Bondarevsky and Collaboration, part 3.

Further to my posts of 20th October and 24th September, it appears likely that the tournament Bondarevsky won took place in February and March of 1942. I have found a Russian language website providing a diary. Before providing the link, I should caution the reader that it is flagged as potentially malicious; no one should access it without adequate Internet security, the diary is available here. The dates given on that page are 16th February to 13th March, 1942. Another site provides a tournament cross-table. It also provides a PGN of some of the games. Note that this gives slightly different dates; beginning one day later and ending one day earlier. That could be due to opening and closing ceremonies, there is not necessarily an inconsistency between the two versions.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to accept the veracity of these accounts. This does, however, give rise to a further question. Did Bondarevsky have time to travel to Romania and Hungary? Rostov fell on 20th/21st November 1941 to the Nazis, it was recaptured on the 27th November by the Soviets. (In my post of 24th September, I wrote that Von Runstedt, the commander of the Nazi Army Group South, resigned following this Soviet victory. It would have been more precise to have written that, under pressure, expecting to be sacked, he asked Hitler to relieve him of his command if the dictator had lost confidence in his judgement. The resignation was more of a dismissal.)

I am sceptical that three months was sufficient time to travel these distances over a poor road network in the difficult weather that prevailed in the autumn and winter of 1941-2. Even Heinrich Himmler, Reichfuhrer-SS, found he was slowed down when making an inspection due to the poor state of the roads. Travelling by train was even less practical. The Soviet rail track was broad gauged, the Nazis used a narrow gauge; the advancing Axis forces had to convert rail lines so that their rolling stock could use it. Note, as well, that the Soviet rail system was better developed for north-south communications. The Nazis tried to compensate through the building of Thoroughfare Four, a little known history within WWII. An entire chapter is given over to it in the book The Shoah In Ukraine (ISBN 978-0-253-22268-8), a joint effort by several academics. The author of that chapter is Andrej Angrick (a brief biography is available here). This vast road project was planned to start in Lviv (German Lemberg, Russian Lvov) and end in Tagangrog (not far from Rostov), a distance of some 1360 miles. Work only began in September 1941, ostensibly under the Todt organisation, which was then responsible for such undertakings. Slave labour was used (to give an idea of the eventual size of this scheme, in July 1943 there were 140,000 slaves, 12,000 local policemen overseeing them and a few Germans in charge), progress was repeatedly slowed down by the SS seizing slaves in order to kill them; murder enjoying a higher priority than supplying the Wehrmacht on the front line.

A further reason for my doubts are that Romania and Hungary enjoyed troubled relations during WWII. The Nazis had to be careful when it came to positioning the forces of the two allies, they were quite likely to shoot at one another. Without going into too much detail, both countries claimed Transylvania, it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the Great War (1914-18), but was awarded to Romania following the Treaty of Trianon (1920). The Second Vienna Award (1940) returned to Hungary half of Transylvania. The Hungarian regent Admiral Horthy greeted with satisfaction the news of very heavy Romanian army losses during the siege of Odessa (David Stahel in his book Kiev 1941, ISBN 978-1-107-01459-6, gives on page 315 a figure of 98,000 casualties suffered by the Romanian Fourth Army when capturing that city). It would not have been straightforward to have travelled between these two countries. It might well have required German intervention. The whole thing strikes me as unlikely, but not impossible should a chess playing German of sufficient rank have taken an interest.

Image scanned from page 282 of Paul Carrell's book Hitler's War on Russia.

Where, then, would Bondarevsky have played Troianescu? Observing that Romanian troops supported the Nazi push into the Crimea and near the Sea of Azov in late 1941. It seems to me more probable that Bondarevsky played Troianescu close to Rostov, the distance being more manageable. Nonetheless, there are more uncertainties than I should care for. Was there really time to print pamphlets? Was Bondarevsky in uniform when he encountered the Axis; if not, why not? One thing I don't have trouble understanding is that Bondarevsky could have convinced the Nazis that he was anti-Soviet. When one says Rostov, one immediately thinks of the Don Cossacks, who were oppressed in Stalin's Soviet Union, and not just during Stalin's anti-Kulak drives. They suffered, too, in the artificial famine of 1932-3. Some Cossacks did fight for the Nazis.

