Alexander Alekhine
Alexander Aleksandrovich Alekhine was a Russian and French chess player and the fourth World Chess Champion, a title he held for two reigns.
By the age of 22, Alekhine was already among the strongest chess players in the world. During the 1920s, he won most of the tournaments in which he played. In 1921, Alekhine left Soviet Russia and emigrated to France, which he represented after 1925. In 1927, he became the fourth World Chess Champion by defeating José Raúl Capablanca.
In the early 1930s, Alekhine dominated tournament play and won two top-class tournaments by large margins. He also played first board for France in five Chess Olympiads, winning individual prizes in each. Alekhine offered Capablanca a rematch on the same demanding terms that Capablanca had set for him, and negotiations dragged on for years without making much progress. Meanwhile, Alekhine defended his title with ease against Efim Bogoljubov in 1929 and 1934. He was defeated by Max Euwe in 1935, but regained his crown in the 1937 rematch. His tournament record, however, was uneven, and rising young stars like Paul Keres, Reuben Fine, and Mikhail Botvinnik threatened his title. Negotiations for a title match with Keres or Botvinnik were halted by the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939. Negotiations with Botvinnik for a world title match were proceeding in 1946 when Alekhine died in Portugal, in unclear circumstances. Alekhine is the only World Chess Champion to have died while holding the title.
Alekhine is known for his fierce and imaginative attacking style, combined with great positional and endgame skill. He is highly regarded as a chess writer and theoretician, having produced innovations in a wide range of chess openings and having given his name to Alekhine's Defence and several other opening variations. He also composed some endgame studies.
Biography
Early life
Alekhine was born into a wealthy Russian family in Moscow, Russia, on October 31, 1892. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Alekhin, was a landowner and Privy Councilor to the conservative legislative Fourth Duma. His mother, Anisya Ivanovna Alekhina, was the daughter of a rich industrialist. Alekhine was introduced to chess by his mother, his older brother Alexei, and his older sister Varvara.Early chess career (1902–1914)
Alekhine's first known game was from a correspondence chess tournament that began on December 3, 1902, when he was ten years old. He participated in several correspondence tournaments, sponsored by the chess magazine Shakhmatnoe Obozrenie, between 1902 and 1911. In 1907, he played his first over-the-board tournament, the Moscow chess club's Spring Tournament. Later that year, he tied for 11th–13th in the club's Autumn Tournament; his elder brother, Alexei, tied for 4th–6th place. In 1908, Alexander won the club's Spring Tournament, at the age of 15. In 1909, he won the All-Russian Amateur Tournament in Saint Petersburg. For the next few years, he played in increasingly stronger tournaments, some of them outside Russia. At first he had mixed results, but by the age of 16 he had established himself as one of Russia's top players. He played first board in two friendly team matches: St. Petersburg Chess Club vs. Moscow Chess Club in 1911 and Moscow vs. St. Petersburg in 1912. By the end of 1911, Alekhine moved to St. Petersburg, where he entered the Imperial Law School for Nobles. By 1912, he was the strongest chess player in the St. Petersburg Chess Society. In March 1912, he won the St. Petersburg Chess Club Winter Tournament. In April 1912, he won the 1st Category Tournament of the St. Petersburg Chess Club. In January 1914, Alekhine won his first major Russian tournament, when he tied for first place with Aron Nimzowitsch in the All-Russian Masters Tournament at St. Petersburg. Afterwards, they drew in a mini-match for first prize. Alekhine also played several matches in this period, and his results showed the same pattern: mixed at first but later consistently good.Top-level grandmaster (1914–1927)
In April–May 1914, another major St. Petersburg 1914 chess tournament was held in the capital of the Russian Empire, in which Alekhine took third place behind Emanuel Lasker and José Raúl Capablanca. By some accounts, Tsar Nicholas II conferred the title of "Grandmaster of Chess" on each of the five finalists. Alekhine's surprising success made him a serious contender for the World Chess Championship. Whether or not the title was formally awarded to him, "Thanks to this performance, Alekhine became a grandmaster in his own right and in the eyes of the audience." In July 1914, Alekhine tied for first with Marshall in Paris.World War I and post-revolutionary Russia
In July–August 1914, Alekhine was leading an international Mannheim tournament, the 19th DSB Congress in Mannheim, Germany, with nine wins, one draw and one loss, when World War I broke out. Alekhine's prize was 1,100 marks. After the declaration of war against Russia, eleven "Russian" players were interned in Rastatt, Germany. On September 14, 17, and 29 of 1914, four of them were freed and allowed to return home. Alekhine made his way back to Russia by the end of October 1914. A fifth player, Romanovsky, was released in 1915, and a sixth, Flamberg, was allowed to return to Warsaw in 1916.When Alekhine returned to Russia, he helped raise money by giving simultaneous exhibitions to aid the Russian chess players who remained interned in Germany. In December 1915, he won the Moscow Chess Club Championship. In April 1916, he won a mini-match against Alexander Evensohn with two wins and one loss at Kiev, and in summer he served in the Union of Cities on the Austrian front. In September, he played five people in a blindfold display at a Russian military hospital at Tarnopol. In 1918, he won a "triangular tournament" in Moscow. In June of the following year, after the Russians forced the German army to retreat from Ukraine, Alekhine was charged with links with White movement counter-intelligence and was briefly imprisoned in Odessa's death cell by the Odessa Cheka. Rumors appeared in the West that he had been killed by the Bolsheviks.
