THE CROWD IS HUSHED and expectant. The tournament is under way and Kronsteen is thinking intensely. The chess moves are being displayed on a large board. A note arrives at the Soviet grandmaster's table with a glass of water: “You are required at once.” Defying the order the secret agent vanquishes his opponent with a dazzling combination.

The opening scene in the film From Russia with Love, based on the Ian Fleming novel, encapsulates many of the themes of Daniel Johnson's thoroughly entertaining book. Here we have an irresistible brew of Cold War politics, genius and skulduggery.

Johnson's book is subtitled “How the Cold War was Fought on the Chessboard”, and he permits himself the most elastic of Cold War definitions to allow coverage of the period after the Russian revolution. For it was during this first Cold War — 1917-1941 — that the Soviets put in place the component parts of the world's most formidable chess machine, one that would dominate international chess for decades.

As one of the founding fathers of Soviet chess put it: “Chess cannot be apolitical as in capitalist countries.” The Soviet Union, says Johnson, a tad hyperbolically, “excelled at only two things: war and chess” (ballet? the circus?). What's unquestionable is that chess came to be seen as a potent ideological weapon. Chess masters were granted a privileged position in the system: experts were dispatched to all corners of the USSR to recruit and train new players. In 1949, a tournament for collective farm workers attracted 130,000 entrants. Arthur Koestler would later applaud the Russians for “treating their [chess] champions as favourite pets”.

Chess was particularly appealing to Soviet intellectuals — novelists such as Pasternak, musicians such as Prokofiev. As Johnson explains: “Chess was one of the very few officially sanctioned areas of intellectual freedom.”

The book is peppered with fascinating nuggets and well-chosen anecdotes. Like Marx and Trotsky, Lenin was a keen player — but he insisted on three conditions before he would play: no taking moves back, no hard feelings on the part of the loser, and no gloating by the winner. When the future world champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, took first place in a prestigious tournament in Nottingham in 1936 and sent the happy news to Stalin in a notorious cable (beginning, “Dear beloved teacher and leader...”), he was subsequently rewarded for his victory and obeisance with a car — at the time, perhaps the only private car in the Soviet Union.

That the communist state had invested so heavily, and so effectively, in chess would come as a shock to the West. The oiled and purring Soviet chess machine was unveiled after the Second World War when a Soviet team smashed one from the US, earning a cable from Stalin: “Well done lads.” From this period on, the Soviets dominated the game. It would take the brilliance, doggedness and ferocity of an eccentric lone American to break — at least temporarily — their world championship monopoly.

Fully a quarter of White King and Red Queen is devoted to Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky and the so-called Match of the Century in Iceland. The year was 1972, the height of détente. But the match is invariably referred to as a Cold War clash, not least because that's how Fischer wanted to portray it. “It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians... This little thing between me and Spassky. It's a microcosm of the whole world political situation.” Fischer's histrionics and chess pyrotechnics would capture front- page headlines globally, benefiting chess immeasurably. Tournament prize money escalated exponentially; elite grandmasters began to command big bucks.

In 1975, Fischer failed to defend his crown; he was becoming ever more reclusive, his rants ever more demented. The Soviets reclaimed the title, in the diminutive shape of Anatoli Karpov — a proper Russian, and a proper communist, hugely gifted, but uncharismatic. Politics and chess, however, remained conjoined.

For a decade Karpov's main rival was the idiosyncratic, blunt-speaking chess fanatic Viktor Korchnoi. Korchnoi defected in 1976 and was loathed by the Soviet authorities.

If anything, the Battle of Baguio City, the Karpov-Korchnoi, showdown in 1978, managed to surpass even Fischer-Spassky in farce — entrenching the stereotype that chess players are all barking. News coverage focused on hypnotists, parapsychologists and yogis in saffron robes. Plus, of course, there was Yoghurt-Gate. Karpov was in the habit of eating yoghurt at the board, and Korchnoi complained that the time or flavour of the yogurt's arrival might contain various instructions (eg, offer a draw). A compromise was ordered: the champion was to receive one colour (violet) at a fixed time, served by a designated waiter.

Korchnoi was half-Jewish and Johnson courageously, or cavalierly, raises some awkward issues, including the prevalence of Jews in chess; around half of world champions and world champion challengers have been wholly or partially Jewish — there's a reference to the deeply controversial arguments about innate intelligence made by American sociologist Charles Murray. This is a surprisingly opinionated book — the author covered the Cold War as a journalist, was in Berlin when the wall fell, and doesn't conceal his contempt for communist brutality. Détente is slammed for “elevating stability above liberty”. When at the end of the Cold War the UK plays host to some major matches, the City of London is described as having survived the worst that “municipal socialism could throw at it”.

This is certainly not just a book for chess players: mentions of the “King's Indian Defence”, forks and fianchettoes, stalemates and zugswangs are kept to a minimum. There's not a single chess diagram. However if I have an en passant quibble, it's that the book occasionally meanders out of focus. Essentially, the narrative framework is the interplay between chess and geopolitics; but chess is irresistibly rich in personality and yarns, and the author sometimes can't stop himself from diverting but irrelevant detours.

With the collapse of communism and the retirement of Garry Kasparov, who abandoned the 64 squares to spend more time with his politics, chess, as Johnson notes, lost some of its lustre, its public appeal. This may have something to do with the inexorable rise of the chess computer. But it may also be that although East-West politics has so often been a rude and unwelcome intruder into chess, it has also, in a way, sustained and nourished it.

White King and Red Queen by Daniel Johnson
Atlantic, £22

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