Georgy Borisenko reached eight finals of the Soviet Championship and won none of them; his best placing was around twelfth. But in those events he beat Smyslov, Spassky, Geller, Bronstein and Tal, and in Leningrad he and Semyon Furman worked out opening systems that Soviet masters played for decades. His biggest success came by post. In the Fourth World Correspondence Championship he finished second in the world, and he twice won the Soviet correspondence title, in a form of chess where thinking time is measured in weeks rather than minutes.
Chuguev, Leningrad, and the demonstration board
He was born on 25 May 1922 in Chuhuiv, a small town in the Kharkov governorate of Ukraine, and the family moved to Leningrad while he was still a child. He learned the moves in 1931 from a worker at a Pioneer camp who, by his own account, then had nothing further to do with his development. There was no training group, no master taking him in hand. “I never studied in any coach's group,” he said later. “The path was completely independent.”
The education came from the front of a hall instead of a classroom. As a boy in the late 1930s he worked the demonstration boards at Leningrad's big tournaments — the 1936 city championship, a tournament of young masters, the 1937 event in which Reuben Fine played — posting other men's moves on the wall for audiences that filled the room. He had watched the Flohr–Botvinnik match of 1933 at the Railwaymen's Palace of Culture the same way. It was, he insisted, exactly the right apprenticeship: while his hands moved the pieces on the board, his mind was running ahead of the players, and then checking itself against them.
Signaller, Third Shock Army
The war took the years that would have been his chess apprenticeship. He served as a signalman and was wounded twice. In his own telling, during a mortar barrage he went out to repair a broken line, and on the way back a large splinter caught him in the leg; a long spell in hospital followed, then duty in the rear, and only after that a return to the front with the Third Shock Army. A second, serious wound in Germany in March 1945 kept him out of the assault on Berlin, which his army carried out without him. He finished the war and then served on in Poland.
He came back to competitive chess in his mid-twenties, with no title and no reputation, and won the championship of the Lokomotiv sports society. In 1950 he was made a Master of Sport of the USSR.
“I never studied in any coach's training group. The path was completely independent.”
“Putting a move up on the demonstration board, I would mentally try to play the game on, guessing the moves, and then compare my own variations with the moves of outstanding chess players.”
“The master Georgy Borisenko is one of our greatest theoretical experts.”
“For many years, the Breyer System was known in the Soviet Union by the name of Furman and his fellow Leningrad master, Georgi Borisenko.”
“an elder statesman of Soviet theoreticians, whom we all, from Karpov downwards, regarded with particular respect.”
Eight finals
He became a master the same year he reached his first Soviet Championship final, and he made an immediate impression: in Moscow in November 1950 he beat Vasily Smyslov, who had finished third in the world championship match-tournament two years earlier, and two days later beat Efim Geller as well. He finished 15th–16th. It was his whole over-the-board career in miniature: dangerous in individual games, unremarkable in the final table.
Eight times between 1950 and 1967 he fought his way through the semi-finals into the final of what was then the strongest national championship in the world, and eight times he finished in the lower half of it; his best placings, in 1954 and in 1964–65, were around twelfth. What the crosstables do not show is the damage he did getting there and while he was there. Boris Spassky beaten in the 1955 final; David Bronstein in the 1961 final and Zonal; Mikhail Tal in the Riga semi-final of 1955; Viktor Korchnoi in the Tula semi-final of 1950; Geller again, and Polugaevsky, Tolush, Furman, Nezhmetdinov.
Away from the Soviet final he took third place in the Leningrad championship of 1953 and second in the RSFSR championship of 1961, and in 1953 he won the USSR team championship with the Leningrad side.
The Borisenko–Furman variations
In the Leningrad years he worked on opening theory with Semyon Furman, later Anatoly Karpov's trainer and one of the finest analysts of the time. Together they revived the Breyer System of the Ruy Lopez, the line in which Black retreats a developed knight all the way back to b8, and for many years in the Soviet Union the variation was named after them, not Breyer. The opening encyclopedias still record it: C95 is the Ruy Lopez, Closed, Breyer, Borisenko Variation, and a line of the Chigorin Variation, 9...Na5 10.Bc2 c5 11.d4 Nc6, carries his name too.
