Mikhail Botvinnik

Mikhail Botvinnik: The Engineer Who Industrialised Chess

Vladimir Kramnik, who was taught by him and later became world champion himself, produced the most useful sentence ever written about his old teacher: "Botvinnik's chess career was the way of a genius, although he was not a genius." It was not an insult. It was an engineering assessment, and Botvinnik — who held a doctorate in electrical engineering and spent his working life on power systems — would have recognised the compliment buried in it.

Nevsky Prospect

He was born on 17 August 1911 in Kuokkala, then in the Grand Duchy of Finland and now Repino in Saint Petersburg. His parents were Russian Jews whose professions — his father Moisei a dental technician, his mother Shifra Rabinovich a dentist — earned the family the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement, on Nevsky Prospect itself. He described his own composition with characteristic precision: "I am a Jew by blood, a Russian by culture, Soviet by upbringing." He was an atheist. In 1935 he married Gayane Ananova, a Bolshoi ballerina; their daughter Olga was born in 1942 in Perm.

A Boy Beats Capablanca

He learned the game in the autumn of 1923, aged twelve, and won his school championship that winter. In 1925, at thirteen, he sat down in a simultaneous exhibition against the world champion José Raúl Capablanca — and won. Two years later he qualified for the USSR Championship as its youngest competitor and gained the master title. Meanwhile he studied: admitted to Leningrad University's mathematics department in 1928, transferring to the Electromechanical Department of the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, taking his engineering degree in 1931, a Candidate of Sciences in 1937 and a doctorate in 1951 — the last of these while reigning as world chess champion.

The Soviet Champion

He won his first Soviet Championship in 1931 at twenty with 13½/17, repeated it in 1933, and would take four more (1939, 1944, 1945, 1952). He broke through internationally in 1935, tying for first at Moscow with Salo Flohr and declining the grandmaster title he was offered on the spot. He finished second to Capablanca at Moscow 1936, then shared first with him at Nottingham later that year, undefeated — for which Stalin's state awarded him the Mark of Honour. Before the final round at Moscow 1935 the official Nikolai Krylenko had proposed that Ilya Rabinovich lose deliberately to hand him first place; Botvinnik refused, saying that in that case "I will myself put a piece en prise and resign."

Fifteen Years, and the Rule That Bore His Name

The Second World War cost him his best years; he became champion at thirty-seven. When FIDE staged the 1948 World Championship Tournament across The Hague and Moscow to fill the title vacated by Alexander Alekhine's death, he won it with 14/20, three points clear, becoming the sixth world champion. In 1950 he was among the inaugural recipients of the FIDE grandmaster title.

What followed had an unusual shape. He drew his 1951 defence against David Bronstein and his 1954 defence against Vasily Smyslov, retaining the title both times under the rule favouring the champion. In 1957 he lost to Smyslov 9½–12½ and in 1958 won the return match 13–8. In 1960 he lost to Mikhail Tal 8½–12½ and in 1961 won the return match 13–8, becoming at fifty the oldest man to win a FIDE world championship match. The rematch clause that twice restored him was nicknamed the Botvinnik rule. In 1963 Tigran Petrosian took the title 12½–9½, and FIDE abolished the rematch right. Between 1954 and 1964 he also anchored six consecutive Soviet Olympiad golds, scoring 54½/73.

Engineer, Computer Pioneer

He never abandoned the other profession. Assigned to an electricity supply organisation in Perm during the war, he won the Order of the Badge of Honour for work on Urals power stations, joined Moscow's Research Institute for Electrical Energy in 1956 and published *Asynchronized Synchronous Machines* in 1960. From the 1950s he pioneered computer chess, rejecting brute force in favour of "selective search" — algorithms applying human chess principles to prune the tree of moves — and built the PIONEER program, which he applied to both chess and power station maintenance planning. He set the thinking out in *Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning* (1970) and *Computers in Chess* (1984), and the University of Ferrara awarded him an honorary mathematics degree for it in September 1991.

The School

In 1963 he founded his own school within the Soviet coaching system, and through it passed three future world champions — Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik — along with Alexei Shirov, Vladimir Akopian and Jaan Ehlvest. His judgement was not infallible: of the young Karpov he said, "the boy doesn't have a clue about chess." Of the young Kasparov he said, "the future of chess lies in the hands of this young man," and Kasparov later named what he had been taught: preparation, research and innovation. Politically he was a loyal Communist with a stubborn streak, proposing economic reforms to the Soviet government in 1960 against party policy, and in 1976 evading a collective letter denouncing the defector Viktor Korchnoi by insisting on writing his own — a privilege officials refused, so his name never appeared.

Why Mikhail Is Called a Genius

Kramnik's verdict is the honest starting point and should be taken literally: the career was the way of a genius, the man was not one. Botvinnik had neither Tal's demonic sight nor Capablanca's effortless clarity. What he had was the realisation, decades ahead of anyone, that chess strength could be manufactured rather than merely possessed. His system — moderate physical training, a deliberately narrow opening repertoire analysed to exhaustion, annotation of his own and his rivals' games, publication of those annotations so that others would hunt his errors for him, systematic study of opponents' weaknesses, and unsparing self-assessment — is the origin of modern professional preparation. He treated himself as a device to be debugged, the habit of mind of an engineer writing a doctorate on synchronous machines. Reuben Fine judged in 1976 that he stood at or near the top of the chess world from 1933 to 1963, a span matched only by Lasker and Steinitz, and the method proved transmissible: three world champions came out of his classroom.

The counter-case is equally clear. He lost title matches in 1957 and 1960 and stayed champion only because a rematch clause nicknamed after him gave him a second attempt. He won the title at thirty-seven, after a war that had removed a generation of rivals. And his greatest pupil declined to call him a genius. He was something rarer: the man who worked out that genius could be substituted for.

Legacy

He retired from competition in 1970 and died in Moscow of pancreatic cancer on 5 May 1995. The Botvinnik Variation of the Semi-Slav still carries his name, as does a whole conception of what a chess professional does between games. Every grandmaster who now arrives at the board with a database, a training regime and a file on the opponent is working inside a system a Leningrad electrical engineer built in the 1930s.