Viacheslav Ragozin

◇A bakery, then a board

Ragozin was born in St Petersburg in October 1908 and grew up as the city became Petrograd and then Leningrad. After school he worked for a time in a bakery before entering college; he trained as a civil engineer, and kept that profession alongside chess for most of his life. His chess came out of the sprawling amateur network of the Soviet trade unions rather than any pre-revolutionary salon. In 1926 he played first board for the food workers' union against Alexander Ilyin-Genevsky, and in 1927 he was sent to Berlin for the international workers' chess congress, where he won the side tournament with 8½/9.

The breakthrough came at the turn of the decade. A qualifying match against Ilyin-Genevsky — by then one of the most respected figures in Soviet chess, and a Bolshevik of long standing — went to Ragozin with six wins against four losses, and in 1930 he was awarded the title of Soviet master. He was twenty-one, and he belonged to the first generation of masters that the post-revolutionary chess movement had raised from the beginning.

◇The best years

He made his debut in a Soviet Championship final at Leningrad in 1934/35 and shared fifth place — enough to earn him a seat at the second Moscow International a few months later. In a field holding Botvinnik, Flohr, Lasker, Capablanca and Spielmann he scored 10/19, beating Spielmann, Andor Lilienthal, Gideon Ståhlberg and Vasja Pirc. The Lilienthal game received the tournament's shared fourth–fifth best-game prize, as the notes in Ragozin's Selected Games (1964) record. Ragozin gave up the exchange twice over and finished with two connected passed pawns crawling down to the second rank while White's rooks watched. Capablanca praised the calculation behind the win, as the Russian Chess Federation's profile recounts.

The following year he won the Leningrad championship and was one of five Soviet players invited to the third Moscow International, a ten-player double-round event won by Capablanca. Ragozin finished fifth with 8½/18. He beat Salo Flohr, and he beat Emanuel Lasker — sixty-seven years old and in the last year of his tournament career. Against Capablanca he came within reach of a third scalp; the ex-champion scrambled out by perpetual check at the end of a frantic game.

In 1937 he shared second place in the tenth Soviet Championship at Tbilisi with Alexander Konstantinopolsky, behind Grigory Levenfish, and was sent to Semmering–Baden to represent the USSR abroad — a rare honour then, when only Ilya Rabinovich and Botvinnik had been given it before him. He shared sixth–seventh in a double-round field of eight, but won his personal duel with Samuel Reshevsky. Two years later, at the Leningrad–Moscow training tournament, he shared third behind Flohr and Reshevsky and ahead of Paul Keres. His engineering work and military service also took time away from tournaments. In the introduction to Ragozin's Selected Games, Lev Abramov identifies 1946–47 as the most significant period of his competitive career, culminating in second place at the Chigorin Memorial.

◇The defence that carries his name

The system that made his name permanent — 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 Bb4 — he worked out in the early 1930s and first played in 1934. Black develops at speed and is willing to hand over the bishop pair, and even the centre, in exchange for piece pressure on the light squares and the freeing advance ...e5. Douglas Griffin has noted that it carries something of the creative legacy of the Chigorin Defence. Isaac Lipnitsky gave it a long theoretical chapter in Questions of Modern Chess Theory in 1956, tracing the key games in its development.

In his notes to Tipary–Ragozin, Moscow–Budapest 1949, collected in Ragozin's Selected Games, he explained why he had investigated the system. Alekhine had criticized ...Bb4 categorically in the New York 1924 tournament book. That verdict prompted Ragozin to analyze the whole defense; later practice convinced him that it was reliable.

Ragozin's own verdict, written into the tournament book of the eleventh Soviet Championship in 1939, was typically modest: the defense's main virtue was its novelty, and perhaps it might one day be seen more often. It is now a main line at the very top of the game. He left ideas in the Spanish, the Sicilian, the Dutch, the Slav, the Grünfeld and the Two Knights as well, but the Ragozin is the one that stuck to him.

◇Botvinnik's laboratory

Botvinnik noticed him early and kept him close for the rest of his life. Ragozin's chess was experimental and risky — he gave up pawns for the initiative almost on principle — and that was exactly the stress test Botvinnik needed while he assembled the solid, reliable opening repertoire he intended to take into world championship play. They played many training matches in private, and the games stayed confidential at first. Some were published later: Botvinnik included his loss at Zacherene in 1936 in the memoir he contributed to Ragozin's Selected Games. Historians have generally counted Ragozin's contribution as a real factor in Botvinnik's success. The Russian Chess Federation's profile records Botvinnik's praise for his intuition and combinational vision.

Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part II gives two examples of this work. Botvinnik tested a Meran line against Ragozin in April 1939 and used the preparation against Euwe in the 1948 world-title tournament. At Bolshevo in 1947 they also tested a defense to the King's Gambit in a secret game before that tournament. The practice could precede its public use by years.

