<IMlday: Rest assured that young Ukrainians are setting up a Bohatirchuk revival; I have had communication with them. His views on democracy, radiology and Old Indian or Big Clamp theory in chess were spectacular and inspirational for future generations, especially me as he was the 'icon' to Ottawa chess back when I was learning the game there. In his prime, late 1920's, he was among the strongest Soviet GM's. During WW2 he ran the Red Cross in the Ukraine: a humanist caught between Stalin and Hitler. Choose this evil or that? No way. He eventually ended up in Ottawa, teaching radiology and gerontology, and in chess inspiring me, as little kid.

Golly! Pachman has a book about 8 Games of Bohatirchuk! That is amazing. I'd like to see it. What Bohatirchuk told me was that the Soviets sabotaged his 1949 GM title with the spokesman a young avowed communist, one Ludek Pachman, as their Czech mouthpiece. Pachman's coming to grips with the evils of Sovietism , circa 1968 frankly amused the aged doctor. At the time i didn't see much funny about Pachman's arrest. But he did. I'd read Pasternak's Nobel-winning "Dr. Zhivago" and seen the movie and then Dr. Bohatirchuk casually dropped that he himself was the doubly-conscripted image for the main protagonist. Double wow eh.. major-league freakers.

In the 60's he only played once a month
in club team matches. I gradually worked my way up to board two and sat beside him when Ottawa won the Ontario teams event in 1966. In 1967 I entered university so I was on the Carleton team playing against him instead of beside him. Never having been very healthy I was stuck in bed for two weeks before our first encounter. I spent all the time studying the White side of the Ruy Lopez Steinitz Deferred. It was the first and only time that I wore a suit and tie for a chessgame, a variation inspired by Ray Keene's tuxedo against Botvinnik. I won. He took it in good humour. A year later he won. The next year we were cautious of each other and had a tranquil draw. But his eyesight was giving out and that was about the end of his over-the-board play. Pretty amazing career though eh. As a sprout he was watching Mikhail Tchigorin trying to decide after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 d6 3.Nc3 whether Black could risk playing 3..g6 making a kingside target and taking the square from the Knight. Tchigorin concluded not and stuck with Old Indians (..Be7). After 65 years Bohatirchuk was still ticking away and showing me Old Indians and Big Clamps. Something almost mystical about that--a thread running through history.. that's why Chess Canada sold chess books plus one work of fiction: Herman Hesse's Masters of Light (aka Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game). Hesse's earlier books were about 'finding it' while his last book was about passing it on to the next generation. For me, Bohatirchuk was the link to Tchigorin and Tchigorin opened up the King's Gambit as a whole realm of adventure. The clamps too, they're all Tchigorin's originally. Against Botvinnik, Bohatirchuk had iirc 3.5-1.5; two wins and three draws. (?) Anyway when he was about to to play Botvinnik for the World Championship, David Bronstein was asked if he was scared and said: Na, I'll just play like Bohatirchuk.

Bohatirchuk's victory was grand +7 -0 =1. He was helped a bit by luck, +6 -2 =0 or +6 -1 =1 would have been more accurate refflection of his dominance.

For me, an absolutely fascinating aspect of doing the translation was to check with our Opening Explorer here. Fifty years of subsequent chess praxis proved Bohatirchuk play profoundly visionary and Pachman's opening assesments stunningly accurate.

Bohatirchuk played several original lines, anticipating the earliest games here in our database (in those lines) by between 15 and 48 years. Also Pachman's assesments of alternative continuations are stuningly prescient, especially when compared with the winning, drawing and loosing percentages of games that were all played well after this ancient match. (I found only one too optimistic assessment of his. In the Ukraine Variation of Old Indian, Pachman sees an advantage for white in one of the lines he proposes, but his own subsequent game with Boleslavski clearly goes to about = chances from the opening.)

Pachman calls Bohatirchuk a perfect defensive player and tries hard to bend his mind around Bohatirchuk's puzzling restrained but flexible style. What Pachman could not know back then was that Bohatirchuk was an ancestor to the hedhehogs as Karpov, Andersson, or Suba, and to the the spiders like Adams. And, I guess, he is a main missing link to them from Chigorin and perhaps even Steinitz.

Here is an interesting article on the KGB, Bohatyrchuk, chess

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...

<Bogatyrchuk spelled his name in English as Bohatirchuk for forty years. Canadians, knowing this, will not be able to find him in the database with KGB pro-obscurity mis-spelling. -- Lawrence Day>

We're willing to change the name to Bohatirchuk if that's what is most commonly accepted. How does Chessbase, and New in Chess spell the name? Are there any other spellings to consider?