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White King And Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard Kindle Edition

by Daniel Johnson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Daniel Johnson -- journalist, editor, scholar, and chess enthusiast who once played Garry Kasparov to a draw in a simultaneous exhibition -- is the perfect guide to one of history’s most remarkable periods, when chess matches were front-page news and captured the world’s imagination.

The Cold War played out in many areas: geopolitical alliances, military coalitions, cat-and-mouse espionage, the arms race, proxy wars -- and chess. An essential pastime of Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries, and later adopted by the Communists as a symbol of Soviet power, chess was inextricably linked to the rise and fall of the “evil empire.” This original narrative history recounts in gripping detail the singular part the Immortal Game played in the Cold War. From chess’s role in the Russian Revolution -- Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky were all avid players -- to the 1945 radio match when the Soviets crushed the Americans, prompting Stalin’s telegram “Well done lads!”; to the epic contest between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972 at the height of détente, when Kissinger told Fischer to “go over there and beat the Russians”; to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, White King and Red Queen takes us on a fascinating tour of the Cold War’s checkered landscape.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A thoroughly entertaining and captivating look at the defining conflict of the twentieth century, "an irresistible brew of Cold War politics, genius, and skulduggery" (Times, London )

From the Publisher

Hi, We are the UK publisher of White King and Red Queen (November 2007, 9781843546092. The book now has a US publisher, who are publishing their edition in November 2008. However, our edition is showing on Amazon.com. Would it be OK to get it removed from the site (or at least listed as unavailable)? We don't want to anger the US publisher! I'd be really grateful if you would help with this - just let me know if you have any queries. Thanks and all best wishes, Joanna Lord Atlantic Books

