For 24 years, the Soviet Union had used the world chess championship as proof of its intellectual superiority over the West — and the American Bobby Fischer's defeat of Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 ended that argument, in front of the entire world, in a single match

For 24 years, the Soviet Union had used the world chess championship as proof of its intellectual superiority over the West — and the American Bobby Fischer's defeat of Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 ended that argument, in front of the entire world, in a single match

It is difficult, at a remove of 54 years, to convey the institutional weight that the Soviet Union had attached to chess by the early 1970s. Beginning in the 1920s, the Soviet government had treated chess as a state-supported intellectual sport in the same general category as ballet, gymnastics, and the space programme — a domain in which the prestige of the Soviet system would be demonstrated through the systematic cultivation of world-class ta…