Leningrad

For Soviet Filmmakers, There Was No Glory in War

In contrast with Hollywood’s approach to World War II, Soviet filmmakers avoided triumphalist images of warfare, depicting the conflict as a brutal necessity that should never be repeated.

On New Year’s Eve 1940, my great-grandfather Aleksandr Afinogenov held a dinner party at his Moscow apartment. At one point the guests, probably writers and other literary intellectuals, played a game: writing on sheets of paper, they tried to predict what the coming year would be like. Some of them thought they’d change their hair colour; others thought they’d get married or divorced.

But what about the bigger question: would the Soviet Union get involved in World War II? Some thought it would, and that the war would be won quickly — or even result in a revolution in Western Europe. Some thought it would end in defeat. But none of them could have anticipated how profoundly their lives would change when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Afinogenov himself would be killed in a shelling by the end of the year. The Germans were already within artillery range of Moscow, and the future of the Soviet Union was in doubt.

“On that June morning… everything seemed so simple, so ordinary,” says the Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Romm in his 1965 documentary Ordinary Fascism:

“But in each of our lives there remains a scar, a wound that will not heal. Some lost a son or a brother, a father or a mother; maybe their whole family perished or their house was destroyed, their lives broken in two.”

This distinctive feature of the Soviet experience — more than the war’s unusual brutality or even the USSR’s disproportionate contribution to the victory over the Nazis — became the main preoccupation of Soviet war films. Whereas American exemplars of the genre, and increasingly post-Soviet ones as well, glorify the conflict as an epic battle between good and evil, the most enduring Soviet commemorations of World War II probe its deeper impact on soldiers and civilians alike.

Real people

Take Two Soldiers, filmed in Tashkent in 1943. This tale of love and friendship between two comrades, one from Odessa in Ukraine and the other from the Urals, takes place mainly in Leningrad, where “the front lies at the end of a tram line”. The two protagonists compete for the love of a woman who lives just a short distance away.

In another wartime film, The Invasion, a former criminal fights for redemption, but the war itself barely appears on screen; instead, much of the action takes place in a family apartment. Even in the midst of war, Soviet films focused on human relationships as they were warped by the experience of conflict.

The Story of a Real Person, released shortly after the war, seems at first to violate these conventions. It centres on a fighter pilot whose feet are amputated, and who struggles through physical therapy and the use of prostheses to get himself back into the cockpit. There is hardly any romance and the character’s main relationship is with a commissar who encourages him in his quest.

But even here the experience of combat is almost absent. Story is set mostly in a hospital; only at the end does the film depict the pilot’s aerial heroics as he puts his plan into action. The main theme is the somewhat banal idea that a Soviet person can achieve anything.

Also read: Red Century: the Russian Revolution and Its Powerful Imprint on Language and Aesthetics in Films

Early Soviet cinematic efforts to make sense of the war suffered from some of the typical problems of Stalin-era film: the characters were often flat and the conflicts sentimental or melodramatic. For viewers unfamiliar with Soviet cinema, however, the most surprising thing is the near-absence of explicit ideological commentary. Far from being Stalinist propaganda, these films avoid the touchy subjects of socialism and revolution almost entirely.

The Story of a Real Person explicitly invokes the classic socialist realist novel How the Steel Was Tempered, but in the service of a narrative that could just as easily have come from an American film. It wouldn’t be any harder to read its central arc as an endorsement of the power of individual initiative as it is to understand it as a vision of the New Soviet Person.

Generational perspectives

In the late 1950s and ’60s, as the Khrushchev Thaw loosened Stalin-era restrictions on cultural production, Soviet representations of the war became even more searching and nuanced. They also moved farther and farther away from envisioning battles and sieges as their central focus.

While there were certainly war films that focused on combat — like the epic The Star, about a crew of POWs that escapes from Germany on a captured tank — these were not the dominant voices of the period. Instead, the new wave of Soviet films tried to make sense of the traumas and experiences of the war for the benefit of a rising young generation with little personal experience of it. The result was a constant implicit contrast between the idyllic lives of Soviet youth in the optimistic postwar era and the hardships suffered by their elders.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood is the most haunting of these depictions. It follows a young boy who loses his family during the Nazi invasion and joins first the partisans fighting against the occupation in the woods, then the regular Soviet army. Moulded in the crucible of war, Ivan speaks and thinks like a seasoned combat veteran, but he remains a child. Tarkovsky explores this contrast with tenderness and sensitivity, deliberately using the clichés of the war movie — the secret scouting mission, the danger of enemy attack — to probe the lost futures of the millions of children who lost their own childhoods to the war.

