9th USSR Championship — Leningrad 1934/35

With Botvinnik not playing, the ninth championship went to two masters from before the revolution: Grigory Levenfish and Ilya Rabinovich shared first on 12/19. The older Leningrad school could still hold its own.

◇A championship without Botvinnik

By the mid-1930s Mikhail Botvinnik was the acknowledged standard-bearer of Soviet chess, fresh from his 1933 title and a hard-fought drawn match with Salo Flohr. He did not play in the ninth championship, and in his absence the field was wide open across a twenty-player round-robin held over the New Year in Leningrad.

The tournament turned into a contest between the established Leningrad masters and the rising younger players, with Fedor Bohatyrchuk and the sharp Muscovite Nikolai Riumin among those pressing at the top.

◇Levenfish and Rabinovich share the crown

At the finish Grigory Levenfish and Ilya Rabinovich stood level on 12/19, and with no play-off they were declared joint champions. Both belonged to the generation that had learned the game before the Revolution and, unlike Alekhine or Bogoljubow, had chosen to stay: Levenfish in particular became a bridge between the old Russian school and the first Soviet-trained talents.

The shared title was Levenfish's first national championship. He would win again outright in 1937 — the peak of a career that produced classic manuals on the openings and, with Vasily Smyslov, a celebrated book on rook endings.