Word: sovietizers
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...hard to say exactly when I first heard the name Bobby Fischer, but it was quite early in my life. When he was battling Boris Spassky for the world title in 1972, I was a 9-year-old club player in my native Baku in the Soviet Union. I followed the games avidly. The newspapers had extensive daily coverage of the match, although that waned as it became clear the Soviet champion was headed for defeat. Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games was one of my first chess books. (It had been translated into Russian and sold in the U.S.S.R...
...Fischer's peak, even his adversaries had to admire his game. At the hallowed Moscow Central Chess Club, top Soviet players gathered to analyze Fischer's crushing 1971 match defeat of one of their colleagues, Mark Taimanov. Someone suggested that Taimanov could have gained the upper hand with a queen move, to which David Bronstein, a world-championship challenger in 1951, replied, "Ah, but we don't know what Fischer would have done...
...long afterward, the grim Soviet sports authorities dragged in Taimanov and his peers to discuss Taimanov's inability to defeat the American. How had he failed? Was he not a worthy representative of the state? Spassky finally spoke up: "When we all lose to Fischer, will we be interrogated here as well...
...once strong U.S. chess tradition had largely faded. There was little chess culture, few schools to nurture and train young talent. So for an American player to reach world-championship level in the 1950s required an obsessive degree of personal dedication. Fischer's triumph over the Soviet chess machine, culminating in his 1972 victory over Spassky in Reykjavík, Iceland, demanded even more...
...Many leading Polish public figures have criticized the book, saying that Gross neglected to take into account the context of of a shattered and demoralized post-war Poland suffering the the brutal imposition of the Soviet system. The victims of the turbulent postwar years were not only Jews, but also anti-communist Poles as well as Ukrainians and Germans expelled after the post-war shifting of borders. "Let?s remind ourselves of what was going on in New Orleans after a few days of a hurricane," historian Marcin Zaremba wrote in the Polityka weekly. "In Poland, the 'hurricane' took place...