Chess politics is back – in just three days, after a long and memorable election race, we’ll finally know if Anatoly Karpov will be the next FIDE President. In truth, politics has always played an important role in the chess world, especially in Russia and the former Soviet Union.
The KGB Plays Chess by Boris Gulko, Viktor Korchnoi and others, movingly documents some of the most shocking episodes in Soviet chess politics, in which Karpov was often involved in a rather different role.
The KGB Plays Chess, published this fall by Russell Enterprises, claims, among other things, that Karpov was in fact a KGB agent with the code name “Raul”, and was helped in various ways by the Russian secret police to keep his world championship title, which he won by default in 1975, up until the termination of his first match against Kasparov, ten years later.
These claims make it immediately obvious that the book is an important and unique project. It’s a collaboration of no less than four authors: GM’s Boris Gulko and Viktor Korchnoi, acclaimed Russian journalist Yuri Felshtinsky and former KGB colonel Vladimir Popov.
The KGB Plays Chess sheds light on the role and influence of the KGB, the former Soviet secret police, on some of the best chess players of all time. Many of the claims and facts that are in this book are still completely ignored in Russia today.
