Alexander Alekhine

Alexander Aleksandrovich Alekhine (March 24, 1946) was a Russian and French chess player and the fourth World Chess Champion, a title he held for two reigns.

By the age of 22, Alekhine was already among the strongest chess players in the world. During the 1920s, he won most of the tournaments in which he played. In 1921, Alekhine left Soviet Russia and emigrated to France, which he represented after 1925. In 1927, he became the fourth World Chess Champion by defeating José Raúl Capablanca.

In the early 1930s, Alekhine dominated tournament play and won two top-class tournaments by large margins. He also played first board for France in five Chess Olympiads, winning individual prizes in each (four medals and a brilliancy prize). Alekhine offered Capablanca a rematch on the same demanding terms that Capablanca had set for him, and negotiations dragged on for years without making much progress. Meanwhile, Alekhine defended his title with ease against Efim Bogoljubov in 1929 and 1934. He was defeated by Max Euwe in 1935, but regained his crown in the 1937 rematch. His tournament record, however, was uneven, and rising young stars like Paul Keres, Reuben Fine, and Mikhail Botvinnik threatened his title. Negotiations for a title match with Keres or Botvinnik were halted by the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939. Negotiations with Botvinnik for a world title match were proceeding in 1946 when Alekhine died in Portugal, in unclear circumstances. Alekhine is the only World Chess Champion to have died while holding the title.

Alekhine is known for his fierce and imaginative attacking style, combined with great positional and endgame skill. He is highly regarded as a chess writer and theoretician, having produced innovations in a wide range of chess openings and having given his name to Alekhine's Defence and several other opening variations. He also composed some endgame studies.

Biography

Early life

Alekhine was born into a wealthy Russian family in Moscow, Russia, on October 31, 1892. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Alekhin, was a landowner and Privy Councilor to the conservative legislative Fourth Duma. His mother, Anisya Ivanovna Alekhina (born Prokhorova), was the daughter of a rich industrialist. Alekhine was introduced to chess by his mother, his older brother Alexei, and his older sister Varvara.

Early chess career (1902–1914)

thumb|upright=0.90|right|Alekhine in 1909

Alekhine's first known game was from a correspondence chess tournament that began on December 3, 1902, when he was ten years old. He participated in several correspondence tournaments, sponsored by the chess magazine Shakhmatnoe Obozrenie ("Chess Review"), between 1902 and 1911. In 1907, he played his first over-the-board tournament, the Moscow chess club's Spring Tournament. Later that year, he tied for 11th–13th in the club's Autumn Tournament; his elder brother, Alexei, tied for 4th–6th place. In 1908, Alexander won the club's Spring Tournament, at the age of 15. In 1909, he won the All-Russian Amateur Tournament in Saint Petersburg. For the next few years, he played in increasingly stronger tournaments, some of them outside Russia. At first he had mixed results, but by the age of 16 he had established himself as one of Russia's top players. He played first board in two friendly team matches: St. Petersburg Chess Club vs. Moscow Chess Club in 1911 and Moscow vs. St. Petersburg in 1912 (both drew with Yevgeny Znosko-Borovsky). By the end of 1911, Alekhine moved to St. Petersburg, where he entered the Imperial Law School for Nobles. By 1912, he was the strongest chess player in the St. Petersburg Chess Society. In March 1912, he won the St. Petersburg Chess Club Winter Tournament. In April 1912, he won the 1st Category Tournament of the St. Petersburg Chess Club. In January 1914, Alekhine won his first major Russian tournament, when he tied for first place with Aron Nimzowitsch in the All-Russian Masters Tournament at St. Petersburg. Afterwards, they drew in a mini-match for first prize (each won a game). Alekhine also played several matches in this period, and his results showed the same pattern: mixed at first but later consistently good.

