White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard by Daniel Johnson

Author:Daniel Johnson [Johnson, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Games & Activities, Chess, political science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780547133379
Google: 7Lzd7SaQA_YC
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2008-11-15T00:18:08.550523+00:00

Chess training for children at the Young Pioneer Palace, Leningrad, 1959. The former capital produced many great masters, including Botvinnik, Korchnoi, and Spassky.

In 1955, aged thirteen, Bobby Fischer was already giving simultaneous exhibitions against adults, such as this one in Jersey City. A year later, he was U.S. champion.

The early 1970s were years of détente. This new orthodoxy was a refinement of the postwar doctrine of containment. Instead of containing communist aggression, the West settled for containment of its consequences—the periodic crises that sent seismic waves through the global economy from about 1947 to about 1970. After the two most frightening decades in history, both sides sought the comfort zone of a system of diplomacy. The new settlement was intended to make the crises and confrontation of the postwar era a thing of the past. Détente was supposed to create a framework of rules, agreements, and understandings that, without ending the Cold War, would at least make it predictable. The point about the strategic doctrine that preceded détente, mutually assured destruction (MAD), was not that it was destructive but that it was mutual and assured. Détente took the logic of MAD several steps further. The status quo that détente perpetuated was inhumane, certainly, but it was not unpredictable. The trouble with the doctrine and its apostle, Henry Kissinger, was that they elevated stability above liberty, so depriving the West of its strongest weapon. The compromises that were intended to be the means to preserve peace soon became ends in themselves. Sooner than anybody suspected, the subversive power of truth would shatter the institutional carapace of détente, while in the meantime its high priests engaged in elaborate rituals of self-congratulation. Realpolitik was the watchword of the day, but it concealed the true significance of détente, which was to mask the consolidation of Soviet imperial expansion.

In the Brezhnev era, the Soviet empire, surrounded by satellites, embarked on the colonization of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The illusory power of this vast oriental despotism had reached its utmost extent. Soviet imperial overstretch was fueled—often literally so—by primitive oil plants that could not begin to compensate for the metastasis of Soviet bureaucracy and the obsolescence of Soviet heavy industry. At this turning point, Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago, the judgment in literary form that laid bare the lie at the heart of communism and lit the fuse that would ultimately detonate the entire structure. In his Letter to the Soviet Leaders of 1973, he warned: "The aims of a great empire and the moral health of the people are incompatible." Yet, as he later acknowledged in The Russian Question, his postmortem on the Soviet Union, the Machiavellianism of Soviet diplomacy was modeled on grandmaster chess:

The Communist leaders knew exactly what they wanted, and every action was directed exclusively towards the realization of this useful objective—never a single magnanimous or disinterested move; and every step was calculated precisely, with all possible cynicism, ruthlessness and sagacity in assessing the adversary ... it always surpassed and defeated the West .

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