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Alexander the Great
Asches To Asches
Alekhine narrowly lost the championship to the Dutch grandmaster Euwe in 1935 but convincingly regained it against the same opponent two years later. In his latter period as champion Alekhine also garnered some impressive first prizes. These came, for example, at Margate 1938, Cracow 1941, then Salzburg, Munich, Cracow again and Prague 1942, Prague, Salzburg 1943, and Madrid 1945. In many of these performances Alekhine utterly dominated the brilliant young contender Paul Keres, himself the victor of the super tournament AVRO 1938.
Alekhine's second tenure of the title, however, aroused considerable controversy. Trapped in Nazi-controlled Europe after the outbreak of the second world war, he embraced, somewhat too enthusiastically for his grandmasterly colleagues in Britain and America, some dubious Nazi ideology and pseudo-scientific claptrap concerning racial differences in matters intellectual. This culminated in a series of unwise articles in the Nazi press mouthpiece of occupied France, Die Pariser Zeitung, of 1941, where he denounced Jewish chess, as practiced for example by Steinitz and Nimzowitsch, as essentially defensive. Alekhine compared this unfavourably with the Aryan chess style of Morphy, Pillsbury and himself, which, according to these ludicrous articles, was laudably creative and aggressive in nature.
It is also likely that Alekhine, a Russian enmeshed in Nazi Europe, became a proto-victim of what we now term the Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages start after a while to sympathize with their captors. A similar explanation can be derived from the notorious conformity experiments of psychologist Solomon Asch carried out in the 1950's. From these it became clear that individuals were reluctant to contest a group decision, or evaluation, even if that decision were patently incorrect and contradicted the evidence of ones own senses. Surrounded by Nazis and Nazi ideology, Alekhine may all too easily have developed an enthusiasm for peddling theories which conformed to their thinking but which his inner self would normally have rejected as gibberish. This week's game shows Alekhine teaming up across the chessboard with SS Gruppenfuhrer Dr. Hans Frank, governor general of occupied Poland, later to be executed at Nuremberg for war crimes. Alekhine's opponents included his unsuccessful challenger for the world title from 1929 and 1934.
Alekhine and Dr. Frank - Bogolyubov and
Pfaffenroth
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WITH
Garry Kasparov in the news again, partly as a result of his literary
activities and partly as a result of his arrest in Moscow following his
attendance at an anti-Putin rally, I turn to Kasparov's hero and mentor -
Alexander Alekhine. This historical disquisition into the games,
thinking and career of Kasparov's main source of inspiration may help to
shed some light on Kasparov's own motives. Alekhine was World Champion
from 1927 to 1935, and again from 1937 to his death in 1946. He
defeated Capablanca, Bogolyubov and Euwe in title matches, won brilliant
games against Lasker, Nimzowitsch, Keres, Flohr, Fine, Reshevsky, Tarrasch
and Rubinstein, and wrote a series of colourful books which explained his
victories in lucid and compelling style.
Alexander
Alekhine, Kasparov's chessboard hero and inspiration, was one of the
undoubted greats of chess. He stormed to pre-eminence by defeating
Capablanca in a prolonged match in 1927, defended his title against a
challenge from his dangerous Russian rival Bogolyubov in 1929, then soared
to a shattering series of tournament victories at San Remo 1930, Bled 1931,
London, Pasadena, Berne 1932 and Zurich 1934.
Alekhine
also formed a number of friendships with prominent Nazis which, with
hindsight, he might have preferred to forget. Perhaps, as a recent
biography of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's cinematographer and propaganda
genius, explains, Alekhine, like Riefenstahl - as an artist, could not be
expected to know what was happening in the world at large. Just as she
focused on film, Alekhine simply took all measures necessary to ensure he
could continue to play chess.
