Manny Rayner's book reviews

If you're not a chess player, you've probably never heard of Paul Keres. He was one of the best players in the world from about 1935 until about 1960, but he never became World Champion. It's a rather sad story. Keres was Estonian, and had a meteoric rise to the top during the late 30s. In 1939, a lot of people thought that he would be able to offer Alekhine a pretty serious challenge in a title match; but then the Second World War started, and of course it was out of the question. Keres was stuck in Estonia, which was occupied by the Nazis, and he played in some German-organized chess tournaments.

After the war, the Soviets invaded, and annexed the Baltic states. There was talk of trying Keres as a Nazi collaborator. The details of what happened next are hotly disputed among chess historians, but there seems to be a lot of evidence that Botvinnik, the Soviet #1, used his connections and got Keres off the hook. Then, in 1948, there was a match-tournament in Groningen, Holland to decide the new World Champion; Alekhine had died, still holding the title, and it was vacant. The five top players in the world, including Botvinnik and Keres, each played each other five times. What's undisputed is that Keres lost his first four games to Botvinnik, winning the fifth one only after Botvinnik had already secured the title. There have always been rumors that he was forced to throw games by the Soviet authorities. I don't think anyone knows for sure what happened.

Keres was immensely admired by chess players all over the world, both as a player and as a person. Here's what Boris Spassky had to say about him:

"I loved Paul Petrovitch with a kind of special, filial feeling. Honesty, correctness, discipline, diligence, astonishing modesty – these were the characteristics that caught the eye of the people who came into contact with Keres during his lifetime. But there was also something mysterious about him. I had an acute feeling that Keres was carrying some kind of a heavy burden all through his life. Now I understand that this burden was the infinite love for the land of his ancestors, an attempt to endure all the ordeals, to have full responsibility for his every step. I have never met a person with an equal sense of responsibility. This man with internally free and independent character was at the same time a very well disciplined person. Back then I did not realise that it is discipline that largely determines internal freedom. For me, Paul Keres was the last Mohican, the carrier of the best traditions of classical chess and – if I could put it this way – the Pope of chess. Why did he not become the champion? I know it from personal experience that in order to reach the top, a person is thinking solely of the goal, he has to forget everything else in this world, toss aside everything unnecessary – or else you are doomed. How could Keres forget everything else?"

Spassky wrote these words when the Soviet Union was still a major power, and it was very brave of him. Today, it would be like a leading Chinese sportsman praising a Tibetan, and saying that they admired him for the pain he and his country had suffered. Keres was clearly an extraordinary person to be able to inspire these feelings.