USSR vs Yugoslavia — Sochi 1968
Sochi 1968 was the twelfth instalment of the USSR–Yugoslavia team match, one of a run of friendly annual contests that were anything but friendly on the scoreboard: from 1956 to 1979 the two chess powers met almost every year, and the Soviets won every single time. Twelve board-pairs — seven men, three women, two juniors — played four games apiece, and among the junior pairings a 17-year-old Anatoly Karpov took his place on the Soviet side and won three and a half of his four games.
An annual rivalry, already one-sided
The USSR and Yugoslavia had been staging these team matches since 1956, alternating venues between the two countries, and by the late 1960s the series was a fixture of the Eastern European chess calendar. It was also thoroughly uneven: the Soviet Union won every edition of the Chess Olympiad from 1956 to 1974 and every European Team Championship from 1957 to 1977, and across the whole USSR–Yugoslavia series it never lost a single match. Sochi 1968 followed the pattern exactly — a decisive 30½–17½ Soviet win, broken down as 17–11 on the men's boards, 7½–4½ on the women's boards, and 6–2 on the two junior boards.
Each of the twelve board-pairs played a four-game mini-match rather than a single game, so the final score was built from forty-eight individual games in all — a format that let the two federations test strength in depth rather than settle everything on one result per board.
Karpov's early appearance
Among the junior pairings, Anatoly Karpov — not yet eighteen, three years from his first Soviet title and seven years from the world championship — represented the USSR against Branko Vujakovic and won three and a half of his four games. It was the kind of early proving ground that ran underneath the senior Soviet system: promising juniors were slotted onto national teams well before they were household names, and Sochi 1968 caught Karpov doing exactly that.
One game short
The official section scores account for forty-eight games. Forty-seven survive, and without the missing game they don't add up to the full 30½–17½, so the page gives the official score and marks the games as incomplete.
Result
We have 47 games from this event. The full results are not known, so there is no cross table; the games are listed in their original order.