1920–1927
When conditions in Russia became more settled, Alekhine proved he was among Russia's strongest players. In January 1920, he swept the championship of Moscow, but was not declared champion because he was not a resident of the city. In October 1920 he won the All-Russian Chess Olympiad in Moscow ; the tournament was retroactively called the first USSR Championship. His brother Alexei took third place in the tournament for amateurs.In March 1920, Alekhine married Alexandra Batayeva. They divorced the next year. For a short time in 1920–21, he worked as an interpreter for the Communist International and was appointed secretary to the Education Department. In this capacity, he met a Swiss journalist and Comintern delegate, Annelise Rüegg, who was thirteen years his senior, and they married on March 15, 1921. Shortly after getting married, Alekhine was given permission to leave Russia for a visit to the West with his wife, from whom he separated in June 1921. He would never return to Russia, and made France his base for much of the following twenty years.
In 1921–1923, Alekhine played seven mini-matches. In 1921, he won against Nikolay Grigoriev in Moscow, drew with Richard Teichmann and won against Friedrich Sämisch, both in Berlin. In 1922, he won against Ossip Bernstein and Arnold Aurbach, both in Paris, and Manuel Golmayo in Madrid. In 1923, he won against André Muffang in Paris.
From 1921 to 1927, Alekhine won or shared first prize in about two-thirds of the many tournaments in which he played. His least successful efforts were a tie for third place at Vienna 1922 behind Akiba Rubinstein and Richard Réti, and third place at the New York 1924 chess tournament, behind ex-champion Emanuel Lasker and world champion José Raúl Capablanca. Technically, Alekhine's play was mostly better than his competitors'—even Capablanca's—but he lacked confidence when playing his major rivals.
Alekhine's main goal throughout this period was to arrange a match with Capablanca. He thought the greatest obstacle was not Capablanca's play but the requirement under the 1922 "London rules" that the challenger raise a purse of US$10,000, of which the defending champion would receive over half even if defeated. Alekhine in November 1921, and Rubinstein and Nimzowitsch in 1923, challenged Capablanca but were unable to raise the $10,000. Raising the money was Alekhine's preliminary objective; he even went on tour, playing simultaneous exhibitions for modest fees day after day. In New York on April 27, 1924, he broke the world record for simultaneous blindfold play when he played twenty-six opponents, winning sixteen games, losing five, and drawing five after twelve hours of play. He broke his own world record on February 1, 1925, by playing twenty-eight games blindfold simultaneously in Paris, winning twenty-two, drawing three, and losing three.
In 1924, he applied for the first time for a residence privilege in France and for French citizenship while pursuing his studies in the Sorbonne Faculty of Law to obtain a PhD. There is no record that he completed his studies there, but he was known as "Dr. Alekhine" in the 1930s.
His French citizenship application was postponed because of his frequent travels abroad to play chess and because he was reported once in April 1922, shortly after his arrival in France, as a "bolshevist charged by the Soviets of a special mission in France". Later in 1927, the French Chess Federation asked the Ministry of Justice to intervene in Alekhine's favor to have him lead the French team in the first Nation tournament to be held in London in July 1927. Nevertheless, Alekhine had to wait for a new law on naturalization which was published on 10 August 1927. The decree granting him French nationality was signed on 5 November 1927 and published in the Official Gazette of the French Republic on 14–15 November 1927, while Alekhine was playing Capablanca for the World title in Buenos Aires.
In October 1926, Alekhine won in Buenos Aires. In December 1926 / January 1927, he defeated Max Euwe 5½–4½ in a training match in the Netherlands. In 1927, he married his third wife, Nadiezda Vasiliev, another older woman, the widow of the Russian general V. Vasiliev.