Top-level grandmaster (1914–1927)

In April–May 1914, another major St. Petersburg 1914 chess tournament was held in the capital of the Russian Empire, in which Alekhine took third place behind Emanuel Lasker and José Raúl Capablanca. By some accounts, Tsar Nicholas II conferred the title of "Grandmaster of Chess" on each of the five finalists (Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Siegbert Tarrasch, and Frank Marshall). (Chess historian Edward Winter has questioned this, stating that the earliest known sources supporting this story are an article by Robert Lewis Taylor in the June 15, 1940, issue of The New Yorker and Marshall's autobiography My 50 Years of Chess (1942).) Alekhine's surprising success made him a serious contender for the World Chess Championship. In July 1914, Alekhine tied for first with Marshall in Paris.

World War I and post-revolutionary Russia

In July–August 1914, Alekhine was leading an international Mannheim tournament, the 19th DSB Congress (German Chess Federation Congress) in Mannheim, Germany, with nine wins, one draw and one loss, when World War I broke out. Alekhine's prize was 1,100 marks (worth about 11,000 euros in terms of purchasing power today). After the declaration of war against Russia, eleven "Russian" players (Alekhine, Efim Bogoljubov, Fedor Bogatyrchuk, Alexander Flamberg, N. Koppelman, Boris Maliutin, Ilya Rabinovich, Peter Romanovsky, Pyotr Saburov, Alexey Selezniev, and Samuil Weinstein) were interned in Rastatt, Germany. On September 14, 17, and 29 of 1914, four of them (Alekhine, Bogatyrchuk, Saburov, and Koppelman) were freed and allowed to return home. Alekhine made his way back to Russia (via Switzerland, Italy, London, Sweden, and Finland) by the end of October 1914. A fifth player, Romanovsky, was released in 1915, and a sixth, Flamberg, was allowed to return to Warsaw in 1916.

When Alekhine returned to Russia, he helped raise money by giving simultaneous exhibitions to aid the Russian chess players who remained interned in Germany. In December 1915, he won the Moscow Chess Club Championship. In April 1916, he won a mini-match against Alexander Evensohn with two wins and one loss at Kiev, and in summer he served in the Union of Cities (Red Cross) on the Austrian front. In September, he played five people in a blindfold display at a Russian military hospital at Tarnopol. In 1918, he won a "triangular tournament" in Moscow. In June of the following year, after the Russians forced the German army to retreat from Ukraine, Alekhine was charged with links with White movement counter-intelligence and was briefly imprisoned in Odessa's death cell by the Odessa Cheka. Rumors appeared in the West that he had been killed by the Bolsheviks.

1920–1927

When conditions in Russia became more settled, Alekhine proved he was among Russia's strongest players. In January 1920, he swept the championship of Moscow (11/11), but was not declared champion because he was not a resident of the city. In October 1920 he won the All-Russian Chess Olympiad in Moscow (+9−0=6); the tournament was retroactively called the first USSR Championship. His brother Alexei took third place in the tournament for amateurs.

In March 1920, Alekhine married Alexandra Batayeva. They divorced the next year. For a short time in 1920–21, he worked as an interpreter for the Communist International (Comintern) and was appointed secretary to the Education Department. In this capacity, he met a Swiss journalist and Comintern delegate, Annelise Rüegg, who was thirteen years his senior, and they married on March 15, 1921. Shortly after getting married, Alekhine was given permission to leave Russia for a visit to the West with his wife, from whom he separated in June 1921. He would never return to Russia, and made France his base for much of the following twenty years.

In 1921–1923, Alekhine played seven mini-matches. In 1921, he won against Nikolay Grigoriev (+2−0=5) in Moscow, drew with Richard Teichmann (+2−2=2) and won against Friedrich Sämisch (+2−0=0), both in Berlin. In 1922, he won against Ossip Bernstein (+1−0=1) and Arnold Aurbach (+1−0=1), both in Paris, and Manuel Golmayo (+1−0=1) in Madrid. In 1923, he won against André Muffang (+2−0=0) in Paris.), of which the defending champion would receive over half even if defeated. Raising the money was Alekhine's preliminary objective; he even went on tour, playing simultaneous exhibitions for modest fees day after day. In New York on April 27, 1924, he broke the world record for simultaneous blindfold play when he played twenty-six opponents (the previous record was twenty-five, set by Gyula Breyer), winning sixteen games, losing five, and drawing five after twelve hours of play. He broke his own world record on February 1, 1925, by playing twenty-eight games blindfold simultaneously in Paris, winning twenty-two, drawing three, and losing three.