About the Author

DANIEL JOHNSON was the op-ed editor and literary editor of the London Times and is a regular contributor to Commentary, the New Criterion, and the American Spectator. A former foreign correspondent, he covered German politics at the time the Berlin Wall fell.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chess makes a good allegory and a bad teacher. Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest player who has ever lived, believes that chess teaches us strategies for survival, and he has written a book to prove it:How Life Imitates Chess. The chess-playing philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was, perhaps, wiser: "Chess is too serious for a game, but too much of a game to be taken seriously." It has, nonetheless, enjoyed a modest but unique place in our civilization for at least fifteen centuries. Having served as a staple of the sermons and moralities of medieval and Renaissance literature the most celebrated of which wasThe Game and Playe of the Chesse by Jacobus de Cessolis (c. 1300), one of the first books to be printed in English by Caxton chess has greatly enriched the language ever since. Every time we speak of keeping an enemy in check, of treating someone as a pawn, or of a political stalemate, we draw on the vocabulary of chess. There are less obvious loan-words, too, such asexchequer (from the Norman use of a checkered board by the royal counting house),gambit (an opening stratagem, from the Italian gambetta), or jeopardy(from "juperty," a medieval chess problem). The Russian word for chess, shakhmaty, is a simple transliteration of the Persianshah mat ("the king is dead"), which is also the origin of the English "checkmate." Chess is thought to have originated among Buddhists on the banks of the Ganges in India, perhaps as a secularized form of a religious ceremony that involved dice as a means of divining the celestial mind. Having reached Persia around ad 625, it was taken up by Arab conquerors. It soon lost all connection with Buddhism and was instead associated with the rapid expansion of Islam. It is likely, therefore, that the Slavic peoples learned chess from Muslim sources quite early in the history of the game, probably from merchants on the trade route from the Caspian Sea via the River Volga to the earliest kingdom of Rus, of which the capital was Kiev. Islam dominated the history of chess for much longer than Soviet communism. The first appearances in literature of the medieval form of chess (chaturangain Sanskrit, chatrang in Persian, or shatranj in Arabic) in the early seventh century coincide with the life of Muhammad, and the game’s westward dissemination followed in the wake of the Arab conquests. Ali, the prophet’s son-inlaw and founder of the Shi’ites, is supposed to have been the first Muslim to encounter chess, which was brought to Arabia from Persia. By the eighth century, the historian of chess H. J. R. Murray wrote, "chess had already become a popular game throughout Islam, from Spain to the banks of the Indus." For the first two centuries of Islam, its legal status was unclear. What saved chess from the Koranic prohibitions against games of chance and the use of images was the importance of jihad in Islam. Because chess was a war game, it could be useful to warriors and thus was permissible. Hence chess came to be an integral part of high culture at the courts of the Umayyad caliphs and, from the eighth century, the new dynasty of Abbasids, who ruled a vast empire from Baghdad that stretched across much of the Middle East and North Africa. The mightiest of the Abbasid caliphs, Haroun al-Rashid (who reigned 786807), was surrounded by grandmasters and historians of chess, such as as-Suli, along with the astronomers, chemists, and physicians for whom his court is still renowned. InA Thousand and One Nights which, according to legend, is set in Haroun’s reign but which modern scholarship has traced to an older, Persian collection of folk tales, now lost, that was translated into Arabic around 850 we learn that medieval Islam allowed chess to be played by women as well as men. In one story, the caliph is said to have bought a slave girl who defeated him three times in succession. Invited to name her reward, she asked pardon for another, rather than her own freedom. The girl’s astronomical price, 10,000 dinars, proves that the caliph considered her even more valuable at the chessboard than in the harem. Six centuries after Haroun, chess was no less esteemed by another Muslim potentate, Timur Lenk or Tamerlane (Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great), who even gave the name Shah-Rukh ("king-rook") to his son, news of whose birth was brought while the emperor was playing chess, as well as to a city he built on the banks of the River Jaxartes in modern Kazakhstan. A Greek historian relates that Tamerlane was playing chess with his son when the Turkish sultan, Bayazid, was brought captive to his tent. At his court in Samarkand, Tamerlane’s favourite lawyer and scholar, Ala’addin at-Tabrizi, was nicknamed Ali ash-Shatranji ("Ali the chess master"). Contemporary sources tell us that this Aladdin played up to four games simultaneously while blindfold, and that he composed a treatise on chess that records about twenty-one positions from his games. Having traveled extensively and defeated all comers, Aladdin has some claim to be considered the first world champion. Tamerlane liked to tell him: "You have no rival in the kingdom of chess, just as I have none in government; there is no man to be found who can perform such wonders as I and you, my lord Ali, each in his own sphere." It is unclear how far this real figure merged in legend with the Aladdin ofA Thousand and One Nights. The historical Aladdin had no genie in a magic lamp; he was, rather, a genius who could work magic on the chessboard. In a sense, the role of Soviet world chess champions in the empire of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors was analogous to that of Aladdin at the court of Tamerlane. There was one difference: the great khans of communism treated their subjects in general just as brutally as Tamerlane, who liked to be known as the Scourge of God, but the thugs who ruled the Soviet empire were incapable of treating mere chess masters so courteously. The modern rules of chess, which speeded up the game by making pieces such as the queen and bishop more powerful, emerged in Renaissance Italy during the late fifteenth century. In the medieval game, the queen (the vizier or counselor in Muslim countries) was a much weaker piece than the rook or even the king, moving only one square diagonally. The bishop (an elephant in the East) also moved diagonally, leaping over only the adjacent squares. The new form of chess soon spread from the West to Muscovy as trade routes were established during the reign of Grand Duke Ivan III in the early sixteenth century. Chess had long been frowned on by the Orthodox Church, which associated the game with heresy and witchcraft, not to mention dice and other forms of gambling. There were periodic attempts to suppress chess in Russia. The tsars themselves, however, were so addicted to it that no ban could be enforced. Ivan the Terrible, the first ruler of Russia to assume the title of Tsar, even died at the chessboard. In 1584, while preparing to play chess with his son Feodor’s guardian and eventual successor, Boris Godunov, the tsar suffered some kind of seizure. We owe this fact to a contemporary description by the English ambassador, Sir Jerome Horsey. The queen who had sent him, Elizabeth I, would have been interested in such details, for she was herself very accomplished at chess. Medieval and Renaissance etiquette allowed women equal status at chess, which only later became a male preserve. In the diary of his travels to Muscovy, Sir Jerome records the dramatic circumstances of the tsar’s demise:

