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Jun-25-04 | | Gypsy: This player has been an intriguing enigma for me ever since I almost got arested for trying to borrow a book about him (Eight Games of GM Bogatyrchuk) from Accademic Library. It was at a diffrent place and time, but to this day I am not sure whether I almost got into troubles because the book was written by Pachman, or because it was published by Nazis during WWII, or because it was about Bohatyrchuk, or perhaps because of all of the above. |
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Jun-25-04 | | WMD: Or because theft from a library is a criminal offence. |
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Jun-25-04 | | Gypsy: <Or because theft from a library is a criminal offence.> You lost me. Am I supposed to take this as a joke or as an insult <WMD>? |
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Jun-25-04 | | Gypsy: I asked IM Lawrence Day on his pages about Bohatirchuk. Here I repost Day's reply. <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 his prime he would have cleaned my clock, but 1967-1970 the score was balanced at +1, -1, =1.
Seems impossible though since he was Ukraine Champion in 1911. Such amazing longevity! > |
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Jun-25-04 | | Gypsy: I will try to trace down a copy of the book. Thinking about the Pachman's "8-Games" book, it only now dawns on me how unique a piece of history it likely is. There probably is only a half-dozen exemplars in existence, if that. And, in all likelihood, none of the books have been outside of its University vault since 1945 or so. |
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Jun-26-04 | | Calli: <Gypsy> Great posts! Appreciate you sharing your knowledge of this man. Did Dr. Bogatyrchuk ever write about life? |
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Jun-26-04
 | | IMlday: When I went to my first American tournament in NY on the July 1-4 holiday space I made sure I had time to visit the big library and check out Bohatirchuk games not available in Ottawa or Toronto. There were some but not many I didn't have already. The Soviets were keen to erase him from history as a persona non grata.
Drafted to doctor to the retreating Nazi army he ended up in Poland for a while. As an ordinary garden-variety Ukrainian nationalist he opposed Stalin,
so the Nazis were enthusiastic and the Soviets appalled. As the war winded down he retreated West. The train was bombed, so much of the trip was on foot until he reached Allied-controlled territory.
Weirdly this was deja vu. When WW1 broke out he was at Mannheim, on borrowed money, playing a tournament.
The 'Russians' got interned. He got to play Alekhine a lot. It took about a year or more to get back to Kiev via
Switzerland, Italy, boats, Bulgaria (?) etc. The embassy in Switzerland had fronted him money--he had none--but when he finally arrived home the gov't forgave all his loans and he resumed med school. Some vacation tournament eh.
Part of the ongoing 'Bohatirchuk Project' is hunting down the games he played in Germany and Poland. With the KGB wanting to assassinate him, he used pseudonyms, but Dutch researcher IM Welling has tracked them down with some admirable detective work.
In his later years the Dr. wrote his memoirs, but in Russian. The translation is also ongoing. A memorial festival to be held in the Ukraine is also in the works. Aside from chess there will (hopefully) be a seminar gathering in radiology for science, and political discussion of democracy. Back in Czarist times, Bohatirchuk recalled, he and most young intellectual Kievians were hoping for Ukrainian independence with a Western style of democracy like the US or France. However, looking back somewhat nostalgically, he figured that Czarist times were actually better than the Bolshevik, then Fascist systems that followed.
Anyway, for the new Ukraine that makes him a figure way way ahead of his time and they are interested in uncovering his suppressed history.
If the first half of his life was wildly exciting Dr. Zhivago stuff, the second half was blissfully tranquil. His house was on the Rideau Canal in a beautifully quiet part of Ottawa. I think it did have bullet proof glass because there was a non-hole with mandalic ripples surrounding it. He did medical research at University of Ottawa; radiology was the scientific frontier in the 1950's. Absolutely not into weapons--understandable considering his life story--he was looking into gerontology, aging, and how to prevent it.. He certainly demonstrated it.
I first saw him about 11 when I played in a simul for kids. I was going to play Sicilian but looking at what he was playing, 2.b4!?, I quickly switched to French. We all lost regardless. He had a strange physique, short but with an extra large head and lots of unkempt Einstein-style white hair. (to be continued) |
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Jun-26-04
 | | IMlday: (part 2)
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. (A note on spelling his name. As a journalist I often have this problem.
Generally I use reader-friendly phonetics, even Dreyev instead of Dreev. However if someone emigrates, or makes it known how he himself spells his name, then I use that.