However, the film that confronts the situation of postwar youth most directly is one that doesn’t at first glance appear to be a war movie at all. Marlen Khutsiev’s I Am Twenty (1965) follows the daily romantic and social adventures of a young man named Sergei growing up in the flush of ’60s prosperity. For most of its action, it doesn’t even mention the war. Yet Sergei is constantly haunted by dreams of his father, a soldier who was killed before he had a chance to get to know him.

Sergei feels the acute gap between the existential seriousness of the choices thrust upon his father at his age and the comparative triviality of his own life. At the film’s climactic moment, as his friends are drinking and dancing at a party, Sergei suddenly grows serious and proposes a toast to potatoes — subtly contrasting the need and desperation of the wartime years with present-day plenty. “If there is nothing you can speak seriously about,” he asks, “then why even live?”

Like I Am Twenty, Romm’s Ordinary Fascism commemorates the war by drawing contrasts — this time quite explicit ones — between postwar youth and the interrupted lives of their elders, including Romm himself. Yet in contrast with Khutsiev, Romm’s approach is not moralistic. Instead of condemning the moral heedlessness of youth culture, Romm sees it as the right of children and young people to think about ordinary things.

Still from Marlen Khutsiev’s I Am Twenty (1965).

It was only the incredible resources marshalled by the Nazi state to indoctrinate its youth into the cult of the Führer that allowed so many young people’s lives, German as well as Russian, to be so fundamentally altered by German aggression. This humanistic approach is a core aspect of the movie, which begins with a montage of children’s drawings and an appeal to the similarities between children around the world. While the film’s depiction of Nazi culture is the central topic, underlying it is an impulse to convey to Soviet young people what their parents went through in the terrible war years.

Indictments of militarism

Some of the new wave of war movies dealt directly with the tropes that had characterised previous Soviet writing and film about the war. Among the best of them is Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957). This emotionally overpowering film tells the story of a woman nicknamed Squirrel whose would-be fiancé goes off to the front, leaving her trapped in a forced marriage with his rapist brother. It confronts one of the most enduring clichés — the idea that the principal duty of a woman in wartime is to patiently await the return of her man.

Squirrel endures endless abuse and condemnation from people who believe that her “failure” to wait is a stain on her character; resisting the easy way out, the film looks unsparingly at the difficult choices and involuntary betrayals forced on people in wartime conditions. Cranes doesn’t just offer a compelling narrative: it is also marked by skillful cinematography, with long shots of the heroine flowing through crowded spaces with a dancer’s grace. Its culminating scene is a bracing condemnation of war as such and a promise of the new world that the survivors will build.

For all the imagery of Red Square tank parades associated with the Soviet Union in Western eyes, and despite the large-scale deployment of World War II as a new kind of founding myth for the Soviet state, official ideology widely denounced militarism. This is one reason why war in these movies rarely looks heroic, less “the good war” and more of a brutal necessity forced upon the Soviet state by external aggression. Previous Soviet complicity in that aggression — through the occupation of the Baltics and eastern Poland — obviously went unmentioned.

Also read: Recounting the Ten Days That Shook the World

It is also one reason there are so few Nazis in Soviet war films. The glowering caricatures in American cinema are nearly absent from its socialist counterpart. When they do appear, it is often as shadowy figures in tanks or infantry helmets, more an elemental force than an ideologically specific enemy.

Ordinary Fascism is one exception to this rule. Another is Tatiana Lioznova and Iulian Semënov’s legendary TV miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring, which aired in 1973. It depicted the efforts of a Soviet deep-cover operative — disguised as a high-ranking SS official — to prevent the signing of a separate peace between Germany and the Western Allies. Yet the Nazis in Seventeen Moments are depicted with depth and sensitivity. They are the architects of a genocidal system, but they are also conscientious, efficient bureaucrats, family men, often intelligent and urbane.

For Soviet viewers, whose experience of their own bureaucracy was more often one of chaos and inefficiency, the orderly officialdom of the televised Reich was a kind of utopia. Although the KGB chief Yuri Andropov had commissioned Seventeen Moments to inspire patriotism and generate new recruits for intelligence work, it is hardly a work of naked propaganda.