He setts his men (all savinge the kinge, which by no means he could not stand in his place with the rest upon the plain board): his chief favorett and Boris Fedorowich Goddonove and others about him. The Emperor in his lose gown, shirt and lynen hose, faints and falls backward. Great owtcrie and sturr; one sent for Aqua vita, another to the oppatheke [apothecary] for marigold and rose water, and to call his gostlie father [confessor] and the phizicions. In the mean he was strangled [choked] and stark dead.

Historians still debate whether Ivan was poisoned by Boris or died of natural causes, but there is no dispute about their common devotion to chess. It was only natural that Sergei Eisenstein (himself a keen chess player) included one of the best chess scenes in all cinema in his three-part epic, Ivan the Terrible (1944). The tsar was more than Stalin’s hero; he was his alter ego. As his paranoia grew, so did the dictator’s identification with the tsar to the point where even Eisenstein’s cinematic epic was not hagiographical enough for Stalin. Actors whose features were deemed too Jewish were weeded out of the cast, and the director, too, came under suspicion. The second part of the trilogy was a window into the soul of a tsar tormented by guilt. When Stalin saw Part 2, he was furious, so it was released only after his death in 1958. The incomplete third partThe Boyars’ Plot was destroyed on Stalin’s orders. Despite its veneer of Marxist ideology and European culture, the Soviet Union was a reversion to Ivan the Terrible’s oriental despotism. One pursuit that oriental and enlightened despots had in common, however, was chess. Russia’s great Westernizers, Peter I and Catherine II, both shared Ivan’s passion for the game. Their chessmen and boards are displayed in the Hermitage Museum along with a Fabergé set made for Nicholas II. For most of the Romanovs, chess remained what it had been at the courts of the Renaissance: an esoteric divertissement for the edification of royal, military, or sacerdotal elites. It was due to Napoleon that thousands of Russian officers learned the game from their French counterparts during their occupation of Paris in 181415 and brought it back home with them. Thus chess owed its popularity in Russia not to a Russian emperor but to a French one. The Russians who took up chess in the wake of the Napoleonic wars belonged to a new class, the educated elite that became known as the intelligentsia. Not only in Russia, but elsewhere in Europe and America, the place of chess closely reflected the rise of this group. A good starting point for the story of the love affair between chess and the intelligentsia is an image that records one of the great encounters of modernity: a group portrait, painted in 1856 by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim. It depicts three major figures of eighteenth-century thought: the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the Swiss divine Johann Caspar Lavater, and the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. The focus of the picture, around which these luminaries of the Enlightenment are stationed, is a chessboard.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004H1UESQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (November 10, 2008)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 10, 2008
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 6.1 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 498 pages

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Christopher Barat
Chess as MORE than a metaphor for real life
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2009

This was a most refreshing read! Subtitled "How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard," this book describes how the Soviet Union made a conscious effort to promote chess as a propaganda weapon during the Cold War... and how the resulting "chess machine" was challenged by three very different threats that each portended the crack-up, not only of the USSR's dominance over world chess, but of the USSR itself. What makes the narrative -- which could have been quite dry and pedantic -- so powerful is the author's pronounced anti-Communist stance. No punches are pulled and no "moral equivalence" is tolerated. In his preface to the American edition, Johnson, a British reporter, notes that this uncompromising stance earned him some criticism when the book was published in the U.K. From my point of view, we should all have such detractors.

