on his part. Such files were kept for up to six months, and their purpose was to obtain accurate facts about the anti-Soviet attitudes of the person under investigation (the target of the file, in KGB terminology). After sufficient information confirming the target’s anti-Soviet pronouncements was gathered, a new file was opened, an operational development file, for collecting concrete materials pertaining to the target’s unlawful activities with accompanying documentation for subsequently bringing criminal charges against him, conducting preliminary hearings, and transferring the case to a court of law.

It should be noted that quite a number of Soviet grandmasters were state security agents. Tigran Petrosian, Lev Polugaevsky, Yuri Balashov, Rafael Vaganian, Eduard Gufeld, and Nikolai Krogius, the head of the Chess Directorate at the State Sports Committee, had extensive experience in collaborating with the KGB as covert agents. The same was true of the long-time editor-in-chief of the magazine 64 – Chess Review, Alexander Roshal.

Tigran Petrosian, world chess champion, was recruited in 1973 by officer Anatoly Smaznov of the First Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.

Lev Polugaevsky was recruited in 1980 by Lieutenant Colonel Igor Perfiliev of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB.

Rafael Vaganian was recruited in 1983 by the Fifth Department of the Armenian KGB. Vaganian worked with Soviet grandmasters, including during trips abroad.

Eduard Gufeld was recruited in 1981 by Igor Perfiliev.

Nikolai Krogius, head of the Chess Directorate at the State Sports Committee of the USSR from 1980 until 1990, was recruited in 1980 by the deputy head of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, Lieutenant Colonel Igor Perfiliev. Code name: Endgame (Endshpil).

Alexander Roshal, editor-in-chief of the journal 64 – Chess Review, was recruited in 1978 by the deputy head of the Third Division of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Davnis.

The KGB made use of all of these people in working on the case of Kortschnoi and his circle. Those who were close to Kortschnoi acquired first-hand knowledge of the power of the Soviet repression machine. Among them was Kortschnoi’s son, Igor, who was put in prison on trumped-up charges, as well as the grandmaster Boris Gulko – Kortschnoi’s putative helper – who spent many years fighting for the right to leave the USSR and being subjected to all kinds of molestations and privations, along with his family, before they were finally allowed to emigrate.

With respect to Kortschnoi, the Soviet government pursued a policy of outright harassment, and he was left with no other choice than to leave the Soviet Union forever. The Soviet government machine placed its bets on Anatoly Karpov, a rising star in the chess firmament, who was obedient and easily manageable. Kortschnoi, an emotional nonconformist and a Jew, was of no use to the Soviet system. In 1976, while attending an international chess tournament in Holland, Kortschnoi requested political asylum, which he soon received in Switzerland. Leaving behind the country where he was born and raised, and whose glory in the world of chess he had greatly advanced, Kortschnoi, whose family was still in the USSR, had little notion of how many trials and battles with the Soviet system he would still have to endure.

In the early 1970s, a young man of average height, with a pleasant appearance, joined the ranks of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB. This was Vladimir Pishchenko, whose name would appear in many newspapers around the world in only a few years. He began his career, however, in the same, ordinary way as most of his colleagues. His first appointment was in the Third Department of the Fifth Directorate, and his job was to oversee Moscow State University and Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University. State security officers who oversaw these institutions were tasked with identifying foreign security agents who had come to the Soviet Union to study as undergraduate and graduate students and recruiting foreign students for collaboration with the KGB and their subsequent embedding in foreign countries. In order to facilitate the investigation of undergraduate and graduate students from foreign countries, the KGB pursued a policy of intensively recruiting agents among Soviet professors and students as well.

As a Moscow State University graduate with a major in economics, Pishchenko became the overseer of a department at his old school and thus found himself in familiar surroundings. But his reappearance at his Alma Mater in a new capacity, as a state security officer, was accompanied by another development in his life.