A troubling absence

There is another, more troubling absence in these films: they feature almost no Jewish characters, and they never depict Nazi repression as disproportionately targeting them. Even Romm, himself of Jewish descent, evades the question in Ordinary Fascism: the film features long sequences about gas chambers, ghettoes, and death camps, but never mentions the religion or ethnicity of the people who were murdered there. Instead, it generally characterises the victims as Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists, which was certainly part of the truth but far from all of it.

This critical omission reflects the Soviet party line, which effectively disavowed the specificity of the Holocaust: its victims were (in some cases) described instead as “Soviet citizens.” This form of denial mirrored another, with even graver consequences: the lack of any representation of Jewish soldiers and partisans, which reinforced the widespread perception that Soviet Jews sat out the war in Central Asia while Russians and Ukrainians died to save them.

Still from Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985).

Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) is perhaps the Soviet war film best known among cinephiles in the West. A tale of a boy who joins the fight out of a romantic desire to protect his homeland, and then observes and experiences senseless brutality on an incomprehensible scale, the film is a dark masterwork. But in some important respects, Come and See is not as unconventional as it may seem at first glance.

Its climactic atrocity is the burning of a church full of villagers by an SS detachment, but the Germans in the film are not especially interested in Jews — even though it was Jews who were massacred in these ways most often. The message about the horrors of war also draws on a long Soviet cinematic legacy, which cast the war as at best a deeply ambiguous experience, and heroism as always counterbalanced by suffering and pain.

Neither of these are slights against the film. Come and See is so powerful because it brings these themes out most fully, and its depiction of the suffering of the Belarussian people is authentic even if the Jews are not mentioned.

Film against war

“I have never seen an anti-war film,” the French director François Truffaut famously claimed. “Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Come and See and many of the Soviet films that preceded it give the lie to this characterisation. It is hard to watch The Cranes Are Flying and come away with the impression that war is aesthetically appealing, morally righteous, or good for social morale — even a war such as this one. This is the lasting legacy of the Soviet film tradition, even if some of its products are jingoistic or preoccupied with heroics.

If it is harder to find similarly troubled depictions of World War II in American cinematic culture, it is because the United States was never as touched by war as the Soviet Union was. The American contribution to the war effort, through Lend-Lease and in the Pacific theatre, was essential. But it was possible for many Americans to make it through the war years effectively untouched. Though thousands died or lost their loved ones, few of them were civilians.

In contrast, the total war represented by Operation Barbarossa left nobody in the Soviet Union unaffected. Even people in regions far from the front contributed recruits. Starvation and deprivation affected everyone as the country strained all its resources for victory.

Today, the war functions as the ultimate legitimating force for official Russian ideology: it seems to be the last episode in Russian history whose significance and moral implications almost everyone agrees on. Likewise, even people who are skeptical of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact admit the importance of the Soviet role in defeating the Nazis. But the Soviet film legacy makes it hard to draw a single lesson from the war, even the sense that it was all worth it. Like a scar, it may be beautiful or horrible, but the wound it covers runs deep.

Greg Afinogenov teaches Russian history at Georgetown. He is a tenant organiser with Metro DC DSA’s Stomp Out Slumlords project.

This article was published on Jacobin. Read the original here.

Operation Bagration: A June 22 Hitler Had Not Bargained for

Operation Bagration kicked off on the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, and it marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.

Stalin had long been asking that his Western allies open the second front in Europe so that the humongous pressures on the Red Army slackened somewhat. Finally, with the Allies landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944 the European front materialised.

Scarcely any episode of the Second World War has received as much attention – and adoration – as Operation Overlord. After all, it marked the Allies’ getting a foothold on the continental mainland, and Berlin, the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich, was just about 1,200 km from the beachhead via a road that ran through Paris. And the mystique surrounding the largest seaborne invasion in history gives Overlord the heft to be called ‘D-Day’, the day on which the gigantic Nazi war machine apparently began to unravel.

But barely two weeks later, on June 22, 1944 began what turned out to be the largest Allied operation of World War II, a campaign that dwarfed not only Overlord but even the epic battle of Stalingrad, widely believed to have been the War’s turning point.

