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 6–4, 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 took the tournament's prize for the best game, and deserved it: 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.

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 finished 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. These were his best years, and he never quite recovered that form.

◈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.

Ragozin's own verdict, written into the tournament book of the eleventh Soviet Championship in 1939, was characteristically unassuming: the defence's novelty was its main virtue, and perhaps it might one day be seen more often. It is now a mainline 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 unpublished. Historians have generally counted Ragozin's contribution as a real factor in Botvinnik's success.

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. Botvinnik, who did not smoke, also had Ragozin smoke at the board and blow it across at him, so that no opponent's cigarette could ever put him off.

◈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. He turned up next 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 the winter of 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.

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

From 1946 until his death Ragozin was principal editor of Shakhmaty v SSSR and Shakhmatny Byulleten. 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.

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.