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Date Posted: 07:42:13 07/18/02 Thu
Author: Todd
Subject: Ill-natured criticism or truth?

Here are two articles from pakchess.com where Khariton criticises Taimanov's book about Fischer and the first part of the interview with Averbakh. In my opinion, they are pretty subjective(at least the one on Averbakh, as I haven't read the book of Taimanov) but worth reading.



11th July 2002
Everyone, with the passage of years, feels nostalgic about the past. Understandably, we are prone to be indulgent to those to whom we owe our first success.
These thoughts crossed my mind when I was reading Larry Evans' piece "Fischer's Victim" in his column at www.worldchessnetwork.com. Larry Evans who is 70 today is an outstanding grandmaster and chess author, but with all due respect, I should admit that as regards Mark Taimanov and his book "I was Bobby's Victim", Evans is a bit superficial.
"I first met Mark Taimanov in 1954, - writes Evans - when we played four games at the USA vs. USSR match in New York. At age 28 he was a leading Russian player as well as an accomplished concert pianist". What is more, Evans was, I believe the only American who came on top of a Soviet grandmaster in a four-game encounter! Naturally, Larry's memories of Taimanov and that match are pleasant.
Chess fans in the West, most likely, have never heard about Taimanov's book in which he recounts the match and what happened after the match. "The Soviet bosses took a dim view, - Evans quotes Taimanov - of the sensational score. I was stripped of all my titles and suspended from taking part in international tournaments, which also entailed financial sanctions."
Paradoxically, this match lost by Taimanov with the 'shut-out' score 0:6 became the highlight of his career!
However, in the book published in Russia in 1993 Taimanov could have been more outspoken. At that time already after the collapse of communism in Russia, he could have written what he really knew about Fischer, especially after so many encounters at the chess board! But Taimanov, as his best buddy Averbakh, is not, to use the American phrase, "the guy who spills the beans". He never writes point-blank. Understandably, his portrayal of Bobby Fischer follows the same standard lines as in the 60-70s in the Soviet Union. Fischer grew up in the capitalist world, he is money-centered, he is afraid to lose... All this we heard for years. Speaking about the un-played match between Fischer and Karpov, Taimanov writes: "All who knew Fischer understood that he was looking for a pretext to avoid the match." Obviously, it was Taimanov who was avoiding a serious discussion of what the Soviets and FIDE had done to Fischer in 1975. It is beyond me to understand how Evans, Fischer's friend and the co-author of Fischer's "My 60 Memorable Games", did not notice that Taimanov was more than tongue-tied when portraying Bobby Fischer.


23 June 2002
This week my attention has been drawn by Taylor Kingston's interview of grandmaster Yuri Averbakh published at www.chesscafe.com Taylor Kingston is a chess historian contributing on a regular basis for H. W. Russell's prolific site. As he points out in this interview he "has been studying chess history for much of the last 30 or 40 years". I have all my respect for his work, although I doubt whether it is really worth the effort to prove, for example, that both Keres and Botvinnik were coerced into KGB manipulations. True, and I have written about this in numerous publications, KGB was an omnipotent and vicious organization, but still the chess players, especially of Botvinnik's caliber, were not playing 'kangaroo' games to please the communist and KGB bosses.
The strangest of all is that Mr. Kingston chose for this interview grandmaster Averbakh. Sure, he could not have found a more false and evasive person for this talk on chess history. For years Averbakh has been bamboozling the chess public about chess history, namely the Soviet chess history, playing a notorious role in forming the public opinion. I think that The Chess Café had no moral grounds to publish such an interview. I think that Mr.Russell and Mr.Kingston have intentionally forgotten that at their site they had published Averbakh's notorious letter to FIDE in 1976 calling on the FIDE to boycott Korchnoi's participation in candidates' matches after Korchnoi's defection from the USSR. Averbakh was for many years President of the Soviet Chess Federation and he was always serving the Soviet Government. In the 70s he could have very well refused to write such a letter. And the risk was not very high as distinct from Stalin's times when he could have been deported or exterminated. In the worst case, he would have lost his position as President and would have traveled less often to Australia or New Zealand!
Averbah says that he is now writing memoirs "Chess and System". "By which I mean the Soviet totalitarian system", he says, - but he was serving this system better than anybody else! In this respect, he was no better than Boris Vainstein whom he calls in a derogatory way a KGB colonel. Incidentally, a few years ago when answering to the letter of grandmaster Kotov's widow protesting that her late husband was called a KGB agent, Averbakh retorted cynically: "What is so shameful about being a KGB agent?" How can anyone trust such a man? For many years, Roshal, the editor of the Russian magazine "64-Chess Review", and Averbakh were life-long enemies. Nowadays they, these people of" iron-clad principles", can be very often seen together. By the way, the same happened to Grandmasters Nikolai Krogius and Lev Alburt .The dissident Alburt defected from the USSR in 1979 asking for political asylum in the West and accusing Krogius, the then leader of the Soviet chess establishment, of thwarting his visits to foreign tournaments. Today both are in the USA writing chess books together!
In his publication Mr. Kingston cites Divinsky's Life Maps of the Great Chess Masters stating that Averbakh 'is ranked among the 30 best players of all time'. Well, in the last 116 years of chess there have been 14 (or more!?) World Champions, let alone all the great players who were near misses (Pillsbury, Rubinstein, Korchnoi, Bronstein, Reshevsky, Keres etc.) Was Averbakh a near miss too? "I lost to Reshevsky" and nobody blamed me", he said to Kingston. But why blame Averbakh? - He was obviously much weaker than Reshevsky!

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