Also read: When Hitler Realised the End of the War Was Upon Him

Indeed, in the scale of its operations, Bagration (pronounced baag-raat-see-ohn)– the Red Army’s counteroffensive through Byelorussia – towers over every other engagement of the War (with the possible exception of Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941) – including those in Moscow, Leningrad, Kursk, the Ardennes and Berlin. In under two months, Operation Bagration wiped out about a quarter (roughly 500,000 troops) of Germany’s Eastern Front manpower.

Of the four armies comprising the vaunted Army Group Centre, one, the 4th, was decimated and two other – the 9th and the 3rd Panzer – very nearly so. Thirty one of the 47 German divisional or corps commanders (of the rank of General) involved in the battle were either killed or captured. The Wehrmacht’s back was broken.

Bagration also restored the Soviet Union to her pre-1939 borders by throwing the Germans out of Soviet territory, and launched the Red Army on a crushing offensive that was to culminate in the battle of Berlin and the dissolution of the Third Reich.

In comparison, D-Day looks almost like a side-show: German deployment here added up to only 11 divisions (the Eastern Front had 228), and Germany lost no more than 9,000 troops here. The Allied forces were mired on the beachhead far longer than they had anticipated, progress inland was painfully slow, and the port city of Caen, a major objective only about 50 kms from the Omaha beach, was not captured before July 21, or a full 45 days after D-Day.

Bagration, on the other hand, took a little over ten days to punch a hole 400-km wide and 160-km deep in the German frontline. By the middle of August, the Red Army was knocking at Warsaw’s doors, less than 600 km shy of Berlin.

And yet, in most histories of the Second World War, Operation Bagration gets mentioned only in passing. It is only in recent years that critical attention has begun to be directed at this important episode of the War.

Also Read: As in Life so in His Death, Hubris and Delusion Defined Adolf Hitler

The 76th anniversary of Bagration is as good a time as any to go over the ground it covered and recapitulate how it panned out in those crucial two months.

In Yalta in December 1943, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union had agreed to orchestrate the Allies’ future campaigns against the Axis. Churchill and Roosevelt informed Stalin that the Allies planned to open the second front by landing in France in May the following year. In turn, Stalin promised to support that operation by launching a massive strategic offensive around the same time. Bagration – named after the Georgian general of the Tsarist army who died fighting Napoleon’s troops in Borodino near Moscow in 1812 – was the result of that commitment.

The Soviet armies involved in bloody fighting in the winter and early spring of 1943-44 had made spectacular advances, particularly in the south, in Ukraine and the Caucasus. They had also managed to lift the crippling siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) that had lasted nearly 900 days. At that point in the war’s eastern theatre, the Soviets had over 6.5 million troops spread over 12 fronts (or army groups) aligned along a 3,200-km front facing four German army groups and an independent army, which together numbered 2.25 million men. Of the 12 Soviet army groups, four, namely the First Baltic, and the Third, the Second and the First Byelorussian, would come into play in the operation.

Of the four German army groups, the one directly in front of these Red Army formations was the famed Army Group Centre commanded by Field Marshal Ernst Busch, not a particularly capable commander, but a favourite of Hitler’s because of Busch’s obsequiousness to the Fuehrer.

Numerically the strongest army group on the Eastern Front – it had around 700,000 troops in 51 divisions – Busch’s group had two major weaknesses other than being led by an unenterprising leader. Spread over a 780-km front, its was a thinly-held line; and its forces occupied a somewhat awkward salient: a bulge extending substantially eastwards north of the inaccessible Pripyat Marshes close to the headwaters of the Dvina and Dnieper rivers east of Vitebsk (please see map), making the flanks vulnerable to spirited enemy attacks. STAVKA (the Soviet High Command) now settled on striking at Army Group Centre in a series of surprise ‘deep operations’ manoeuvres that would destroy this jewel in Hitler’s crown.

But the Soviet decision had not been made with an eye on Marshal Busch’s vulnerabilities, personal or strategic. STAVKA had determined that the demolition of Army Group Centre would bring the Red Army to the borders of Poland and East Prussia and facilitate future operations hugely. Equally importantly, the best – and perhaps shortest – road to Berlin from the East ran through Warsaw, which sat on a straight line from General Rokossovsky’s First Byelorussian Front through the deep defences of Army Group Centre.

