This Sunday marks the death in Portugal of Alexander Alekhine. Was it at the hands of Soviet agents, a la Trotsky in Mexico, or at the hands of the French Resistance taking revenge? He was not a very nice person. Having read the anti-semetic screeds published under his name by the N a z i s during WWII, I can only wish Alekhine had been blessed with the moral integrity of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
In any event, our club will mark his death as a great chess player this Sunday at Cafe Lotti, E. Burke, VT from 2:30 pm to 4:40 pm. Please join us if you are in the area. Bring your hip flask with something to imbibe, or bring a cat to sit on your lap as Alekhine often did. We’ll try to play at least one game as Black using the Alekhine Defense.
I don’t see why anyone should expect great chess players to be great people.
In another thread, now locked, someone wondered what nominations to the Chess Hall of Fame might be controversial. He’s already in it, but given what we’ve learned about Fischer in the nearly 47 years since he won the World Chess Championship, wouldn’t his nomination be just a bit controversial today?
A bit, but how many feel personally aggrieved by Fischer to the extent those who defended lawsuits, and he never did anything that seriously threatened the existence of USCF. Consequently, while there would surely be some PC types who would have decried his enshrinement, I doubt there would have been much of an uproar. And truth be told, while there are a lot of people who would be vocal about Polgar here on the forums (for we are vocal about everything), among the membership at large there are plenty who support her strongly and even more who really don’t care much about any of the controversial stuff.
I felt really bothered, personally, when I heard Bobby’s rants against America after 911, but afterwards, I realized that he was simply a very ill man with psychosis, and it wasn’t his fault.
Mental health has a stigma to it that I feel is unfair. Many people with depressive, and anxiety disorders are told by loved ones to “just get over it”. They don’t realize that mental disorders are medical issues, and writing off anxiety and other disorders as something controllable is as silly as telling someone to get over a cancer.
As for me, I’ve forgiven Fischer, and believe that what he accomplished, though a lot of hard work, in chess is deserving of HOF honor.
I agree with you regarding Fischer. Alekhine, to my knowledge had no sign of mental illness. Alcoholism perhaps, but that would not medically account for anti-semitism.
A couple of years ago, I submitted a proposal to the USPS for a commemorative set of forever stamps honoring great American chess players. I suggested Morphy, Steinitz, Pillsbury, Marshall, Kashdan, Denker, Koltanowski and Fischer. I put a note in the proposal making the point you make as to Fischer. We could add Lombardy now that he’s dead. The only living person to have ever graced a US postage stamp was Elvis.
“Deserving” is somehow not the right word. When someone is deceased, as many of the HOF honorees are, it doesn’t matter any more what they “deserve”. The HOF is not for the benefit of the people it honors; it’s for the benefit (and education) of the people who visit it. When the custodians of the HOF are considering who should be in it, they should be asking, “Do we want to teach people about this person?”, and “What exactly do we want to say about this person?”. Whether or not the person did good or evil, or was crazy or sane, are only secondary questions.
Fischer was admitted to the U.S. Chess HOF in 1986. It was already known at the time that he was rabidly anti-Semitic, and more than a little eccentric, and things only got worse as he got older. But it wouldn’t make much sense to even have a U.S. Chess HOF if Fischer couldn’t be in it. So the issue for custodians of the HOF is what exactly to say about Fischer – how to present Fischer. By the way, I take rabid anti-Semitism very seriously these days, even when the person is crazy, as in the Tree of Life massacre. So if I were watching over the HOF, I’d try to be extra careful about how to handle that topic in the material about Fischer.
I do not know of many figures in U.S. Chess history who were both accomplished enough to be possibilities for the HOF, and really crooked or at least really sleazy. Norman Whitaker comes to mind. If chess were a more popular sport, with bigger money, in this country, we’d have more shady or dubious characters.
Regarding Alekhine, he was undoubtedly worried at the time about how to deal with the Nazi government of France, where he lived. Denker, among others, said that he was outraged at the end of World War II when he read about Alekhine’s repugnant anti-Semitic writing, but that he (Denker) eventually realized what it meant to have to live under the N a z i s, and he regretted his earlier opposition to letting Alekhine back into organized chess after the war.
Survival under a regime like the Third Reich sure does raise moral issues.* I was somewhat non-judgmental as to Alekhine’s purported writings until I read them in Pablo Moran’s book Agony of a Chess Genius. Vile doesn’t come close to describing them. Would Alekhine in time have faced some form of judicial proceeding as a war criminal in the way that Tokyo Rose did? Add to that the fact that from 1941 -1943 he played in tournaments in Germany, occupied Poland and occupied Czechoslovakia and there may well be a level of complicity that would have had him eventually in the dock.
I would have no problem inducting people such as Fischer and Alekhine into a HoF after their death with an explanation of their chess as distinct from life choices, mental illness compelled actions or willful harm to others. It’s pretty clear that Alekhine did not die a natural death from choking. In his case, and Fischer’s, the end was not good. At least one can make the argument that on some level justice prevailed in the end.
* Surviving in the chess community of the Soviet Union is a corollary that fascinates me. I wonder if those who refused to sign the grandmaster’s letter condemning Victor The Terrible for defecting would have done so had Stalin still be at the top.
An addendum to Alekhine in occupied Poland tournaments. These were organized by Hans Frank who was deeply involved with the implementation of the Final Solution in Poland. Frank was tried and convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg, sentenced to death and executed.
Here are the best know participants in those tournaments:
Alexander Alekhine Russia/ France
Efim Bogoljubow Ukraine/ Germany
Paul Felix Schmidt Estonia/ Germany
Klaus Junge Chile/ Germany
Karl Gilg Czechoslovakia/ Germany
Josef Lokvenc Austria/ Germany
Hans Müller Austria/ Germany
Wolfgang Weil Austria/ Germany
Paul Mross Poland/ Germany
Teodor Regedziński Poland/ Germany
Leon Tuhan-Baranowski Poland/ Germany
Fedir Bohatyrchuk Ukraine/ Soviet Union
and other German players Germany/ Germany.
Regedziński played as Theodore Reger, and Tuhan-Baranowski as Lisse.
