"Idiots Don't Play Chess"

The photo below of the Zhek Chess Club (from the acronym ЖЕК, for “housing and exploitation office,” which is responsible for utilities and other communal services) in Moscow’s Khoroshevo-Mnevniki residential district evokes the heyday of Russian chess, when the sport was a mass phenomenon. Taken in the late 1980s by local chess lover Sergei Pavlyuchenkov, it shows several of the chess club’s members playing a blitz tourney (speed chess of five-minute games) in the entryway of a Stalinesque building on Raspletina street.

“All these young guys are now in their 40s,” Pavlyuchenkov says with no small tinge of nostalgia. “That was a time when we avidly followed every international chess tournament and would come to the club at night to analyze the games played by Karpov or Kasparov. We would even make bets on the next best move when a chess game was postponed and resumed later. We played normal chess, speed chess, we played chess even by phone. Chess was like our religion – one of our members (Sasha Potebnya) even had his mother knit for him a scarf with chess figures – and we all envied him.”

The Zhek Club was in fact just a hang-out for chess lovers, not just for kids from the residential district of Khoroshevo-Mnevniki. They found out about each other by word of mouth. “Only one of our players had a “pervy razryad” [first grade],” Pavlyuchenkov said. “The rest were just very solid “samouchki” (self-taught) players who learned theory and openings from chess textbooks and borrowed chess puzzles and tests from special chess editions. Yet, our games were pretty close, especially when we played the neighboring Zhek people in a team competition.”

Today, of the almost 45 regular club members, only some 5-7 are left. “Lots of our players – mostly students of prestigious intellectual institutes like Moscow State University or Baumansky – emigrated abroad, some to the U.S., actually,” said Valentin Surkov, another club member. “They were all smart guys, because idiots don’t pay chess. So I am pretty sure they found their place there. Some spilis [took to the bottle]. Some switched to business and are now big shots, so they don’t come here anymore. I am sure they still play chess, because it’s good for your brain. But, frankly, it’s been a while since they called. And this is no place for them, as they are rich guys now. All we had was a small room where we stored our chess boards and chess clocks, tournaments charts, files of chess magazines. And a corridor where we put our tables and chairs during practice games and tournaments. Now the corridor has been refurbished, as the building is now full of privatized apartments. So we just play chess in the nearby park or visit each other at home. But playing between just a bunch of people gets boring, as you come to learn each other’s playing style and moves by heart, and that leads to stagnation of your chess thinking.”

But the membership drain did have a silver lining – short of partners, the remaining club members bought themselves inexpensive “red-made PCs” with chess software. They now play chess with each other electronically. “It’s much more fun than the old chess-by-phone thing,” said Pavlyuchenkov. “You can even go without a sparring-partner and just play against the computer – like Kasparov did against Deep Blue. But playing face-to-face is still something we miss – you can’t see the reactions of your opponent; you can’t figure out whether he is stressed or serene; you don’t get to see how many cigarettes he smoked. The computer is imperturbable – and that takes away the human touch.”   

Yelena Kulagina also contributed to this story.