Besides, other options open to the Red Army at that point had been considered and dropped: for example, a strike into the Balkans by one or more of the northern spearheads (viz., the Third Baltic and Leningrad fronts) – rejected because it would still leave much of western Russia in German hands; or the option of a northwest strike from northern Ukraine across Poland to the Baltic Sea – not pursued because it would mean a long and perilous drive with dangerously open flanks.

Having thus decided on the broad contours of the offensive, the Red Army set about filling in the tactical and operational details, a project of astonishing ingenuity and skill, the like of which has been seen only rarely in the history of modern warfare.

First, the Soviets launched an elaborate tactical programme of deception – maskirovka in Russian. In April, the entire Soviet army assumed a defensive posture, and kept up the appearances with great verve, so that German intelligence was inclined to discount the possibility of an imminent, large-scale operation. But more importantly, the Red Army build-up managed to deflect attention to the south-western part of the front, to Ukraine, giving out clever and seemingly bona-fide signals, which the Germans picked up with alacrity, of an impending operation against Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group North Ukraine.

Somehow, the Germans had also persuaded themselves that a Ukrainian offensive would best serve the Red Army’s operational objectives, and when reports of a large Soviet build-up in the front opposite Army Group Centre started to come in beginning early June, the German High Command viewed that build-up as a deception, thus playing fully into Soviet hands.

The deception was so complete that the Germans, incredibly, started shifting a lot of their fire-power, and a whole Panzer corps, from Busch’s command to Model’s. Thus, as the Red Army was rearing to go, Army Group Centre lost 15% of its divisions, 23% of its assault guns, and a staggering 50-88% respectively of its artillery and tank strength.

Hitler had no answer to the Red Army’s T-34 tank.

And the Soviet build-up on the eve of Bagration was the War’s most massive – 4,000 tanks, 5,300 aircraft, and over 25,000 pieces of mortars, assault guns and other indirect-fire weapons gave the Red Army armour, artillery and air superiority of 10:1 at the assault point, even as two million troops faced off with about 500,000 German combatants.

This build-up necessitated reinforcements to the extents of 300%, 85% and 62% respectively in tank, artillery and aircraft strengths. Marshal Zhukov, one of Bagration’s heroes, recalls that the front needed to be supplied with 400,000 tonnes of ammunition, 300,000 tonnes of fuel and lubricants, and 500,000 tonnes of food and fodder before the battle.

It is a tribute to the Red Army’s organisational virtuosity that it managed to amass these enormous quantities of fire-power, accessories and provisions without giving their game away. Battle-hardened veterans Marshal Georgiy Zhukov and Marshal Alexander Vasilevskiy were made responsible for planning, coordinating and directing two fronts each: Zhukov for the two southern fronts (2nd and 1st Byelorussian) and Vasilevskiy for the two northern fronts (1st Baltic and 3rd Byelorussian). The front commanders were Generals Bagramyan (1st Baltic), Chernyakhovskiy (3rd Byelorussian), Zakharov (2nd Byelorussian) and Rokossovskiy (1st Byelorussian, the largest formation, also tasked with covering the most ground).

A vital component of the Soviet plan was parallel partisan warfare. By this phase of the War, Byelorussian partisans, numbering close to 150,000, were a formidable force, capable of paralysing German supply lines virtually at will and demolishing bridges, highways and railway installations whenever required. The wooded and often boggy terrain made parts of Byelorussia ideal partisan country. Now well-armed and well-provisioned by the Soviets, partisans set and carried out their operational objectives in coordination with the Red Army. In the days leading up to Bagration, they stepped up sabotage and demolition very significantly, waylaying all supplies meant for Army Group Centre but taking care to let supplies in the reverse direction pass unmolested.

Also read: ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’: The Hell-Gates of Dachau

The Soviets’ ‘deep operations’ – a concept borrowed from the ‘Deep Battle’ military theory first formulated by Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Alexander Svechin – worked with deadly effect in Bagration. Breakthroughs were achieved at several points in the enemy line by massive infantry-led attacks with heavy artillery and air support.

When holes had been punched in the German lines, armoured spearheads rushed through them and encircled the communications and supply centres by double envelopments. Waves of such attacks would follow in rapid succession, each spearhead delving deeper than the one before it, overtaking, overwhelming and encircling enemy formations at blinding speed, and keeping the enemy continually guessing which direction the next attack would come from.