Given the fluidity of the front line in the winter of 1941-2, it would not have been hard for Bondarevsky to have slipped through the front lines. The dreadful weather acting as cover, assuming the Red Army did not simply overrun wherever Bondarevsky was staying. It would be speculative as to why it took a year to arrest Bondarevsky.

It's true that one source, Damsky, is perhaps too slender a reed for so much conjecture; however, he was considered a reliable recorder of chess history in his lifetime.

Bondarevsky and collaboration.

This subject was first discussed in my post of 24th September. It is possible to clarify matters a little, thanks to Yakov Zusmanovich of California, who was kind enough to email me an extract from Yakov Damsky's book King Boris the Tenth - Король Борис Деcятый" (Moscow, Ripol Classic, in Russian, 2004). In it Damsky discusses the case of Bondarevsky. Many readers will be aware that Zusmanovich and Voronkov are writing a Russian language account of the life of Fyodor Bohatirchuk, who, together with Peter Romanovsky, won the Soviet chess championship in 1927.

Here is the extract:

A translation is available here.

It appears that Bondarevsky, following the first capture of Rostov in November 1941, ended up playing in Hungary and Romania in 1942. Given that Bondarevsky also played in a masters' tournament in Moscow that year, he must have escaped east before the second recapture of Rostov in February 1943. Thus his detention took place well after his return to the Soviets. Did somebody denounce him? Did someone in the NKVD see a copy of a chess magazine published in Romania or Hungary during wartime?

It would be useful to see the germane copy of the Romanian magazine Revista Romana de Sah to clarify matters. Equally handy would be sight of Bondarevsky's NKVD file, although whether that ever sees the light of day is problematic. Putin's Russia has been cracking down on bodies such as Pamyat’ (Memory, Memorial or Monument), the organisation dedicated to recalling the victims of the Georgian tyrant.

Averbakh 15: Budapest Candidates Tournament, 1950.

This is discussed from page 59, but, before proceeding, given that not all readers will be able to decipher the Cyrillic in the photograph at the top of that page, I shall digress and point out that Averbakh's opponent in that picture was German Samuilovich Fridstein (1911 – 2001). He became a Soviet master of Sports (i.e. a chess master) in 1945. He is best known in the West for his book on the Pirc-Umfintsev Defence, as that opening was called in the former USSR.

When discussing some of the background to the Budapest contest, Averbakh relates how the Yugoslav grandmaster Petar Trifunovich (Trifunovich has earned the reputation of being a very hard man to beat, and the other grandmasters have acquired a healthy respect for his technical skill. At Bled, for example, he lost only this one game - from the introduction to game 33 of Fischer's My Sixty Memorable Games, SBN 571 093 4) was kept out of the tournament. This was a knock-on effect of the breach between the communist dictators Stalin and Tito. The Soviets, in order to keep the Yugoslav out, sacrificed Bondarevsky's place. Grandmaster Bondarevsky will be known as Spassky's trainer, a subject treated by Averbakh elsewhere in the book. A bit of spice can be added by revealing that there may have been links to the NKVD (i.e. the Cheka).

On this page, chess historian Sergey Voronkov wrote:

Кроме того, Бондаревский тоже находился на оккупированной территории (и даже играл с румынским военврачом, мастером Троянеску), поэтому мог судить о происходившем «в тылу врага» не только по передовицам газет. Одно смущает. После освобождения Ростова осенью 1942 года он попал не в концлагерь, как любой бы другой на его месте («за сотрудничество с оккупантами»), а прямиком в Москву, где принял участие в турнире мастеров. Так что разговоры о том, что 28-летний гроссмейстер остался в Ростове по заданию советской разведки, не лишены оснований…

In English this reads:

