Zurich 1953, a big farce

[Javier]

(Just published in "ABC", Spanish newspaper)

 

MADRID. The most imaginative player who has ever lived died a year ago. He managed to draw a match against Bovtinnik, although only 2 rounds before the end of the match, David Bronstein was 2 points ahead. Then, something incredibly odd happened: one of the best players in the world made a very misterious child's mistake in the last round, something which prompted many to suspect that the result had been fixed by the Russian "polit bureau". Russia didn't want Botvinnik to lose against the son of a Jewish desident. Bronstein never explained what happened...

 

However, just recently a new book has seen the light: "Secret notes", which David Bronstein co-wrote with Sergey Voronkov and only wanted it to be published after his death. In it, Bronstein unveils that the Kremlin forced the soviet players to fix their games and thus prevent a foreigner to win the event.

At the time, nobody believed him, but Bobby Fisher was right when he accused the Soviet Grandmasters of helping each other...

 

Bronstein was the only Soviet GM who didn't sign a condemnation letter against exhiled GM Victor Kortchnoi, and that earned him the cancellation of his passport for 13 years.

 

In the book, Bronstein also talks about how the Zurich 1953 candidates tournament was "fixed". He says that it was the most embarrasing moment of his chess career, (a tournament on which he wrote a memmorable book). There were 8 soviet GMs and US GM Samuel Reshevsky. The KGB monitored the event and instructed the players to arrange "rest draws" or even losses against the "chosen winner" (Smyslov) when the American GM was near the lead.

To avoid suspicions, the players even "prepared" the games before they were played.

A KGB agent even asked David: "Do you really think you've come here to play chess".

David Bronstein confesses that he never in his life did he forget the shame that he felt. "We were all puppets"...

 

Original source: HERE (In Spanish)