USSR Absolute Championship — Leningrad/Moscow 1941

Six players who had just finished the 1940 Soviet Championship in a muddle met again five months later, at Mikhail Botvinnik's urging, to decide once and for all who deserved to challenge World Champion Alexander Alekhine. In a quadruple round robin, each player meeting every other four times over twenty rounds, Botvinnik led from the first cycle and finished two and a half points clear of Paul Keres, with a plus score against every opponent. Two months later Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the title match Botvinnik had wanted since 1938 didn't happen for another seven years, and by then Alekhine was dead.

◇A rematch Botvinnik demanded

Botvinnik had led the 1940 USSR Championship early, then faded to a tie for fifth, two full points behind co-leaders Igor Bondarevsky and Andor Lilienthal. The plan on the table was for those two to settle the Soviet title between themselves in a straight match — but Botvinnik wrote to a sympathetic official arguing that neither man had any real international record, and pressed the Soviet chess leadership to hold a new event instead, "in order to clarify the situation." The result was a specially created title, the 'Absolute Champion of the USSR,' whose real purpose was to identify a single Soviet challenger for Alekhine's world crown. The top six finishers of the 1940 championship qualified: Bondarevsky, Lilienthal, Paul Keres, Vasily Smyslov, Isaac Boleslavsky, and Botvinnik.

Keres arrived under unusual circumstances of his own — his homeland, Estonia, had been annexed by the Soviet Union only months earlier. Botvinnik, for his part, prepared with almost obsessive thoroughness: training with his second Viacheslav Ragozin in deliberately noisy, smoke-filled rooms to simulate playing-hall conditions, and sleeping in the venue itself rather than travel each day.

◇Botvinnik in a class of his own

It was not close. Botvinnik won with 13½/20 (+9 −2 =9), finishing two and a half points ahead of Keres (11) and three ahead of Smyslov (10), with Boleslavsky fourth on 9, Lilienthal fifth on 8½, and Bondarevsky last on 8 — a startling reversal for the man who had tied for fifth in the very event that seeded this one. Botvinnik held a plus score in his personal 'mini-match' against every single rival. The tournament's most quoted game came early: on 26 March, playing Black against Keres, Botvinnik won a Nimzo-Indian in just 22 moves, a brisk demolition still cited as one of his cleanest strategic wins.

The event was a genuine round-robin decided entirely on the board — all six players met four times each, 60 games in total, and Andromeda's archive holds the complete set.

“In order to clarify the situation.”

◇Two months from war, and a book written in exile

Botvinnik had been angling for a world title match against Alekhine since 1938; Soviet authorities had authorised and funded one as early as January 1939, but confirmation dragged and war in Europe kept the match perpetually postponed. On 22 June 1941 — less than two months after the Absolute Championship ended — Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and any hope of playing Alekhine for the crown that year was gone for good.

Evacuated with his family to Perm, Botvinnik took a job with the local power utility and spent his evenings annotating all sixty games of the Absolute Championship, working to keep his analytical edge sharp for the match he still hoped to play. The book, published after the war as Championship Chess, became a classic of tournament literature. Botvinnik never did face Alekhine, who died in 1946 without a rematch; instead Botvinnik became the first postwar World Champion by winning the 1948 title tournament — final proof, delayed seven years by war and tragedy, that the six-way playoff had picked the right man.