58th USSR Championship — Moscow 1991

In the last championship the Soviet Union would ever hold, the 24-year-old Armenian Artashes Minasian emerged from a 64-player Swiss field to take the title on 8½/11 — level on points with Elmar Magerramov of Baku but placed first on tie-break for the stronger opposition he had met — a surprise result crowned barely six weeks before the union that had staged fifty-eight of these championships ceased to exist.

◇A surprise in an open field

The 58th championship broke sharply with tradition. Instead of the usual elite round robin of eighteen or twenty invited masters, it was an open 11-round Swiss with 64 players, and it produced what has been called perhaps the biggest surprise in the whole history of the series. Two little-known players finished clear at the top on 8½/11: Minasian at +7 −1 =3, and Elmar Magerramov of Baku, unbeaten at +6 −0 =5. With the two level on points, the title went to Minasian on Buchholz (71.5 to 67.0), for the stronger opposition he had faced. Vladimir Epishin was clear third on 7½.

Several of the tournament's better-known names fell well short. Alexei Shirov, among the highest-rated entrants, managed only 6½; the veteran grandmaster Rafael Vaganian scored the same; and the ailing former world champion Mikhail Tal — who would die the following June — could gather just 5 points, finishing far down the table in one of his last competitive appearances. Behind Epishin, a cluster of players including Viktor Bologan, Vadim Ruban, Sergei Rublevsky and Alexey Vyzmanavin shared fifth on 7.

◇The last Soviet champion

The timing gave the result a weight far beyond the crosstable. The championship finished on 13 November 1991; barely six weeks later, on 26 December 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, and no fifty-ninth championship would ever be held. Artashes Minasian thus became the final champion of a competition first won by Alexander Alekhine in 1920 — a title that had passed through Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Korchnoi, Karpov and Kasparov.

The last Soviet title went to the generation about to take over the game. The open field was full of young players who would lead the post-Soviet era, among them Alexei Shirov, Sergei Tiviakov, Sergei Rublevsky, Viktor Bologan and Andrei Kharlov, all playing under the Soviet flag for the last time. Minasian, an Armenian grandmaster, went on to represent an independent Armenia, and he will always be the last champion of the USSR.