In the lives and literature of its devotees, chess illustrates rather well the metamorphosis from freedom to totalitarianism. In the West, the significance of what had happened in Russia since 1917 was not lost on those who longed for a similar apocalypse. The turmoil of war and peace, revolution and counter-revolution seemed to many to toll the death knell for the educated bourgeoisie...

By 1929 the speculative bubble of European prosperity had burst, causing collateral damage, not only to the arts and sciences, but also to chess. Like most intellectual endeavours, it turned out that chess was vulnerable to economics. The conditions in which high culture can flourish are rare. Western civilization has sustained this environment over many centuries, but the period of world war, from 1914-1945, came close to annihilating these conditions in central Europe. The subculture of chess was uprooted, blasted and blighted by the ensuing blizzard of dictatorship.

The precarious but creative role of chess in the laissez- faire culture of pre-1914 Europe gave way to a less marginal but much more sinister function in the Soviet system. As the recreation of the revolution, chess ceased to be a private activity and instead was taken over by the all-embracing state. This led to a vast aggrandizement in the scale and status of chess, but also to a no less striking transformation of its practitioners. The “rigorist” lifestyle of the revolutionary fanatic was applied to professions that had nothing to do with politics, including chess. Even this most abstract of pursuits was saturated with dialectical material, an ideology that claimed to be applicable to absolutely anything. Communism did not imply state control — it was also a method of self-control. Party discipline was internalized, and chess was a kind of mental exercise for the cadres...
In the vast laboratory that was the Soviet Union, chess was among the least sanguinary experiments.

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