Yury Averbakh on living chess in the USSR of the 1950s and the OBKhSS intervention

I am often asked about my chess past. Above all it is a draughts past, strictly speaking, but I remember plenty of stories from the lives of chess players.

I recall a tale told by the well-known Soviet chess official Yury Averbakh, who is now 95. He once shared a curious true story about so-called living or human chess, in which people lined up on a marked-out board and fought it out, as in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". This pastime has ancient roots: games of the kind are mentioned from the eighth century, and the first human chess is associated with Charlemagne.

Averbakh's story, however, concerns how in the 1950s the Soviet Union began to monetise the playing of human chess. With prominent chess players and actors taking part, games were staged in the largest venues in the country and drew tens of thousands of spectators. Actors, singers and musicians were assigned to the various pieces, and when the fate of a piece was being decided, its representative performed on stage. All this brought in a very decent income and did a good deal to popularise the game itself, until, at the prompting of the Union of Theatre Workers, who did not at all relish the millions floating past them, the OBKhSS (the Soviet police department for combating embezzlement) intervened in the game. There were arrests, trials and real prison sentences. In the end this form of living chess perished, though some others are still in use today.