Furthermore, Bondarevsky was also in the occupied territories (and even played against the Romanian doctor, and master, Troianescu), he could therefore judge what happened behind enemy lines, and not just from reading newspaper editorials. One thing that could confuse. After the liberation of Rostov in the autumn of 1942, he was not sent to a camp, as others would have been in his situation (for collaboration with the invaders), but sent straight to Moscow where he took part in a masters tournament. So talk that the 28 year old grandmaster remained in Rostov on the orders of Soviet intelligence is not without basis …

Rostov-on-Don, the gateway to the Caucasus, changed hands several times during the Great Patriotic War. It first fell to the invader, somewhat unexpectedly, on 21st November, 1941 (some accounts give the 20th). The outnumbered Nazis (outnumbered save in armour) were driven out by a counter attack that began six days later. This led directly to the resignation of Von Runstedt, the commander of the Nazi Army Group South. Following a major Nazi victory at Kharkov (a former capital of Soviet Ukraine, a status it lost in 1934) in the summer of 1942, a subsequent Nazi offensive captured Rostov again on 23rd July 1942:

Not that Rostov had surrendered lightly: NKVD units, crack, fanatical troops under rigid command, turned the city into a death trap, the streets tangled with spectacular barricades, houses sealed up with firing points.

Quoted from Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad. ISBN 0 297 76877 8, page 370.

There was time to evacuate. Note that Rostov was recaptured again by the Soviets in February 1943.

I suspect there is a typo in the Russian text and that the autumn of 1941 is intended, rather than the given 1942. It isn't easy to be precise over these things. Before examining this further, it should be pointed out that the Absolute USSR Championship of 1941 was completed before the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union. The best known tournament from the war years was the very strong Sverdlovsk (the name of that city has reverted back to  Yekaterinburg) 1943 contest. It cannot be either of those, Sverdlovsk is not near Moscow. It must be another competition. The 1964 Shakhmatny slovar' (i.e. Chess dictionary) contains a bird's eye view of Soviet events provided by I Z Romanov. Those occurring during the Great Patriotic War only include just the year. There is an entry for 1942, this masters' tournament was headed by Bondarevsky (10/14), followed by Petrov on 9½, then a quadruple tie involving lesser figures such as Mikenas, Panov … Later that year the Moscow Championship was won by Smyslov.

Those conspiratorially minded can feed on the non-existence in the famous series of Black Books (i.e. biographical and semi-biographical accounts of masters such as Mikenas, Panov, Kholmov, Ragozin, Lilienthal, Makagonov, Gufeld, …) of a volume about Bondarevsky. Bondarevsky's name doesn't feature as often as one might expect in other chess books. As Voronkov wrote: … talk that the 28 year old grandmaster remained in Rostov on the orders of Soviet intelligence is not without basis …

I should stress that Averbakh makes no such accusation of any association between Bondarevsky and the NKVD in his autobiography.

I should like to thank to Bernard Cafferty for the exchange of ideas on this topic and for looking up his copy of the 1964 Shakhmatny slovar' on my account.

Reverting back to the Budapest 1950 Candidates, which was won jointly by Boleslavsky (not to be confused with Bondarevsky!) and Bronstein.

Chess historians looking for evidence of machinations behind the scenes at the Budapest 1950 Candidates' Tournament will be disappointed. It is well known that Isaac Boleslavsky agreed a quick draw in the last round, which gave David Bronstein the opportunity to come equal first should he overcome Paul Keres, which Bronstein managed. There is a translator's note describing the allegation that this was prearranged by Bronstein's second Boris Vainstein, who was a member of the NKVD. As far as I am aware, the charge of collusion has never been substantiated or shown to be false. If anything, Averbakh, by examining Boleslavsky's character, appears to be hinting that there is nothing to this story. Boleslavsky and Bronstein were and remained firm friends (Bronstein later married Boleslavsky's daughter). Isaac Yefremovich Boleslavsky did not feel hard done by. Should an edition of Averbakh's memoirs come out aimed specifically at the Western reader, then Yuri Lvovich could boost sales by providing accusations of alleged improprieties that are of lesser interest to the Russian intelligentsia.