A leather-bound book "Chess in the USSR. Illustrated History"

This album offers a panorama of the seventy-year history of Soviet chess in all its diversity, to feel the movement of time, to see how thousands of fans of the game become millions, how the era of silent films, telegraphic games and circles in workers' clubs grows into the era of nationally known champions, the "Chess School" on Central Television, simultaneous game sessions. on a thousand boards. It allows us to evaluate chess in the USSR as a unique cultural phenomenon of the 20th century, to trace the transformation of the artful fun of intelligent people into a powerful tool for the cultural development of the country. To see a successful example of how, through the efforts of interested people, public interest received government support, and how over time the whole world, regardless of political leanings, realized the need to study the Soviet experience in this area.

In the recently published book "Luck of the XX Century," historians who tried to systematize the positive experience of our country in the past century devoted a separate chapter to chess. But back in 1951, Sovietologist G. Schwartz, who was critical of Russia, admitted in his quest to uncover the "secret of Soviet chess" that "one can make fun of Soviet claims to primacy in everything in the world, but in at least one area the Soviets really beat everyone: chess. Their successes bring tangible prestige to the Soviet Union and destroy the image of Russians as a semi–civilized backward people, a view that was diligently promoted by the Nazis before and during World War II." In an era of warming relations between Russia and the West, British Professor D. Richards set out to study Soviet chess in order, as he writes, "not to glorify or defame the Soviet regime, but to conduct an analysis in a small area of intellectual history." He tried to define the place of the chess movement in the USSR between two extreme poles, on one of which the history of Soviet chess is "an example of the wisdom and benevolence of the Soviet regime," and on the other it provides an example of "the triumph of human genius over totalitarian control." The professor drew attention to a paradox showing that the development of chess culture does not fit into the political and ideological framework of the state. Indeed, in the USSR, chess was given its due, on the one hand, by prominent statesmen from Lenin and Kalinin to Brezhnev and Defense Minister Malinovsky, and, on the other hand, by such symbols of opposition to the government as the future Interior Minister of Israel Sharansky and the future President of Lithuania Landsbergis. Among the hundreds of photographs, documents, and exhibits, there are rare and unfamiliar ones even to experts: they are published in this book for the first time. A significant part of the Illustrated History materials is based on the collection of the Chess Museum and the archive of the Russian Chess Federation. However, for all its diversity, this is not a comprehensive encyclopedia or a reference book: all the wealth accumulated in those years cannot be exhausted even by a multi-volume publication.

Dear customers, the color and texture of the skin may differ from the photos.