Ludek Pachman

◈A village champion at Alekhine's table

Pachman was born on 11 May 1924 in Bělá pod Bezdězem, north of Prague. His brother Vladimír, six years older, became one of the outstanding figures of Czech chess composition and an international master in that discipline; the two grew up over the same board. Luděk's first title, in 1940, was the championship of the nearby village of Čistá, population nine hundred. The same year brought his first spell in custody — he was jailed after a student demonstration under the German occupation, and long afterwards he wrote plainly that he had been arrested by the Gestapo as a teenager.

The break came in April 1943, when he was taken into a strong international tournament in Prague as a late replacement. Alexander Alekhine won the event and Paul Keres finished second; the substitute from the village club beat the established Czech masters Opočenský and Foltys and held his own in a field of nineteen. Alekhine praised him in the Frankfurter Zeitung, and from the fifth round on invited him up to his hotel suite after each game to analyse. “I don't have to tell you how a beginner from a village chess club felt at that time,” Pachman wrote. He became a master of the Czech federation in 1944 and champion of Czechoslovakia in 1946, at twenty-two.

◈Seven titles and half a point

The national championship came to him seven times across twenty years — 1946, 1953, 1957, 1959, 1961, 1963 and 1966. He was made an International Master in 1950 and a Grandmaster in 1954. In December 1947 he beat Mikhail Botvinnik at the Chigorin Memorial in Moscow, months before Botvinnik became world champion, though Botvinnik won the tournament. A shared second place at the Hilversum zonal of 1947 carried him into the first Interzonal, and he played six of them, from Saltsjöbaden 1948 to Manila 1976. The closest he came to the Candidates was Portorož 1958: seventh place with 11½ from 20, half a point short.

His best year was 1959. After taking the Czechoslovak title he went to South America and won at Mar del Plata (shared with Miguel Najdorf), Santiago de Chile (shared with Borislav Ivkov) and Lima (with Ivkov again). On that tour he twice beat a sixteen-year-old Bobby Fischer; across their careers the score stayed level at +2 −2 =4, a balance very few players kept. Retrospective historical ratings place him around fourteenth in the world at the end of that year. He won fifteen international tournaments in all, but the result he rated highest was Havana 1963, where he finished level with Mikhail Tal and Efim Geller behind Viktor Korchnoi — and beat Korchnoi in their individual game.

He played eight consecutive Olympiads for Czechoslovakia between 1952 and 1966, usually on first board, and a ninth for West Germany at Haifa in 1976: 147 games, +53 −21 =73. From 1959 to 1967 he was chess editor of the daily Československý sport.

◈Eighty books

Pachman published around eighty books in five languages, and for a long stretch of the 1950s his multi-volume Theory of Modern Chess made him the world's leading authority on the openings. The book he considered his best was Modern Chess Strategy (1959), later reworked in English as the two volumes of Complete Chess Strategy — a plain, unmystical account of pawn structure, the centre, piece activity and the making of a plan, written for players who wanted reasons rather than rules. Decisive Games in Chess History and Chess Endings for the Practical Player followed the same instinct.

The writing was compulsive. Vlastimil Hort, sharing lodgings with him in Hamburg, remembered the typewriter going through the night; asked about it, Pachman answered, “I cannot help it, I am addicted to writing.” Hort also thought the same trait shaped his play: “What had already struck me as a young chess apprentice was his irrepressible urge to find the ‘only right’ move — at any cost.”

◈The Communist who changed his mind

He came to Communism young, active by his own account in the wartime underground as a Marxist, and after 1945 he held Party office. Hort remembered him chairing cadre commissions — the bodies that decided which citizens were allowed to travel abroad — and recalled a Prague barber who, decades later, refused to serve him on learning that he knew Pachman: “This communist, who at that time was still a faithful follower of the system, stole us the 15 best years of our life!” In 1952 Pachman criticised Stalinism openly, gave up his political posts and went back to chess.

In 1967 he wrote an open letter to the Writers' Congress in Prague taking Israel's side during the Six-Day War, against the whole line of the Soviet bloc. That September he was dispatched to Puerto Rico as a chess instructor; he came home in May 1968, into the Prague Spring. When Warsaw Pact troops crossed the border on 21 August 1968 he became one of the most visible public opponents of the occupation, and at the Lugano Olympiad that autumn he pressed FIDE to expel the Soviet Union and its allies from the federation.

◈Twenty-first of August, one in the morning

“On the anniversary of the invasion, on 21 August 1969 at one in the morning, I was arrested,” he later wrote. “In the torture cellar I was almost killed. On Christmas Eve 1969 the doctors in the infirmary telephoned my wife to say that I might not survive the night.” He survived. He was held for a year and a half, then released and re-arrested through a cycle of investigations that came to roughly two years in custody altogether. He smuggled a small pocket set into prison and followed Fischer's games against Spassky in 1972 from the newspaper reports he could get hold of.

The trial, when it finally came in 1972, produced a two-year sentence — already served — and expatriation. FIDE lobbied on his behalf for an exit permit, and Pachman wrote that the Politburo settled the question by five votes to four. He and his wife Eugenie, whom he had married in September 1946, reached Munich on 28 November 1972. He came out of prison a practising Catholic; the account of that turn is the book Herder published in 1974 as Gott läßt sich nicht verbannen — God cannot be banished — and the record of the years themselves is Checkmate in Prague, which Faber brought out in English in 1975.

◈The second career

In West Germany he joined Solinger SG 1868, but Soviet players boycotted tournaments he entered, and in 1974 his own club asked him to stand down from the international event in Solingen. Hartmut Röseler, the deputy mayor of Berlin-Charlottenburg, brought him to the capital instead and to SC Kreuzberg, where he played eighteen Bundesliga matches. He took German citizenship on 21 October 1975 and from then on spelled his name Pachmann. He finished second behind Walter Browne at the International German Championship in Mannheim in 1975, played the Manila Interzonal and the Haifa Olympiad in 1976, won the individual prize on board five for West Germany at the 1977 European Team Championship, and in 1978, at fifty-four, took the West German Championship at Bad Neuenahr. In 1979 he beat the program Chess 4.7 in one of the early public encounters between a grandmaster and a computer.

The politics did not stop. He edited Das Schach-Archiv, wrote regularly for Die Welt, and his fluency made him a fixture on German political television. He founded and chaired the Free Society for the Promotion of Friendship with the Peoples of Czechoslovakia, which among other things smuggled badly needed medicines to signatories of Charter 77. He campaigned for Franz Josef Strauß and Hans Filbinger and worked inside CDU and CSU circles. At a tournament in Berlin in 1982 he offered Hort a draw so that he could get to a political meeting on time.