Boris Spassky, the chess player who was a victim of Bobby Fischer but also much more

Boris Spassky’s life (1937-2025) is enough to make a good film, even if Bobby Fischer (1943-2008) doesn’t appear in it. But his mark in history will always be that he lost the historic duel with Fischer in Reykjavik in 1972, in the middle of the Cold War between the USSR and the USA. Spassky, the 10th world chess champion (1969-1972), died on February 27 in Moscow, where he had lived since 2012 when he himself — aided by the Russian embassy — organized his own kidnapping in Paris to leave his wife, Marina, departing in a wheelchair with his new partner, Valentina.

Spassky learned to play chess in unusual circumstances, at the age of five, on a train full of children evacuated from Leningrad — today’s St. Petersburg — before the Nazis besieged the city with the aim of starving its inhabitants. After that traumatic episode, his life was relatively calm, happy, and full of achievements from the time he was 10 — when he won a simultaneous exhibition against Mikhail Botvinik (1911-1995), who would become world champion a year later and the great patriarch of Soviet chess — until he dethroned another of the sacred names, Tigran Petrosian (1929-1984), in 1969 at the age of 32.

And that is when the man who would forever mark his career crossed his path: Fischer, the most charismatic, controversial, and idolized champion in the history of chess. To understand why the legendary duel for the world title in Reykjavik was front-page news for months in many countries, there are two key factors: the button for nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the USA was on the verge of being pressed several times during that period; chess was a national passion in the USSR and, therefore, a showcase for the alleged intellectual superiority of communism over capitalism. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called Fischer from the White House to ask him, on behalf of President Richard Nixon, to do his best to dethrone Spassky.

Spassky once explained his first divorce by arguing that he and his wife were like bishops of different colours; that is, one always went along the white diagonals and the other along the black ones, without ever meeting. And the truth is that he could have said something similar about Fischer, arrogant, aggressive on the board and in life, scandalous and controversial, while Spassky in contrast was a very elegant gentleman with impeccable manners, a balanced character with a universal style of play, capable of defending like Petrosian and attacking like Mikhail Tal (1936-1992), another of the great Soviet champions.

In Reykjavik, Fischer created a series of scandals, problems, and protests that probably unhinged Spassky, even though the world champion bore them with apparent composure. But he lost the match (8.5-12.5) and with it the honor of the USSR to its arch-enemy, and was therefore received in Moscow as a traitor a few hours after saying this in Iceland: “You know, I am not disappointed to lose this match. I don’t know exactly why, but I think life for me will be better after this match […] I had a very hard time when I won the chess title of the champion in 1969. Perhaps the main difficulty is that I had very big obligations for chess life, not only in my country but all over the world. I had to do many things for chess but not for myself as a champion of the world.”

However, just when it seemed that his life was destined for bitterness and depression, Spassky pulled off two masterstrokes. First, he fell in love with a Franco-Russian woman, Marina Sherbacheva, who worked at the French embassy in Moscow. Then he proposed the following deal to the Soviet authorities: “If you let me emigrate to Paris, I promise you two things: that I will never speak against the USSR, and that I will be available to play for the national team whenever I am called upon.” The Kremlin agreed, and Spassky was happy again. Now he was making the most of his fame, and without any dissimulation: his games at tournaments often ended in quick draws without a fight, with such impudence that he sometimes showed up in the playing room in tennis clothes and carrying a racket, letting his opponent know that he was ready to sign a peace deal within minutes.

At the same time, Spassky suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome with respect to Fischer. He was one of the very few true friends the unbalanced American had, who had disappeared from public life after renouncing the title in 1975, despite the fact that Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos had offered a purse of $5 million for him to defend it against Anatoly Karpov. After rejecting two offers from Spanish promoters (José Ignacio Borés and Luis Rentero) for a friendly rematch in 1991, Fischer and Spassky accepted one in 1992 from the Yugoslav mobster Jezdimir Vasiljević to face each other in Sveti Stefan (Montenegro), 30 miles from the Bosnian War front and despite the White House warning Fischer that he was violating the embargo against Yugoslavia (he was arrested for this 13 years later, in Japan, until Iceland granted him political asylum).

Spassky lost again (10-5 and 15 draws), but he received $1.65 million for the match. With that money he continued to enjoy his life in France until, in 2008, he had to attend the funeral of his friend Fischer in Reykjavik, where he asked if he could be buried, when the time came, in the adjoining grave. He later suffered several strokes, the last in 2010, which left him half-paralyzed and in a wheelchair.

And then, in 2012, something bizarre happened. Although several witnesses indicate that Spassky was very well looked after by Marina in Paris, he asked his Russian friends to organise a sort of kidnapping: they took him out of his house without Marina knowing, went through the Russian embassy to obtain a single-use passport and flew to Moscow, where — while being the subject of lawsuits from Marina and their son — he lived thereafter with his new partner, Valentina Kuznetsova, a person with an iron facade but a loving heart, judging by the couple’s visitors. One of them, the Chilean Daniel Yarur, a friend of Spassky, claimed in 2019, before the pandemic, that the former world champion maintained a “more than acceptable” mental agility despite his strokes.

The author of this obituary last saw Spassky in Sochi, Russia, on the Black Sea, during the 2014 World Cup match between Magnus Carlsen and Viswanathan Anand. Very lucid in his wheelchair, he told me that he often dreamed about Fischer, and that he liked Carlsen: “I see him as a gnome. And he also has the intelligence not to get involved in politics, which is dangerous in these times.” When he said that, he was referring to the fact that Putin had just invaded Crimea. I asked him how he was, and he clung to chess: “My French wife has taken away my property, my archive, everything. And the tragedy of the war in Ukraine affects me a lot. But I try to be happy writing my memoirs, watching the sun rise every day, watching my plants grow. Today, more than ever, we need chess. Moving those wooden pieces and thinking about their strategy allows us to forget the misfortunes of this world.”

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