All in all, Bagration was to cover a front stretching for more than 1,200 km from Lake Neshcherdo to the Pripyat, and 600 kms deep – from the Dnieper to the Vistula and the Narew. The first avalanche of attacks began on June 22, 1944 and by the morning of the 26th, Army Group Centre appeared to be falling apart. One after another, all the major town and cities occupied by Germany since 1941 were wrested from her control – Vitebsk, Bobruysk, Minsk, Slutsk, Mogilev, Borisov, Stolbtsy, Marina Gorka, Lublin….. All Byelorussia was freed, followed by large parts of East Poland and Lithuania and, in the second leg of the operation, those parts of the Ukraine which were still in German occupation. By 25 July, the Red Army had reached the Vistula.

On the way, it had stumbled upon the Majdanek death camp – the first concentration camp to be discovered – where the Nazis had murdered at least 80,000 people in cold blood. On July 28, the Red Army liberated the historic Brest fortress. Fully, 50 German divisions had been routed, 30 of them destroyed. In the operation’s second leg, after the 1st Ukrainian Front had joined the offensive, the Wehrmacht lost another 30 divisions, eight of which were wiped out.

Konstantin Rokossovskiy and Georgy Zhukov – two of Bagration’s heroes.

The virtual destruction of the Army Group Centre was Germany’s most calamitous defeat in the War. The Soviets could now sit calmly on the Vistula, reorganising and resupplying their forces, confident of their ability to drive to the Oder, the Neisse, and then on to Berlin.

The demoralised Germans, on the other hand – now obliged to fight on two full fronts – could only mount a weak defence along the Vistula. In an irony of history, Operation Bagration, which had begun on the third anniversary of Hitler’s most ambitious military campaign, had now sealed the Fuehrer’s fate.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

Viktor Korchnoi, the Last Knight from Leningrad

Viktor the Terrible, as he was named, was not an urbane, charming personality. He was a terrifying opponent and It was considered a rite of passage to get the rough end of his tongue.

Viktor Korchnoi in 1976. Credit: Verhoeff, Bert/ Anefo

Viktor Korchnoi (March 23, 1931-June 6, 2016) in 1976, the year of his defection from the Soviet Union to the West. Credit: Verhoeff, Bert/Anefo

The Siege of Leningrad began on September 8, 1941 when invading German forces cut off the city from the rest of the Soviet Union. It was one of the most horrendous sieges in history. At its worst, daily rations were reduced to 150 grams of bread (baked with sawdust) with wallpaper used as seasoning. Over 2,000 persons were convicted of cannibalism (classified as “Special Category Banditry” in Soviet law). More than 1,500,000 Leningraders died before the siege was lifted in January 1944.

The casualty list did not include a Polish-Jewish resident, who was 10 years old when the siege started, and not quite 13 when it ended. That boy lost every member of his family. He was later adopted by his father’s ex-wife. Viktor Lvovich Korchnoi used the ration cards of his dead relatives to supplement his diet.

Korchnoi, who died on June 6, 2016 in Zurich, will be remembered for his extraordinary chess skills and for being the first Grandmaster to defect from the Soviet Union. He had a very long and successful career, winning everything except the world championship and he came within an ace of taking that as well.

The orphan started playing chess regularly some months after the siege was lifted, at the Pioneer Palace. It was soon obvious that he was very gifted. Indeed, he would win the Soviet Junior (Under-20) Championship in 1947, which was great going for a 16-year old.

Korchnoi would win the very strong USSR Chess Championship four times before he quit the Soviet Union. He would be a contender for the world title in every cycle between 1962 and 1992. He would win over a hundred tournaments.

His attitude to chess and to life (which he considered a mundane extension of chess) was shaped by “The 900 Days” as the siege is known. To the boy who survived Leningrad, the equation was stark and simple: You won, or you starved. Or, you were eaten. There was no point getting attached to people, or letting relationships distract you.

That absolute, even absolutely monstrous focus made him a terrifying opponent. On principle, he hated whoever he faced. He could switch on the hate at will. Sadly, he often failed to switch it off when the game was over.

He loved chess, he loved winning and he wanted to be world champion. To further those ends, Korchnoi worked at an insane tempo, spending long hours in analysis, trying to glean more insights. He taught himself to calculate to incredible depth. He would routinely end up in time pressure, as he kept calculating. But he was also a great blitz player. With only seconds left, he would find the best moves.

