At the end of October 1953 the Austrian Chess Federation invited the Soviet Union to Vienna for a ten-board match played over two rounds. It was the largest chess occasion Austria had staged since the war, and it was also a rout: the visitors won 17½–2½. Austria was still an occupied country, its capital administered by the four Allied powers, and the team it fielded was measuring itself against a chess culture operating on an entirely different scale.
A match in an occupied capital
Vienna in 1953 was governed jointly by the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France, its central district an international zone whose occupying garrison rotated month by month. Austria would not recover full sovereignty until the State Treaty came into force on 27 July 1955, and the last occupation troops did not leave until that October. The Soviet team therefore arrived in a city where the Soviet Union was already, in the most literal sense, a resident power.
For the Austrian federation the match was part of a wider programme of friendly internationals in those years — Hans Müller, one of the country's veteran masters, played in fixtures against Czechoslovakia in 1949, Italy in 1951 and 1952, and the Soviet Union in 1953. This was by some distance the hardest of them.
The visitors
The ten Soviets the archive records are Flohr, Lilienthal, Averbakh, Tolush, Taimanov, Geller, Petrosian, Simagin, Sokolsky and Moiseev — a squad deep enough that a future world champion was only one name among them. Austria answered with its reigning national champion Josef Lokvenc, together with Karl Robatsch, Alfred Beni, Hans Müller, Hans Lambert, Max Dorn, Alexander Prameshuber, Ernst Stöckl, Anton Kinzel and Josef Platt; Karl Poschauko and Gerhard Bruckner came in for the second round.
Karl Robatsch was then in his mid-twenties and years away from the reputation that would follow him: from the 1960s onward he revived and popularised 1.e4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 so thoroughly that it was long called the Robatsch Defence, and is now known simply as the Modern. In Vienna he lost both his games to Geller.
Twenty games, five draws
In the twenty games our archive preserves, Austria does not win once. Its two and a half points come entirely from draws: Josef Platt held Lilienthal and Max Dorn held Simagin in the first round, Alexander Prameshuber shared the point with Sokolsky, and on the second day Hans Müller drew with Averbakh and Hans Lambert with Flohr.
At the top of the order the visitors were merciless. Petrosian beat Lokvenc twice, Geller beat Robatsch twice, Taimanov beat Beni twice, and Moiseev beat Stöckl twice — four boards conceded 8–0 between them. It is a hard scoreline to read kindly, but the games themselves are the reason the match is worth preserving: a small national federation put its whole first team, one after another, in front of the best players in the world and asked them to prove it.
Result
We have 20 games from this event. The full results are not known, so there is no cross table; the games are listed in their original order.