On page 126 whilst
discussing Living Chess
Averbakh relates:
Most of the money
from selling tickets went to the World Defence Fund, and this gave
chess a political significance, and it was well looked upon by the
authorities.
I
am not convinced that all readers would recognise the words
World Defence Fund.
There should have been a note. The
Russian is Комитета защиты мира.
That would probably be better translated as World
Peace Committee.
The Soviet Union's
World Peace Committee
was established in 1949, it was a member of the World
Peace Council,
also established in 1949. The latter has a website here.
It is a non-governmental member of the United Nations. Its aims
include the elimination of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,
as well as a reduction in conventional arms stocks. Its first
president was the physicist Frédéric
Joliot-Curie
of France.
Rapid
collectivisation (i.e. the elimination of private ownership of farms
and so forth) was
a reality
of
the
tightening
of Stalin's grip in 1948 on eastern Europe. The
dictator at that time did not feel secure in the
recent
aggrandisement of his empire: for
there
was no Soviet
nuclear bomb until August 1949. Given
Stalin's paranoid nature, an
international body devoted to world peace was useful as a means of
discouraging a pre-emptive nuclear strike from the USA, regardless
of whether the Americans intended to do such a thing or not.
Averbakh's
words as to the political significance of the money going to the
World Peace Committee are well chosen.
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