Ian Mitchell

12.06.2011, 12:11

Today I will be talking about a game which used to be played in every sunlit, summer square in Moscow, where young and old alike could be seen hunched over tables and benches under the shade of gently-rustling birch trees. That game is, of course, chess. Lenin played it and Soviet champions dominated world chess for half a century. Alas, no more. Chess is no longer the universally popular game it once was, possibly because you cannot play it by yourself on a mobile phone while sitting in the Metro. But was chess quite so popular in pre-Revolutionary Russia as it was in Soviet times? Was its legendary popularity here a matter of ancient fact or of carefully promoted Soviet fiction? In reality it was both. I will be talking to the Russian historian, Yuri Felshtinsky, about this, as well as to the only man who was ever champion of both the USSR and the US, the Grandmaster, Boris Gulko.

Source: Voice of Russia.