His French citizenship application was postponed because of his frequent travels abroad to play chess and because he was reported once in April 1922, shortly after his arrival in France, as a "bolshevist charged by the Soviets of a special mission in France". Later in 1927, the French Chess Federation asked the Ministry of Justice to intervene in Alekhine's favor to have him lead the French team in the first Nation tournament to be held in London in July 1927. Nevertheless, Alekhine had to wait for a new law on naturalization which was published on 10 August 1927. The decree granting him French nationality (among hundreds of other applicants) was signed on 5 November 1927 and published in the Official Gazette of the French Republic on 14–15 November 1927, while Alekhine was playing Capablanca for the World title in Buenos Aires.

In October 1926, Alekhine won in Buenos Aires. In December 1926 / January 1927, he defeated Max Euwe 5½–4½ in a training match in the Netherlands. In 1927, he married his third wife, Nadiezda Vasiliev (née Fabritzky), another older woman, the widow of the Russian general V. Vasiliev.

World Chess Champion, first reign (1927–1935)

1927 title match

In 1927, Alekhine's challenge to Capablanca was backed by a group of Argentine businessmen and the president of Argentina, who guaranteed the funds, and organized by the Club Argentino de Ajedrez (Argentine Chess Club) in Buenos Aires. In the World Chess Championship match played from September 16 to November 29, 1927 at Buenos Aires, Alekhine won the title, scoring +6−3=25. Alekhine's victory surprised almost the entire chess world, since he had never previously won a single game from Capablanca. After Capablanca's death Alekhine expressed surprise at his own victory, since in 1927 he did not think he was superior to Capablanca, and he suggested that Capablanca had been overconfident. Capablanca entered the match with no technical or physical preparation, while Alekhine got himself into good physical condition According to Kasparov, Alekhine's research uncovered many small inaccuracies, which occurred because Capablanca was unwilling to concentrate intensely. Vladimir Kramnik has commented that this was the first contest in which Capablanca had no easy wins.

Rematch offered, never finalized

Immediately after winning the match, Alekhine announced that he was willing to give Capablanca a return match, on the same terms that Capablanca had required as champion: the challenger must provide a stake of US$10,000, of which more than half would go to the defending champion even if he was defeated. The first was held at Wiesbaden, Heidelberg, Berlin, The Hague, and Amsterdam from September through November 1929. Alekhine retained his title, scoring +11−5=9.

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Soon after becoming champion, Alekhine swept a two-game exhibition match in New York against Charles Jaffe, who had supplied analysis to him during the match with Capablanca.

Anti-Bolshevik statements, controversy

After the world championship match, Alekhine returned to Paris and spoke against Bolshevism. Afterwards, Nikolai Krylenko, president of the Soviet Chess Federation, published an official memorandum stating that Alekhine should be regarded as an enemy of the Soviets. The Soviet Chess Federation broke all contact with Alekhine until the end of the 1930s. His elder brother Alexei, with whom Alexander Alekhine had a very close relationship, publicly repudiated him and his anti-Soviet utterances shortly afterward, but Alexei may have had little choice about this decision.

Early 1930s

According to Reuben Fine, Alekhine dominated chess into the mid-1930s.

From 1930 to 1935, Alekhine played first board for France at four Chess Olympiads, winning the first brilliancy prize at Hamburg in 1930, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the Dutch East Indies. In July 1933, he played thirty-two people blindfold simultaneously (a new world record) in Chicago, winning nineteen, drawing nine and losing four games.

In 1934 Alekhine married his fourth wife, Grace Freeman (née Wishaar), sixteen years his senior. She was the American-born widow of a British tea-planter in Ceylon, who retained her British citizenship to the end of her life and remained Alekhine's wife until his death.

In the early 1930s, around 1933 according to Reuben Fine, it was noticed that Alekhine was drinking increasing amounts of alcohol. Euwe, in the early 1930s, was regarded as one of three credible challengers (the others were José Raúl Capablanca and Salo Flohr).

