USSR First League — Baku 1977

Eighteen players fought a full round-robin in Baku for six places in the 45th USSR Championship final, and Gennadi Kuzmin came out on top, unbeaten on 11½ from 17. It was the strongest possible proving ground: Kuzmin's six qualifiers went on to Leningrad, where Boris Gulko — who had finished only third here — beat them all to a share of the national title.

◇Kuzmin's clean sweep

Gennadi Kuzmin went through the field without a loss, six wins and eleven draws for 11½/17, half a point clear of Vladimir Tukmakov (11). Boris Gulko and Karen Grigorian shared third on 10½, with Alexander Kochyev and Vladimir Bagirov rounding out the six qualifying places on 9½. The archive here holds the full 153-game round robin — every pairing among the eighteen players survives.

The rest of the field reads like a snapshot of Soviet depth in the late 1970s: Alexander Beliavsky, Rafael Vaganian, and Yuri Razuvaev tied for eighth on 8, while a fading Mark Taimanov, then in his fifties, finished last on 6 without a win.

◇Outplayed by the man who missed first

The six who advanced from Baku had a rough time of it in Leningrad that December. Kuzmin, the Baku winner, could only manage joint eighth on 7½; Tukmakov slipped to joint fourteenth on 6½; Grigorian fell further still, sharing fifteenth on 5½. Bagirov was the best of the six, tying for fifth on 8, with Kochyev joint twelfth on 6½.

It was Gulko — who had trailed both Kuzmin and Tukmakov here in Baku — who made the difference in the final, going through it undefeated to share the USSR title with Josif Dorfman after a drawn Moscow play-off. The full story of that final is told separately; Baku was simply the sternest of gatekeepers, and even its own winner could not repeat the feat where it mattered most.