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Red Letters

by Tim Harding and Sergey Grodzensky

Introduction

Tim Harding has just released Red Letters, which is the story of the 21 CC Championships played under the banner of the old Soviet Union. Although the USSR ceased to exist at the end of 1991, its CC Championships continued until 2002, confirming that chess is more durable than politics!

The book is co-authored by Sergey Grodzensky, an ICCF GM, plus Tim Harding, now an ICCF SIM. Both are noted CC historians and authors, although this is Sergey's first publication in English (the translation was by Ken Neat).

Contents

The medium is book + CD. The book is rather larger than usual (16x24cm), and, pleasingly, is stitch-bound. It has 160 pages of commentary, games, cross-tables, tactical finishes, miniatures and indices, plus 8 glossy pages of players' photographs (not too many cheerful characters in there!).

The CD contains three main types of material:

• Databases - there are 1400+ Championship games, plus a further 3000+ Russian CC games, with 1100+ being annotated in some way. They are stored in Chess Assistant, ChessBase (old and new), and PGN formats.
• Russian text - Sergey's original Cyrillic, lest you doubt the authenticity of the source material!
• Miscellaneous - a collection of photographs, chess graphics, tournament cross-tables, texts in pdf format, and other reference material.

The CD has been created for Windows computers, but the files can be ported on to Apple, Unix and Linux machines.

Review

The Soviet school has dominated world chess for decades, particularly over the board, with Russians plus ex-Soviets and émigrés representing by far the biggest tranche in the FIDE rating list. Interestingly, CC rating has a different balance, with Germany being the leading nation, even when all the ex-USSR countries are tallied together.

This analysis of the top 101 rated CC players comes from the ICCF list of August 2003:

23	Germany
12	Russia
5	USA, England
4	France, Netherlands, Sweden, Ukraine
3	Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland
2	Argentina, Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Switzerland
1	Belgium, Belarus, Bulgaria, Chile, Georgia, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia

The top-rated Russian is GM Mikhail Umansky at 2687, ranked 11th. The only other Russian to make the top 20 is GM Abram Khasim, 2651, ranked 20th.

Nonetheless, the USSR CC Finals represent a long-running feast of high quality chess. Many notable Russian players participated (including Konstantinopolsky, Estrin, Simagin and Yudovich - all USSR champions - plus Zagorovsky, Umansky, Nesis and many others, including Grodzensky, who was arbiter in Ch-15 and Ch-19, and played in Ch-21).

A feature of these events is the high playing performance from the less well known contestants, often restricted by geography or non-chess careers, but demonstrating the ability to overturn the big names via the CC medium.

Almost all the games were played by post, and without the benefit of computer analysis, so all the combinations and complications were the result of fertile minds at work! In the same spirit, the annotations are largely human rather than electronic.

The authors needed deep research to complete the history, as there was no central archive for the tournaments - Ch-16 and onwards were fully published in bulletins, but many earlier results, game scores and cross-tables had to be assembled from the contributions of individual competitors.

Sample Game

Here is a game from the book, featuring commentary by GM Paul Motwani, who has also assessed Estrin (the 5th CC world champion) in Chess Mail.

Conclusion

I found this book a very satisfying combination of historical anecdotes and fascinating chess. The authors are to be warmly commended for their painstaking research and re-assembly of the cross-tables and game scores.

The material assembled on the CD is an extra bonus, with something like 4500 extra CC games for your database! I think the complete package represents really good value.

Red Letters sells at £15.99, or 25 euros. With p&p, this becomes £16.99 or 27 euros. In addition, there are a number of combined purchases available from Chess Mail, featuring combinations of Red Letters, Megacorr 3 and/or 64 Great Chess Games.

Red Letters is available from September 30, and handily timed for the Christmas market - it's definitely a potential present for the chess enthusiast!

You can find out more at the Chess Mail website or write to Chess Mail at 26 Coolamber Park, Dublin 16, Ireland. Other stockists are also selling the book - you should quote ISBN 0-9538536-5-9.