Alexander Tolush attacked with everything he had. “Forward, Kazimirych!” he would mutter at the board, urging himself on by his own patronymic, and his games were full of sacrifices and counter-sacrifices that he won and lost in style because, as a friend said, he fought to the last pawn. He never became world champion. But he took two of the most gifted players of the century under his wing, passed on his fearless, independent style, and helped Boris Spassky all the way to the world title. He influenced chess history twice: through his own bold, reckless play, and through the champion he helped train.
Forward, Kazimirych
Alexander Kazimirovich Tolush was born in Saint Petersburg in 1910 and was, in the deepest sense, a Leningrad man — he was born, came of age, and died within the same city across its three names. He rose through the chess life of the city in the 1930s and 1940s, winning the strong Leningrad Championship four times: shared first in 1937, outright in 1938 and 1946, and shared again in 1947.
His chess had a single, unmistakable signature: attack. Tolush played for the initiative the way other men breathe, hunting for sacrifices and complications, willing to burn his own position to the ground for the sake of a flaming kingside assault. He even talked himself into the charge, famously rallying himself at the board with the cry “Forward, Kazimirych!” — addressing himself by his own patronymic, as though the attacker and the man were two soldiers in the same regiment.
The master of the surprise
Tolush was, by the testimony of those who faced him, one of the most dangerous and unpredictable opponents of his generation. “Playing against Tolush was very interesting, but also difficult,” the master Mikhail Yudovich recalled. “He was a chess master who could create surprises that changed the character of the fight sharply.” He had a gift for finding hidden traps and resources in difficult positions, and a temperament that refused to settle for the safe road.
Mikhail Botvinnik, the great theorist of Soviet chess, summed Tolush up in a sentence and tied him to his most famous pupil. “Spassky prefers to play in a style that used to be employed by Alexander Tolush,” Botvinnik said. “Tolush had weak technique, but an amazing, self-sufficient style.”
“Remember, even if you play against someone who doesn't know chess at all, never be sure of a hundred-per-cent win, because anything is possible. ... No player is ever sure of a hundred-per-cent win.”
“Dracula has been caught.”
“You know, Borya, today I lost to a genius”
“Spassky prefers to play in a style that used to be employed by Alexander Tolush. Tolush had weak technique, but an amazing, self-sufficient style.”
“Playing against Tolush was very interesting, but also difficult. He was a chess master who could create surprises that changed the character of the fight sharply.”
“Tolush was a reckless, temperamental gambler, a gambler in the best sense of this word.”
Bucharest, 1953
Tolush's best result as a player came at Bucharest in 1953. In a field full of current and future Soviet stars, he finished clear first with 14 out of 19, ten wins, one loss and eight draws, losing only to Vasily Smyslov and finishing a full point ahead of Tigran Petrosian, Isaac Boleslavsky, the young Boris Spassky and László Szabó. The win earned him the Grandmaster title that same year.
It was the best result of a career full of near misses at the top. His best Soviet Championship finish was second place in 1950, scoring +8 −3 =6 behind Paul Keres, and he placed fourth in both 1952 and 1957, tying with the rising Spassky in 1957. He never played in a Chess Olympiad, but represented the USSR in European team competition, where he was the attacking specialist trusted to make something happen on his board.
The maker of champions
If Tolush's own play never carried him to the world title, his teaching carried others. From 1947 he worked as a trainer and second to Paul Keres through the brutal Candidates cycles of the early 1950s, when Keres was perennially the strongest player never to play a title match. Then, in 1951–52, came the partnership that would define his legacy.
He took over the training of the teenage Boris Spassky from the patient pedagogue Vladimir Zak, and the match of temperaments was perfect: where Spassky already loved the attack, Tolush set it on fire. They had first met in 1947 at the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers, when young Boris — entrusted with relaying the moves of a telegraph match — was also sent to the buffet to buy Tolush more cigarettes. The bond that grew from it lasted the better part of a decade. Tolush's fearless, sacrificial chess became the foundation of Spassky's, and the seed he planted bore its ultimate fruit in 1969, when Spassky won the crown.
Garry Kasparov records another prospective pupil in My Great Predecessors, Part V (2006), pp. 9–10: towards the end of the 1940s Tolush offered to help the young Viktor Korchnoi become a master. Korchnoi declined, confident he could achieve the title himself. He did so in 1951, but later regretted the refusal after seeing Tolush’s work with Spassky.
The man at the board
Away from his own games, Tolush gave his energy to the wider chess world as a journalist and radio commentator, work that suited his vivid, combative voice. He was, by all accounts, a character — a chain-smoker who, the story goes, would stuff his cigarettes with cotton wool, and a man who dispensed his wisdom in unforgettable, slightly conspiratorial bursts.
Spassky carried one such lesson all his life. “Remember,” Tolush warned him, “even if you play against someone who doesn't know chess at all, never be sure of a hundred-per-cent win, because anything is possible. What if you suddenly have a heart attack, or something? No player is ever sure of a hundred-per-cent win.” It was the creed of a man who had seen too many won positions slip away and lost ones miraculously saved — the wary humility of a lifelong gambler with the pieces.
In My Great Predecessors, Part III (2004), pp. 299–300, Kasparov records Tolush’s habit of telling friends after a win, “Dracula has been caught.” Spassky remembered him as a spirited poker player who understood the psychology of a struggle as well as its combinations. Kasparov also recalls analysing his 1981 Tilburg game with Larsen: Spassky repeatedly urged a g-pawn advance, saying, “Here Tolush would have played g4!” Larsen recognized the reference and all three laughed.
Legacy
Tolush died in Leningrad on March 3, 1969, not yet fifty-nine, in the city where he had spent almost his whole life. His widow Valentina (the couple had no children of their own and had long thought of the young Spassky as a son) put together a memorial collection of ninety-two of his games. He is remembered as one of the great attacking players of Soviet chess, a master who could change the character of a game with one surprising move, and his name survives in the Tolush–Geller Gambit of the Slav. His biggest influence, though, was on other players: Paul Keres, whom he seconded through the hardest years of the Candidates, and above all Boris Spassky, the tenth World Champion, whose fearless attacking style owed a great deal to Tolush.
Books
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