Aarav Dengla examines Bolsheviks' state-backed rise of Soviet chess

In his latest Grandmaster View column published on 2026-09-20, India’s young GM Aarav Dengla looks back at how the Bolsheviks transformed chess from a pastime of Russia’s aristocracy into an instrument of mass education, military training and cultural revolution.

He traces the development from Ilyin-Zhenevsky and the Red Army to Botvinnik, Tal, Karpov and Kasparov, and how a century-old state-backed experiment helped build the Soviet chess machine and a legacy that still shapes the chess world today.