After completing his secondary schooling, Pishchenko had been drafted into the Soviet Army. He served as a truck driver, and after being discharged, he worked for a couple of years as a driver for the Inturist car fleet. His parents were professional drivers as well. Seeing their existence, he understood that the only path to a decent life in the USSR was to acquire a higher education. At Moscow State University, Pishchenko married a young woman named Lyudmila. Lyudmila, like her mother, worked in the central apparatus of the KGB, as a secretary in one of the departments of the Second Main Directorate. Not without help from his wife’s relatives, Pishchenko was sent on an internship to Cuba while he was still only an upperclassman. In half a year there, he managed to become proficient in Spanish. After graduating from Moscow State University, once again with help from his wife’s relatives, he was hired by the KGB and sent to attend two years of courses that included intensive study of a foreign language. His second language was English. After completing his studies, Pishchenko became an officer in the KGB’s Fifth Directorate.

In 1977, a group of Cuban state security officers arrived in the Soviet Union for training. In Cuba, these officers handled questions similar to those handled by the Fifth Directorate of the KGB in the USSR. Senior Lieutenant Pishchenko of the Fifth Directorate’s Third Department was assigned to work with this delegation as a translator. After the Cuban officers completed their training, they were treated to a luxury cruise on the Volga. They were accompanied by two officials from the KGB’s Fifth Directorate: Pishchenko and Vladimir Strunin, the head of this directorate’s First Department, whose colleagues had nicknamed him Drunken Hedgehog. He always wore a crew cut (called a hedgehog cut in Russian), and the telltale patchwork of blood vessels that embellished his nose and cheeks left no doubt as to his partiality for alcohol. It should be pointed out that neither the typical characteristics that marked him as a drunkard nor his embarrassing nickname prevented him, thanks to the support of General Abramov (a.k.a. Vanya Palkin), to attain the rank of general, although in a completely alcoholized and debilitated state. Years later, Pishchenko followed in Strunin’s footsteps – without, however, attaining the rank of general. The two of them first found common ground during their trip down the Volga, in their passion for excessive consumption of alcohol.

In 1978, a world championship match was scheduled to take place in Baguio in the Philippines between the Soviet world champion Anatoly Karpov and the defector and traitor to his homeland (as he was referred to in the Soviet Union) challenger Viktor Kortschnoi. When he was still a young man and living in Leningrad, Karpov had been recruited as an agent of the KGB, operating under the code name Raul. The choice of the code name had evidently been inspired by the recent revolution in Cuba, and as his moniker Karpov chose the name of Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul. Not fully trusting the information about chess that he received from his subordinates in the Fifth Directorate, Andropov, the head of the KGB, had regular meetings with Karpov himself in order to stay fully informed about his problems and wishes, since Karpov was a favorite of the General Secretary of the Central Committee, Leonid Brezhnev. The outcome of these meetings was that Lieutenant General Filipp Bobkov, the head of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, was instructed that Karpov had to remain the world chess champion.

Brezhnev was also interested in hockey. Andropov collected information for Brezhnev about the leading players, their athletic accomplishments, and their personal lives. This was done through Andropov’s informers, who, like Karpov, were regularly invited to the office of the head of the KGB. But usually they met not with Andropov himself, but with Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Davnis, the deputy head of the Third Division of the Eleventh Department of the Fifth Directorate, who oversaw the USSR’s select ice hockey team. For example, if Brezhnev became interested in the biathlon, Andropov would meet with his informer Valery Goncharov, a biathlon world champion and an officer of the KGB.

Events occasionally took an amusing turn. Once, in order to obtain a more complete picture of things, Andropov decided to talk directly to the head coach of the USSR’s select ice hockey team, Viktor Tikhonov. After receiving instructions from Andropov’s office, Davnis summoned Tikhonov and informed him that the head of the KGB wished to meet with him. Hearing this disquieting news, Tikhonov fell sick. He came down with a bad case of diarrhea. For several days, he could not leave his apartment due to severe stomach troubles. As a consequence, on top of arranging a meeting between Tikhonov and Andropov, Davnis had to get lab tests performed on Tikhonov to make sure that Tikhonov was not suffering from some contagious disease that might endanger the head of the