Moscow 1935

◇The second Moscow International

Ten years after Moscow 1925, the Soviet chess authorities again invited the world's best. Twenty players, twelve from the USSR and eight from abroad, met in a nineteen-round round robin, 190 games in all, in the halls of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The event drew huge public interest, part of a state campaign to make chess a mass pastime and to test the rising Soviet school against the established Western masters.

The foreign contingent was headed by two former World Champions, José Raúl Capablanca and Emanuel Lasker, joined by Salo Flohr, Rudolf Spielmann, Gideon Ståhlberg, Vasja Pirc, and the Women's World Champion Vera Menchik. Against them stood the best of the new Soviet generation — Botvinnik, Grigory Levenfish, Ilya Kan, Nikolay Riumin, Viacheslav Ragozin and others.

◇A shared crown

Flohr, one of the most feared tournament players of the 1930s, set the early pace, and Botvinnik trailed him by half a point through round fifteen. The young Soviet then closed the gap, and both leaders drew each of their final three games to finish level on 13/19. There was no play-off: Flohr and Botvinnik were declared joint winners.

For Botvinnik it was a big step. Two years after drawing a training match with Flohr, he shared first in one of the strongest tournaments in the world at twenty-three, the clearest sign yet of the champion he would become.

◇Lasker's biological miracle

The wonder of the tournament was Lasker. World Champion for twenty-seven years and long thought retired, he was sixty-six years old — and he lost to no one. He finished third on 12½, undefeated across all nineteen rounds, and in the ninth round outplayed Capablanca to take a brilliancy prize and finish half a point ahead of his old rival, who came fourth. Vera Menchik, competing among the men, closed the standings with 1½ points.