Peter Romanovsky

◇A Tver family and a 1909 upset

Romanovsky was born on 17 July 1892 (29 July New Style). Most reference works give Saint Petersburg as his birthplace, but the church certificate published by the historian Alexander Kentler shows that he was baptized as Peter on 25 August in the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Tver. Kentler thinks he was most likely born in the village of Stary Pogost in Tver district, where his father, Arseny Yakovlevich Romanovsky, had served as a priest before studying law in Saint Petersburg; Peter was the seventh of eight sons. When he entered the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute in 1911, Romanovsky himself gave Tver as his place of birth.

Chess ran in the family. His older brother Yevgeny was a second-category player and Alexander a first-category one. In 1908 Peter replaced the ill Alexander in a tournament at the St Petersburg Chess Club and, playing with a clock for the first time, beat the master Freiman. At the 1909 All-Russian Amateur Tournament, won by Alekhine, he tied for 10th and 11th places, and Kotov and Yudovich write that his victory over Alekhine "attracted general attention". Emanuel Lasker annotated his win over Apollon Viakhirev from the same event in the tournament book.

In 1913 Romanovsky became the student champion of Saint Petersburg, which earned him a place at the German Chess Federation congress in Mannheim in the summer of 1914.

◇Mannheim and internment

At Mannheim he played in the Hauptturnier B, one of the subsidiary events, and was tied for second to fourth places when the outbreak of the First World War stopped play on 1 August. His account of Alekhine's arrival at Mannheim, two hours before the first round and openly planning a title match with Capablanca, is quoted in Kasparov's My Great Predecessors.

Romanovsky was one of eleven Russian players interned by Germany after the tournament. The internees played their own tournaments: he tied for fourth and fifth at Baden-Baden in 1914, took third at Triberg 1914/15 and tied for fifth and sixth at Triberg 1915. In Petrograd, Alekhine gave charity simultaneous exhibitions for Romanovsky and the colleagues still held at Triberg, including one at the Polytechnic Institute on 8 December 1914. Romanovsky was released in the spring of 1915, and on 1 April he applied to the Institute to be reinstated as a student, citing his captivity as the reason for his absence.

◇Champion of a new country

At the All-Russian Olympiad in Moscow in October 1920, the first Soviet championship, Romanovsky scored 11 out of 15 and finished second, a point behind Alekhine, and he was promoted to master. In 1921 he founded the first Soviet chess periodical, the bulletin of the Petrograd commune's chess circle. In July 1923 he won the second USSR Championship in Petrograd, and in 1924 he was second to Efim Bogoljubov in the third.

In 1925 he tied for first in a Leningrad tournament of ten with Bogoljubov and nine Leningrad players, and shared first in the Leningrad Championship with Grigory Levenfish, Alexander Ilyin-Zhenevsky and Ilya Rabinovich. At the Moscow international tournament of November and December 1925 he scored 11½ out of 20 and tied for seventh with Richard Réti, ahead of Akiba Rubinstein and Rudolf Spielmann. He had been invited to Baden-Baden the same year, but Ilya Rabinovich went in his place, and Romanovsky never played abroad in the Soviet period.

In 1927 he won the Leningrad tournament of the six strongest local players, drawing only two of ten games and finishing ahead of the young Mikhail Botvinnik. That autumn, at the fifth USSR Championship in the Hall of Columns in Moscow, he and Bohatyrchuk tied with 14½ out of 20 and were declared co-champions because a playoff could not be scheduled.

◇Leningrad master, teacher and author

From 1918 to 1939 Romanovsky was one of the leaders of the Leningrad chess section, and he combined tournament play and teaching with work as a consultant in Leningrad banks. In 1928 he and Levenfish published a book on the Alekhine–Capablanca world championship match, and in 1929 came Mittelspiel, his guide to combination and planning in the middlegame, followed by books on openings, chess ideas in practice, chess creativity and teaching method. In June 1934 he was among the first Soviet athletes named Honored Master of Sport, the first chess player to receive the title.

He divided first place with Botvinnik in a 1933 tournament of Leningrad masters. At Leningrad 1934, with Max Euwe and Hans Kmoch, he tied for second with Nikolai Riumin, half a point behind Botvinnik, and at the Moscow international tournament of 1935 he shared eighth to tenth places, beating the Women's World Champion Vera Menchik.

His pupils included Vladimir Alatortsev, Georgy Lisitsin, Grigory Ravinsky, Vitaly Chekhover and Leonid Savitsky, and he worked with the women players Lyudmila Rudenko, Kira Zvorykina and Valentina Borisenko and with the future trainer Vladimir Zak. His biographer Sergei Tkachenko writes that even Botvinnik matured and grew stronger with his help. In 1939 the strain of work brought on a heart attack.

◇The siege and the Moscow years

The siege of Leningrad destroyed his family. Between 6 and 26 January 1942 his companion Agnessa Garmsen and his four daughters, Svetlana, Anya, Rogneda and Kira, aged 6 to 18, died, and his brother Yevgeny, who lived in the same apartment, died that May. In a notebook entry of 31 January Romanovsky wrote that work was his only way to go on living and that he was beginning a new book, Selected Games. The revised middlegame manuscript he had just finished was lost.

In March 1942 he was evacuated, taken off the train at Aleksandrov and hospitalized, and then went to his brother Alexander in Ivanovo, where he played in the city championship. In 1943 he moved to Moscow. Near the end of the war he married again, and his son Viktor was born in February 1945. From 1947 to 1957 he taught chess at Moscow State University, and Selected Games appeared in 1954.

FIDE awarded him the International Master title in 1950 and the International Arbiter title in 1951. He was made an Honored Coach of the USSR in 1956, received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1957 and served on the presidium of the USSR Chess Federation. In January and February 1960 he was chief arbiter of the 27th USSR Championship in Leningrad. He rewrote his lost middlegame book as Mittelspiel: Plan (1960), followed by Mittelspiel: Combination (1963). He died in Moscow on 1 March 1964.