On October 3, 1935, the world championship match began in Zandvoort, the Netherlands. Although Alekhine took an early lead, from game thirteen onwards Euwe won twice as many games as Alekhine. The challenger became the new champion on December 16, 1935, with nine wins, thirteen draws, and eight losses. This was the first world championship match in which seconds were officially employed: Alekhine had the services of Salo Landau, and Euwe had Géza Maróczy. Euwe's win was a major upset. Later World Champions Vasily Smyslov, Boris Spassky, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov analyzed the match for their own benefit and concluded that Euwe deserved to win and that the standard of play was worthy of a world championship.

According to Kmoch, Alekhine abstained from alcohol altogether for five years after the 1935 match.

World Chess Champion, second reign (1937–1946)

1937–1939

Max Euwe was quick to arrange a return match with Alekhine, something José Raúl Capablanca had been unable to obtain after Alekhine won the world title in 1927. Alekhine regained the title from Euwe in December 1937 by a large margin (+10−4=11). In this match, held in the Netherlands, Euwe was seconded by Fine, and Alekhine by Erich Eliskases. The match was a real contest initially, but Euwe collapsed near the end, losing four of the last five games. Fine attributed the collapse to nervous tension, possibly aggravated by Euwe's attempts to maintain a calm appearance. Alekhine played no more title matches, and thus held the title until his death.

Keres, who had won the AVRO tournament on tiebreak over Fine, also challenged Alekhine to a world championship match. Negotiations were proceeding in 1939 when they were disrupted by World War II. During the war Keres' home country, Estonia, was invaded first by the USSR, then by Germany, then again by the USSR. At the end of the war, the Soviet government prevented Keres from continuing the negotiations, on the grounds that he had collaborated with the Germans during their occupation of Estonia (by Soviet standards).

Alekhine was representing France at first board in the 8th Chess Olympiad at Buenos Aires 1939 when World War II broke out in Europe. The assembly of all team captains, with leading roles played by Alekhine (France), Savielly Tartakower (Poland), and Albert Becker (Germany), plus the president of the Argentine Chess Federation, Augusto de Muro, decided to go on with the Olympiad.

Alekhine won the individual silver medal (nine wins, no losses, seven draws), behind Capablanca (only results from finals A and B—separately for both sections—counted for best individual scores). Supported by Latin-American financial pledges, José R. Capablanca challenged Alexander Alekhine to a world title match in November. Tentative plans—not, however, backed by a deposit of the required purse ($10,000 in gold)—led to a virtual agreement to play at Buenos Aires, Argentina, beginning on April 14, 1940.

World War II (1939–1945)

Unlike many participants in the 1939 Chess Olympiad, he enlisted in the French army as a sanitation officer.

Relationship with Nazi Germany

Chess historians have had a significant interest in Alekhine's affiliation with Nazi Germany. Of ongoing speculation among historians specialising in mid-20th century European chess is whether or not Alekhine was the author of numerous antisemitic pieces of propaganda published in relevant partisan materials at the time. While an analysis of writing styles is perceived to provide evidence supporting the theory Alekhine willingly worked as a propagandist in a non-coercive fashion, Alekhine himself denied this in written letters.

By some accounts, to protect his wife, Grace, and her French assets (a castle at Saint Aubin-le-Cauf, near Dieppe, which the Nazis looted), he agreed to cooperate with the Nazis. Alekhine took part in chess tournaments in Munich, Salzburg, Kraków/Warsaw, and Prague, organised by Ehrhardt Post, the chief executive of the Nazi-controlled Grossdeutscher Schachbund ("Greater Germany Chess Federation")—Keres, Bogoljubov, and several other strong masters in Nazi-occupied Europe also played in such events. In 1941, he tied for second-third with Erik Lundin in the Munich 1941 chess tournament (Europaturnier in September, won by Gösta Stoltz), shared first with Paul Felix Schmidt at Kraków/Warsaw (the 2nd General Government chess tournament, in October) and won in Madrid (in December). The following year he won in the Salzburg 1942 chess tournament (June 1942) and in Munich (September 1942; the Nazis named this the Europameisterschaft, which means "European Championship"). Later in 1942 he won at Warsaw/Lublin/Kraków (the 3rd GG-ch; October 1942) and tied for first with Klaus Junge in Prague (Duras Jubileé; December 1942). In 1943, he drew a mini-match (+2−2) with Bogoljubov in Warsaw (March 1943), he won in Prague (April 1943) and tied for first with Keres in Salzburg (June 1943).

