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Grandmaster Alexander Alekhine

GRANDMASTER PROFILE Alexander  A. Alekhine (1892 - 1946)

According to most sources, Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine was not the most likeable man in the world. However, there are plenty of people who would claim that he was the best chess player who ever lived.

He played over 1000 tournament games, scoring 73% in them and his historical ELO rating has been calculated to be 2690.
He certainly crammed a great deal of living into his 54 years:- 
                    Wounded during the First World War;
                    made a prisoner of war at least twice;
                    accused of espionage and condemned to death;
                    married four times;
                    worked for the Communist Party as a translator;
                    (and in a film studio, with the intention of becoming an actor); 
                    made an honorary colonel in the Mexican army and .....
                     .....was the fourth world chess champion, altogether holding the title for 17 years.
     
He was born in Moscow into a prominent family: His father was a wealthy landowner and a member of the Russian legislative assembly established by Tsar Nicholas II and his mother was an heiress to an industrial fortune. It was she who taught her sons to play chess. 
 
At the age of 16 he entered the Imperial High School for Law in Moscow. The following year he won a chess tournament in St. Petersburg that gained him the title of Russian master. It was there, in 1914 that he won his first major tournament when he tied for first place with Aron Nimzovich.
Legend has it that it was in St. Petersburg a few months later that Tsar Nicholas bestowed the title 'Grandmaster of Chess' on Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Tarrasch and Marshall after they had taken the top five places in another major tournament. If not the very first time, this would certainly have been one of the earliest times that the description 'grandmaster' was used.

He was leading an international tournament in Mannheim, Germany when World War I broke out. He was taken prisoner but was released after feigning madness! Making his way back to Russia, he served in the Red Cross on the Austrian front where he was wounded and captured by the Austrians. On his eventual return, the Russians decorated him for bravery.

He finished his legal training and worked in Moscow as a magistrate. In 1919 he was in prison again; this time in a death cell in Odessa on suspicion of espionage. It's said that his life was spared by Leon Trotsky himself. (I wonder if Alekhine ever recalled that Trotsky was the son of a Jewish farmer when twenty years later he was writing his anti-Semitic nonsense for the Nazis.)

In 1920 he won the first USSR chess championship and married a Russian baroness.
The following year he left both his wife and the Soviet Union (never to set foot there again), settled in Paris and remarried. A few months later, he abandoned his second wife and moved to Berlin. 

In 1925 he became a naturalized French citizen and entered the Sorbonne Law School, writing his thesis on the Chinese prison system. That same year, he broke the world blindfold record by playing 28 games simultaneously, losing just three of them. (He was still exhibiting his prowess in this way in 1933 where, in Chicago, he extended the number to 32.)   

His greatest achievement was in winning the world championship from Jose Capablanca in 1927.
The match turned out to be a ten week marathon of 34 games. Capablanca had for some time believed that the game held no more secrets for him and his ego had been nourished for too long on the myth of his invincibility. For his part, Alekhine came to the match fiercely determined and thoroughly prepared.
In the event, his will was more than a match for Capablanca's complacency. What's more, Capablanca hadn't made it easy for Alekhine to meet the conditions for the title match and he subsequently found that Alekhine could be just as difficult. For the rest of his life, Capablanca never got the chance for revenge. 

Having married for the third time shortly before beating Capablanca, Alekhine married wife number four in 1934 - the year he successfully defended his title for the second time against Bogoljubov.

All too often, it seems that arrogance accompanies success. In 1935, with no documents at the Polish border, Alekhine told the border guard, 'I am Alekhine, chess champion of the world. This is my cat. Her name is chess. I need no passport.' 

That same year, the unthinkable happened when he lost the world championship to the gentlemanly Dutchman, Max Euwe.
It's not certain that the Dutch were aware of Alekhine's problems with alcohol but part of their hospitality included paying Alekhine's bar bill for the duration of the contest. He was definitely not at his best and he lost the match. (It was reported that the defending champion's play was 'strangely uneven'.)
He returned in 1937, having not had a drink since losing the title, and became the first player to ever regain the world championship.  
  
With the financial backing of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Botvinnik was due to challenge him next but, for the second time in his life, a world war got in the way of Alekhine's chess.
He was representing France at the Chess Olympiad in Buenos Aires when World War II was declared. He was the French captain and refused to allow his team to play Germany. On his return to France, he enlisted as an interpreter in the army but when France was over-run he went to Lisbon and tried to get an American visa.

In 1941, articles written by Alekhine appeared in German newspapers in occupied France and Holland.
In typical Nazi style, they attacked the 'defensive thinking' of Jewish chess players who demonstrated a lack of courage or creative ability; the more successful of them being motivated by a lust for money.
A chess master who knew him well said later that Alekhine's motivation was quite simple - he had no morals and would do anything for money. 
By collaborating with the Nazis he protected his assets in France. He played in Nazi chess tournaments in Munich, Salzburg, Warsaw and Prague and by 1943 was spending all of his time in Spain and Portugal as the German representative to chess events.
After the war, he denied writing the articles and called them 'a heap of monstrosities'. Later, he claimed that he had been forced to write them, saying that he feared for his wife's safety and that he needed the money. When he died, copies of the articles, certified to be in his handwriting, were found among his effects.

There were calls for FIDE to strip him of his title. Then came a renewed challenge from Botvinnik - together with a large enough purse to persuade the champion to accept it - and, although just recovering from a heart attack, Alekhine agreed to play. The British Chess Federation were due to hold the match in 1946 but during the negotiations Alekhine suffered a fatal heart attack in Estoril, Portugal, and the title didn't become Botvinnik's until 1948.
Alekhine left us a treasury of wonderful games. Often as unconventional in his play as in his life, he had a fine appreciation of strategy which enabled him to create positions which were ripe for combinations.
He has been called the most complete chess artist in the history of the game.

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