Bohatirchuk spelled it like that, closest English phonetics.} |
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Jun-26-04 | | Gypsy: <IMlday> The book (or manuscript?), if it still exists, is in Czech (Osm partii velmistra Bohatyrcuka). It hopefully still resides in the vaulted archives of one of the Czech Universities. I never put my hand on the book; it was listed as one of their chessbooks by a mistake; its existence was supposed to be kept secret. I am sure the librarians quickly corrected their mistake after I made my ill-fated request to borrow it. (It feels so surreal to recall all that now some 30-years later.) I will contact the current University President about your interest and I will Cc <chessgames.com> so that they can get you also into the loop. With any luck, we will unearth it. <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.> It is hard for a life-long westerner to appreciate how audacious (or reckless) was such a flip from Bronstein. Stalin era still reigned supreme. When I queried russia chessplaying emigrees for information on Bahatirchuk, they always got incredibly conspiratorial--hushed voice, gleaming eyes, and a sense of talking about this un-expressable greatness. But no concrete information ever came out. The blackout of information on this particular persona-non-grata overcame even the usually efficient grape-wine mechanisms. |
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Jun-26-04 | | Gypsy: <Great posts! Appreciate you sharing your knowledge of this man. Did Dr. Bogatyrchuk ever write about life?> Thanks <calli>. I also feel that I would love to read this guy's own views on life. Even Pasternak's novel comes a very distant second when you consider a life like that. |
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Jul-17-04 | | Gypsy: It seems that in May 1944 Bohatirchuk got to Prague and played an 8-game training match against local players (Pachman, Kottnauer, Podgorny, Prucha,...). Young Pachman wrote a short pamphlet about the match and then it all got lost and forgotten during the end-of-war excitement. These games/notes have indeed now resurfaced and I have translated them. IM Day should have it all at his end sometimes next week (I am just trying to figure out the best transmission format). 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. (Forgive the rant, I am just decompressing after finishing the work.) |
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Jul-20-04 | | Gypsy: <Against Botvinnik, Bohatirchuk had iirc 3.5-1.5; two wins and three draws. (?)> Actually, +3 -0 =1 in this database. |
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Jul-20-04 | | Calli: <Gypsy>
Some interesting info:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/csarchiv... |
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Jul-20-04 | | Gypsy: Wow, Russians do take their chess seriously!! Thanks <Calli>, I think at least a couple of lines deserve direct postings here. |
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Jul-20-04 | | Gypsy: «You will never beat Botvinnik again!»
by Krylenko
Chairman of Soviet Chess Organisation
Minister of Justice |
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Jul-20-04 | | Gypsy: «I would hang this man myself in the centre of the city!» Mikhail Botvinnik |
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Jul-20-04 | | Calli: Botvinnik: A great chess player but seemed brainwashed by Soviet thinking. Despite his intelligence, he followed the party line totally. Krylenko was killed in one of Stalin's purges a couple of years later. |
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Jul-20-04 | | Gypsy: At one point I came accross a thought that a soviet-style system could have succeded if it were composed of people like Botvinnik. The flaw of that thought is that Botvinnik would not stand another Botvinnik in the same land. He took a resolute preemptive action against any, real or perceived challenge to his top-dog possition (Levenfish, Bronstein, ...) When Botvinnik did not feel challenged, he was a humorless but benevolent king. Most understood that and kept safe by giving Botvinnik wide berth (Ragozin, Flohr, Keres, ...). |
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Jul-20-04 | | Calli: I see. Botvi was the man at the top of the pyramid. Its easy to embrace the system if you are in that spot. Whats the line from the movies? "Its good to be King!" |
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Jul-20-04 | | sneaky pete: <Calli> That line is from Mel Brooks'<History of the World, Part I.> The king is Louis XVI. |
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Jul-20-04 | | Calli: <SneakyP> thanks!
Here is an interesting article on the KGB, Bohatyrchuk, chess http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=... (For some reason I am Googling up a storm today) |
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Jul-25-04
 | | chessgames.com: Many thanks to Honza Cervenka for supplying us with over more 100 games of Bogatyrchuk. |
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Jul-25-04 | | Gypsy: Way to go, <Honza>! |
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Jul-27-04
 | | chessgames.com: IM Day submitted an error correction:
<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? All opinions are welcome. |
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Jul-27-04
 | | IMlday: I don't know enough about computers to know if there is a way to get the various spellings to lead into the same file.
In my experience with chessbase Viktor/Victor Korchnoy/Korchnoi/Korchnoj they seem to have the same problem.
Bohatirchuk's case is even more complex because after WW2 and before settling in Canada he played in Europe under aliases, eg, Bogenko, to evade Soviet assassins. Chess 'detective' Gerard Welling, a Dutch IM, has traced these games down. There are other GM's with made-up names, eg: Andras Adorjan and Alexander Graf. Databases will probably always find difficulty with such a name change. |
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