By late 1943, Alekhine was spending all his time in Spain and Portugal, as the German representative to chess events. This also allowed him to get away from the onrushing Soviet invasion into eastern Europe. In 1944, he narrowly won a match against Ramón Rey Ardid in Zaragoza (+1−0=3; April 1944) and won in Gijón (July 1944). The following year, he won at Madrid (March 1945), tied for second place with Antonio Medina at Gijón (July 1945; the event was won by Antonio Rico), won at Sabadell (August 1945), he tied for first with F. López Núñez in Almeria (August 1945), won in Melilla (September 1945) and took second in Caceres, behind Francisco Lupi (Autumn 1945). Alekhine's last match was with Lupi at Estoril near Lisbon, Portugal, in January 1946. Alekhine won two games, lost one, and drew one.

Final year and death

thumb|upright|Grave of Alexander Alekhine in Paris, France (reconstruction of the original which was destroyed in 1999)

After World War II, Alekhine was not invited to chess tournaments outside the Iberian Peninsula, because of his alleged Nazi affiliation. His original invitation to the London 1946 tournament was withdrawn when the other competitors protested. The circumstances of his death are still a matter of debate. It is usually attributed to a heart attack, but a letter in Chess Life magazine from a witness to the autopsy stated that choking on meat was the actual cause of death. At autopsy, a three-inch-long piece of unchewed meat was discovered blocking his windpipe. Some have speculated that he was murdered by a French "death squad". A few years later, Alekhine's son, Alexander Alekhine Jr., said that "the hand of Moscow reached his father." Kevin Spraggett, a Canadian Grandmaster who has lived in Portugal since the late 1980s and has thoroughly investigated Alekhine's death, favors this possibility. Spraggett makes a case for the manipulation of the crime scene and the autopsy by the Portuguese secret police PIDE. He believes that Alekhine was murdered outside his hotel room, probably by Soviet agents.

Alekhine's burial was sponsored by FIDE, and the remains were transferred to the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France, in 1956.

His gravestone suffered heavy damage by a cyclone on 26 December 1999. The headstone monument was blown over, shattered and fell on the main gravestone. It was later restored.

Assessment

Playing strength and style

Alekhine's peak period was in the early 1930s, when he won almost every tournament he played, sometimes by huge margins. Afterward, his play declined, and he never won a top-class tournament after 1934. After Alekhine regained his world title in 1937, there were several new contenders, all of whom would have been serious challengers. An explanation offered by Réti was, "he beats his opponents by analysing simple and apparently harmless sequences of moves in order to see whether at some time or another at the end of it an original possibility, and therefore one difficult to see, might be hidden." John Nunn commented that "Alekhine had a special ability to provoke complications

without taking excessive risks", and Edward Winter called him "the supreme genius of the complicated position". and Harry Golombek went further, saying that "Alekhine was the most versatile of all chess geniuses, being equally at home in every style of play and in all phases of the game."

Alekhine's games have a higher percentage of wins than those of any other World Champion, and his drawn games are on average among the longest of all champions'. His desire to win extended beyond formal chess competition. When Fine beat him in some casual games in 1933, Alekhine demanded a match for a small stake. And in table tennis, which Alekhine played enthusiastically but badly, he would often crush the ball when he lost. Fischer, who was famous for the clarity of his play, wrote of Alekhine: <blockquote>Alekhine has never been a hero of mine, and I've never cared for his style of play. There's nothing light or breezy about it; it worked for him, but it could scarcely work for anyone else. He played gigantic conceptions, full of outrageous and unprecedented ideas. ... [H]e had great imagination; he could see more deeply into a situation than any other player in chess history. ... It was in the most complicated positions that Alekhine found his grandest concepts. In 2012, Levon Aronian said that he considers Alekhine the greatest chess player of all time.