USSR vs United States — Radio 1945
In the first days of September 1945, ten of the United States' strongest players sat down against ten of the Soviet Union's finest without either team leaving home soil: the Americans at the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York, the Soviets at the Central Club of Art Masters in Moscow, every move relayed by shortwave radio in the Uedemann code. Two games a board later, the USSR had won 15½–4½ — a landslide that, in a chess world still measuring strength by the American Olympiad teams of the 1930s, arrived as a genuine shock.
◈Chess across the Atlantic by radio
The two federations arranged a ten-board team match to be played not in the same room but over the airwaves: each move was encoded (Uedemann code), radioed across the Atlantic, and decoded on the other side — a process that took an average of five minutes per move. The Americans fielded Arnold Denker, Samuel Reshevsky, Reuben Fine, Israel Horowitz, Isaac Kashdan, Herman Steiner, Albert Pinkus, Herbert Seidman, Abraham Kupchik and Anthony Santasiere. The Soviets sent Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Isaak Boleslavsky, Salo Flohr, Alexander Kotov, Igor Bondarevsky, Andor Lilienthal, Viacheslav Ragozin, Vladimir Makogonov and David Bronstein — every leading Soviet master except Paul Keres.
Each pair played twice, once with each color, for twenty games in all. It was the first serious test of Soviet chess strength against the country whose teams had won four straight Chess Olympiads from 1931 to 1937 — Olympiads the USSR, not yet a FIDE member, had not entered.
◈A rout across almost every board
The Soviets won seven of the ten boards outright and drew two more; only Herman Steiner, who beat Igor Bondarevsky 1½–½, won a board for the United States. Botvinnik crushed Denker 2–0 on top board, Smyslov did the same to Reshevsky, and Kotov, Ragozin and Bronstein all won their boards 2–0 against Kashdan, Seidman and Santasiere respectively. Boleslavsky took 1½–½ from Fine and Makogonov the same from Kupchik; only Flohr–Horowitz (1–1) and Lilienthal–Pinkus (1–1) were shared.
The margin astonished contemporaries. Reuben Fine, one of America's own grandmasters, conceded afterward that "the Russians play chess considerably better than we," and the United States' ambassador in Moscow admitted "it was quite true that we did not expect such a large score."
◈A changing of the guard
The radio match is remembered as the moment the West first saw the results of the Soviet chess program Nikolai Krylenko had built through the 1930s, decades before Soviet players had a chance to prove it in Olympiad play. From 1945 the USSR would go on to dominate international chess for most of the rest of the twentieth century, and this quiet, wartime-technology match between two hotel ballrooms is where historians usually date the start of that era.
◈Final Standings
Official final match score. Our source preserves 20 of the games played; the games list carries everything we hold, in board and round order.
| # | Team | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | USSR | 8 |
| 2 | United States | 2 |
“The Russians play chess considerably better than we.”
“It was quite true that we did not expect such a large score.”