Georgy Borisenko

◈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.

◈Eight finals

The master title arrived in the same year as his first final of the Soviet Championship, and he announced himself immediately: 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 the pattern of his whole over-the-board career in miniature — devastating 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

Through the Leningrad years he worked on opening theory with Semyon Furman — later Anatoly Karpov's trainer, and one of the finest analysts of the age. Together they revived the Breyer System of the Ruy Lopez, the line in which Black withdraws a developed knight all the way back to b8, and for many years in the Soviet Union the variation was not called Breyer's at all but theirs. The opening encyclopaedias 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. David Bronstein, writing in 1973, called him one of the country's greatest theoretical experts, and Douglas Griffin's account of Furman records simply 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 summit was the Fourth World Correspondence Championship, played from 1962 to 1965. He finished second, behind Vladimir Zagorovsky — a man he had beaten over the board in a Soviet semi-final at Gorky a decade before. He also played in 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 giants. 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.