The partnership left its mark elsewhere as well. D21, the sharp 4.e4 against the Alekhine System of the Queen's Gambit Accepted, is the Borisenko–Furman Variation, and their analytical work ran through the Queen's Gambit, the Old Indian, the Nimzowitsch Defence and the Sicilian. This was never a hobby beside the playing; it was arguably the main thing. In 200 Open Games (1974), David Bronstein described him as one of the greatest theoretical experts, an inventor who searched for fresh variations night and day and brought his home preparation to the board. Douglas Griffin's account of Furman records that the Breyer System “was known in the Soviet Union by the name of Furman and his fellow Leningrad master, Georgi Borisenko.”
A world championship played by post
Correspondence chess rewarded precisely what he had: patience, stamina, and an appetite for analysis measured in weeks. He won the USSR Correspondence Championship twice — the 1955–57 event, shared with Pyotr Dubinin, and the 1960–62 event, shared with Yakov Estrin — and was second in the championship that finished in 1965. The ICCF made him an International Master in 1961 and a Grandmaster in 1965.
His best result was the Fourth World Correspondence Championship, played from 1962 to 1965. He finished second, behind Vladimir Zagorovsky, a player he had beaten over the board in a Soviet semifinal at Gorky ten years earlier. He also played for the Soviet teams that won the third and fourth Correspondence Olympiads, in 1958–61 and 1961–64. Over the board he was a very good master among much stronger players. By post he came within one place of the world title.
Two champions, and a second life in Tashkent
His wife was Valentina Mikhailovna Borisenko, née Belova (1920–1993), born in Cherepovets and one of the leading women players of the Soviet era: champion of the USSR five times between 1945 and the early 1960s, seven-time women's champion of Leningrad between 1940 and 1956, third–fourth in the Women's World Championship of 1949–50, and an honorary Woman Grandmaster from 1977. He was her trainer as well as her husband; they had a son who also played. She died in St Petersburg in 1993.
In 1965 Borisenko was offered work preparing players, chose Tashkent from among the offers, and lived there for the remaining forty-seven years of his life. He won the championship of the Uzbek SSR in 1966, 1968 and 1971 and kept beating the next generation well into his fifties — Vladimir Tukmakov in 1971, Rafael Vaganian in 1972. He was made an Honoured Master of Sport of the USSR and an Honoured Trainer of both Georgia and the USSR.
The coaching became the second half of the life. He worked with the women's world champion Nona Gaprindashvili, and at various times with Furman, Korchnoi, Mark Taimanov and Lev Polugaevsky; his first serious engagement with a world-class player was the 1956 Alekhine Memorial, where he prepared Taimanov, who finished third without losing a game. In Uzbekistan he brought Anton Filippov and Timur Gareyev through to the grandmaster title and trained a long line of local masters. In August 2003 Uzbekistan awarded him the Shohrat medal for his work with the country's young players.
His influence extended to Karpov's preparations for the 1981 match with Korchnoi. In Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part V, Igor Zaitsev recalled Borisenko visiting one training session before the match and being treated with particular respect by everyone, including Karpov.
Legacy
Borisenko died in Tashkent on December 3, 2012, aged ninety, forty-seven years after he moved there and sixty-seven after he came out of the war with two wounds and no chess career to speak of. FIDE put him in its Hall of Fame after his death, and the city where he grew up, Leningrad, now St Petersburg, holds a rapid tournament in his memory. His name is also still in the opening books, where C95 is the Breyer, Borisenko Variation and D21 carries the names of the two Leningrad masters who worked it out. He never won a Soviet Championship and never held a playing title above Soviet master; he quietly made himself, by post, the second-best correspondence player in the world, and then spent forty-seven years teaching others how to do it.
Books
No authored or contributed books are documented in the available sources.