The three aforementioned "threats" to post-WWII Soviet chess hegemony were Bobby Fischer, the troubled American genius who defeated champion Boris Spassky in a 1972 match that put chess on the front pages of the world's newspapers; Viktor Korchnoi, a Soviet defector who barely lost to Anatoly Karpov in a pair of contentious, occasionally bizarre matches in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and Garry Kasparov, who wrested the title from Karpov in 1985 -- though not without a fair share of controversy -- and gradually drifted from a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms to outright opposition to the Communist regime, a position he has since maintained vis-a-vis Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation. The Fischer story will be familiar to most American readers who are interested in chess and has been told in greater detail elsewhere, and Johnson plows relatively little new ground when discussing Fischer's career, his relationships with the world and the Soviet chess establishments, and the Fischer-Spassky match. Korchnoi and Kasparov, however, have never truly gotten their due in this country, and this book serves as a useful corrective. Korchnoi, in particular, may have been an even graver threat to the Soviets than Fischer, since he had been a well-established grandmaster in the USSR before falling afoul of the authorities and choosing to abandon the Soviet system in favor of the West. Paranoid and superstitious Korchnoi may have been, but the saying "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" never contained more truth than it did in his case. Kasparov -- who's best known in this country for losing to the computer "Deep Blue" back in the 1990s -- was younger, much more of a "world citizen," and, once he made his break with the Communists, a much clearer indication that the regime that had nurtured his talents had lost the ability to control them for its own purposes.

In between the sections dealing with Fischer, Korchnoi, and Kasparov, Johnson discusses such topics as the history of chess, the fates of post-Revolutionary emigrants from Russia, the fact that the vast majority of great chess players have been Jewish, the uses of chess in various literary contexts related to the Revolution and its aftermath, and the Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, a chess player of promise who used tactics adopted from the chessboard to maintain his intellectual independence from the Soviet state. This renders the narrative somewhat choppy at times, but Johnson does manage to "thread the needle through the popcorn" in ingenious ways, e.g., discussing the development of chess-playing computer programs in the context of the failure of Soviet technology to keep up with that of the West. Those who know nothing about chess need not worry about diagrams and game summaries; this is strictly an historical narrative that can be read by anyone with an interest in the Cold War -- and, thankfully, never loses sight of who was "black" and who was "white" in the overall struggle.

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Waldemar Kalinowski
Somewhat tedious and long
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2014
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This is an interesting book exposing the chess competition between USSR and the West during the Cold War. Somewhat tedious and long, it does however give the reader a solid picture how the Soviets propaganda machine used bright Russian chess players in its attempt to show the world the superiority of USSR's political system. Until the defeat of Soviet grandmaster Spasky by the American, Fisher, it looked as though KGB's machinations were proving to be successful giving the Kremlin something to gloat about as it faced homegrown economic and political disasters. And the author makes a good case that Fisher's victory foreshadowed the coming of glasnost and the demise of the Soviet state,

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Alan A. Elsner
Soviet and Cold War History seen through prism of chess
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2010
This book takes the novel approach of narrating the history of the Soviet Union and the Cold War as seen through the prism of chess. As such, it's an entertaining and sometimes riveting read that vividly brings to life some of the colorful personalities of the past century, most notably that deeply-troubled genius Bobby Fischer.

The paperback edition gets off to an unpromising start with a preface which includes several paragraphs of the author praising himself through selected reviewers' quotes. This kind of self-aggrandizement is best left to the blurbs one expects to see on the back cover -- and denotes a certain defensiveness on the author's part which is entirely unjustified. This is a good book -- and it can stand on its own merits without such puffery.

Johnson believes that "chess illuminates the process by which Western civilization ultimately triumphed over the gravest threat it had ever encountered." It's a bold, and somewhat hyperbolic claim. There can be no dispute that Soviet-style communism was a great threat to Western civilization -- but was it greater than Nazism and fascism?

Another bold declaration follows: "The Soviet Union excelled at only two things: war and chess." Really? Not ballet, not gymnastics, not space travel? And it's hard to say they excelled at war, given their chaotic performance in the Winter War against Finland and their response to the German invasion of 1941.