It was not a sentimental arrangement. A formal match in 1940 went to Botvinnik 8½–3½, with Ragozin failing to win a single game. But he was one of very few people ever admitted to the sixth World Champion's confidence, and he was there as trainer and second at the 1948 match-tournament that made Botvinnik champion and again for the 1951 defence against Bronstein; in 1955 he was at the Gothenburg Interzonal in the same role.

The preparation could be eccentric. Getting ready for the 1944 Soviet Championship, the two of them played their games with the radio turned up to full volume so that Botvinnik would be proof against the noise of a packed hall. Botvinnik won the championship. Ragozin finished in the bottom half of the field and blamed his losses on how quiet the playing room was. In Andrew Soltis's Mikhail Botvinnik: The Life and Games of a World Chess Champion, Yuri Averbakh recalls that Botvinnik also had Ragozin smoke toward his face during practice, to prepare him for opponents who smoked at the board.

Soltis also retells Botvinnik's recollection of a visit to the barber before the 1945 Soviet Championship. An inexperienced barber made a mess of Botvinnik's hair, and Ragozin took his friend's patience as a good omen: “You endured this so calmly that you are already guaranteed first place.” Botvinnik won the tournament.

◇War, Helsinki, and the highest titles

The war caught him mid-tournament: the semi-final of the thirteenth Soviet Championship at Rostov-on-Don was broken off when the fighting began in 1941. Botvinnik's memoir in Ragozin's Selected Games records that he endured the siege of Leningrad while serving in the Soviet Army. He later played in the Urals, winning the masters' tournament at Sverdlovsk in 1942 with 9/10 and no losses. In 1945 he took the Leningrad championship with 17/22, and on board eight of the USSR–USA radio match he beat Herbert Seidman twice.

1946 was his year. He won the international tournament at Helsinki outright with 7½/9, then beat Igor Bondarevsky 8–4 in a match and was awarded the title of Soviet grandmaster for it. In November–December 1947 came his greatest achievement over the board: second place at the Chigorin Memorial in Moscow with 10½/15, half a point behind Botvinnik and ahead of Smyslov, Boleslavsky, Keres, Kotov and Gligorić. In 1950 he was among the inaugural holders of FIDE's International Grandmaster title, and in 1951 he added International Arbiter to it.

In Mezhdunarodny shakhmatny turnir pamyati M. I. Chigorina (1950), Pyotr Romanovsky describes the risk behind Ragozin's result at the 1947 memorial. Against Kazimierz Plater, Ragozin refused to settle for a draw and took serious risks, stood close to defeat, and eventually won. Romanovsky contrasted this with Boleslavsky's cautious draw against the same opponent.

Ragozin's own notes to his game with Gligorić in the same book explain a psychological opening choice. He chose an old line of the Two Knights Defense that obliged Black to sacrifice a pawn and justify the attack without a forced sequence. In Ragozin's assessment, Gligorić disliked unclear sacrifices; that made the position a useful choice against him.

◇An editor's desk, and a world title by post

Lev Abramov's introduction to Ragozin's Selected Games dates his work as an editor of Shakhmaty v SSSR to 1947 and says that he edited Shakhmatny Byulleten from its founding. Abramov remembers an editor who kept thinking about how to make the journal more interesting and useful rather than letting routine work consume all his time.

He was a delegate to the 1947 FIDE Congress that decided the shape of the World Championship after Alekhine died holding the title, he sat on the presidium of the Soviet chess federation, and he served as a vice-president of FIDE from 1950 to 1961. In 1957 he was given the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.

He also wrote a book on the 1959 Candidates tournament with Svetozar Gligorić. Kasparov's bibliography lists their Turnir pretendentov, published in Belgrade in 1960. His annotations followed both Tal's attacks and the young Fischer's struggles against unfamiliar opening ideas.

By then the new wave out of the Soviet chess schools had overtaken him and his championship finals were growing thin; his best late tournament was the Steinitz Memorial at Prague and Mariánské Lázně in 1956, where he came second behind Miroslav Filip and ahead of Flohr, Pachman, Ståhlberg and a young Wolfgang Uhlmann. So he moved his best work to the post. Correspondence chess suited an analyst exactly — unhurried, exhaustive, settled by whoever could see furthest — and in the second World Correspondence Championship he won nine games, drew four and lost one to take the title. The ICCF made him a grandmaster in 1959, and he became one of the few men to hold the grandmaster title in both forms of the game.

Abramov describes what that title required: over roughly three years, Ragozin estimated that he spent an average of three hours a day analyzing his correspondence games, while the most difficult positions stayed in his thoughts even away from the board. Shortly before his death, he asked to enter another world correspondence championship. His opponents waited for letters that never came.