13th USSR Championship — Moscow 1944

With the war still on, the Soviet Union revived its national championship after a four-year silence, and Mikhail Botvinnik answered by winning the first championship held since 1940 — 12½/16 in Moscow, two full points clear of the twenty-three-year-old Vasily Smyslov.

◇Chess resumes in wartime Moscow

The thirteenth championship was the first Soviet title event since 1940; the war had shut down top-level play, and the field was assembled from three semi-final tournaments — held in Baku, Moscow and Omsk — plus a handful of direct invitations, among them Botvinnik and Smyslov. It ran in Moscow from 21 May to 17 June 1944, its middle rounds falling across the days of the Normandy landings, and it was as much an act of national revival as a sporting contest.

Botvinnik, whose claim to a match with world champion Alexander Alekhine had been put on hold by the war, set out to make a point. He scored 12½/16 with eleven wins, two points ahead of the field, for his fourth Soviet title. The war years hadn't hurt his form.

◇A field of the future

Second place went to the twenty-three-year-old Vasily Smyslov on 10½, an early sign of the player who would take the world title a little over a decade later, with Isaac Boleslavsky (10) and Salo Flohr (9½) completing the top four.

Botvinnik lost only two games all tournament — one to Alexander Tolush, the other an upset by a twenty-year-old making his championship debut, David Bronstein. Bronstein finished only fifteenth, but his win over the champion was a foretaste of the player who, seven years later, would come within a single point of taking Botvinnik's world crown.