Despite his tendency to exaggerate, Johnson does convincingly tell the story of how Lenin and Stalin set out to dominate the chess world after the 1917 revolution -- and how it was intimately connected to the Stalinist Terror and show trials of the 1930s. At the same time, he argues, ordinary Russians flocked to chess as one of the few areas of intellectual activity not censored by the state. Chess, he says, "became the opium of the people."

Johnson provides a fascinating chapter on the role of Jews in chess. Several leading players, including at least two Soviet World Champions, were Jews. They had to navigate treacherous waters in a state always on the edge of launching new anti-Semitic campaigns. We learn the inspiring story of how the renowned dissident Anatoly Sheransky used chess to retain his sanity through long years of imprisonment on trumped up charges -- and how he came to believe he was playing a long game of chess with the Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov. Sheransky emerged victorious, checkmating the entire Soviet Union -- which shortly afterward ceased to exist.

The chapters about Fischer and his classic showdown with Spassky have been told many times before. Johnson has a fine eye for drama and tells the story with considerable elan. He then goes on to describe the lengthy battles between Karpov and Korchnoi and Karpov and Kasparov, attempting to link them to his central thesis. Johnson clearly believes that Vladimir Putin's Russia is the political and intellectual heir to the old repressive Soviet Union, still playing the same games through chess to ensure one-party control and frustrate the emergence of genuine democracy.

It's a bit of a stretch perhaps -- which is the main flaw in an otherwise fine book. Johnson has a great story to tell and tells it well -- but cannot resist the occasional urge to make his overarching theory go a little bit too far.

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Sergey
a complete blow
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2010
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being a russian i know chess history from the original books, this one is just a shorter story told by american. The facts are incomplete, a lot of small talk by and about dissidents, and no chess. All there is is politics. If you want to read some real chess stories - read book about certain players like Fischer, Tal or Keres.

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Jim Rickman
A veritable history of chess over the last 150 years
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2008
A very fine work which provides an entertaining and quite detailed account of chess history over the last 150 years that have seen battles between American and European chess geniuses (for example Morphy triumphing over the European masters, the brilliant and tragic Pillsbury, the great Capablanca (undoubtedly the greatest genius ever to play chess), Reshevsky, and with special emphasis on the rise of Fischer, a player of indomintable will and genius and his ultimate triumph that catapulted him to the status as one of the greatest players to ever play the game. I highly recommend this book.

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Sarugumo
White King and Red Queen
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 21, 2009
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I am inclined to agree with the first two reviews for this book and offer up my own thoughts on `White King and Red Queen'. Whilst very well written and fascinating for someone interested in Chess, this book places way too much importance on Chess in the political events of the Cold War years. Although the political history on it's own is good and the chess accounts on their own are great, together the links are highly tenuous and makes the book weaker overall. I am sure Chess was important for national prestige and pride, but I doubt it had the political impact the author suggests here. This book has three photo sections which illustrate the various stories and events well and although it is a little dry in places, the writing is engaging and informative. The initial chapters were probably the hardest to engage with, but the chapters on Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky were great, as were the later ones covering Kasparov. If you are a fan of chess then this book will keep you reading and interested throughout, but if you come to this from a historical angle then I feel you will be left feeling frustrated and dubious about the veracity of what is being recounted. A highly polished, but author biased account of Cold War era chess.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Chess as MORE than a metaphor for real life

4.0 out of 5 stars Somewhat tedious and long

3.0 out of 5 stars Soviet and Cold War History seen through prism of chess

1.0 out of 5 stars a complete blow

5.0 out of 5 stars A veritable history of chess over the last 150 years

Top reviews from other countries

3.0 out of 5 stars White King and Red Queen

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Chess as MORE than a metaphor for real life

Somewhat tedious and long

Soviet and Cold War History seen through prism of chess

a complete blow

A veritable history of chess over the last 150 years

White King and Red Queen