He was brave, almost foolhardy. He would take material and face down attacks. And, he would hit back.

Others prided themselves on their ability to defend, or attack. Korchnoi counter-attacked. He provoked his opponents, absorbed material and hit back when they over-extended. His endgame technique was near-flawless. He literally wrote the book on rook endgames – as Viswanathan Anand once said, “Every time I reach a rook endgame, I wonder what Viktor would say “.

Off the board too, Korchnoi took huge risks to maximise returns from his talent. In 1974, it became apparent that his national federation did not want him to be world champion. He did not fit the template of the ideal Soviet champion. He was 43, foul-mouthed and Jewish.

The 23-year-old Anatoly Karpov, whom he disparagingly called “that little boy” was much more acceptable and clearly favoured by the Soviet establishment. They played what turned into a de facto world championship match in 1974. (Bobby Fischer did not defend his title). Karpov won 3-2 with 19 draws to become world champion by default. To add insult to injury, Korchnoi’s stipend was cut because of his outspoken comments.

So, he just upped and left. in 1976, he walked into a police station in Holland and asked for asylum while playing in a tournament there (he won). That meant abandoning his first wife, Bela, and his son, Igor behind the Iron Curtain. Chess was more important.

Korchnoi bulldozed through the 1977-78 Candidates cycle, beating three Soviets, Lev Polugaevsky, and the two former champions, Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky. These were all ill-tempered matches with protests and counter-protests galore. Most amusingly, the chess-mad Soviet public had to read between the lines because Korchnoi’s name was not mentioned in news reports. Two revered former world champions lost to an unnamed opponent!

The title match in Baguio City, Philippines transcended the Candidates in terms of lunacy. Karpov’s team included a “parapsychologist” and hypnosis expert, Dr Vladimir Zoukhar. He would glare at Korchnoi from the audience. Korchnoi retaliated with an Anand Margi Gambit, hiring two Australians Margis (who were embroiled in a murder case). The Aussie sadhus glared at Zoukhar!

When Karpov wanted to drink yoghurt during play, Korchnoi demanded that he choose the flavour (to prevent Karpov’s team passing flavour-coded messages!). Korchnoi was down 5-1 and came back to tie the match 5-5 before Karpov finally pulled out a deciding win.

In 1981, Karpov won another title match in Merano, Italy. The Soviets arrested Igor, perhaps in the hopes that this would psychologically destabilise Korchnoi. Maybe it did since Karpov won with some ease. After the match, Korchnoi’s wife and son were finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union. By then, he was a Swiss citizen. He divorced Bela in 1983 and married Petra Leeuwerik, who survives him.

That Merano match was the zenith of Korchnoi’s career. He lost a hard fought Candidates match to Garry Kasparov in 1983 and he was superseded as a credible challenger. But he continued to perform at extremely high levels until 2009 when he finally dropped out of the top 100 at the ripe old age of 78.

Viktor the Terrible, as he was named, was not an urbane, charming personality. He castigated little children and ruthlessly beat them when giving simultaneous displays. He scolded people when they beat him. He scolded people when he beat them. Anatoly Karpov complained that he was repeatedly verbally abused during play in their matches.

In fact, Korchnoi’s putdowns were epic. It was considered a rite of passage to get the rough end of his tongue. Viswanathan Anand laughs, “I have a plus score against Viktor but he’s always called me a coffee-house player”. When he was pushing 80, Viktor the Terrible beat 19-year-old GM Fabiano Caruana in 2011 (now world #3). He promptly rubbed salt into the wound saying, “You are very weak!”

His saving grace was his merciless self-criticism. In 1982, the teenaged Dibyendu Barua beat Korchnnoi (then World #2) at the Lloyd’s Bank Open in London. Barua (who was officially 15, by his birth certificate) pulled off a lovely endgame combination in a wild struggle. The Indian GM says, ” We did a post-mortem of that game for about 30 minutes. He just kept pointing out his errors. He was so angry with himself. He could not accept anything less than perfection.”

He suffered a stroke in 2012 and made only a partial recovery. But he sat in a wheelchair and played a last match against the East German great, Wolfgang Uhlmann (born 1935) in 2015. They drew 2-2 and Korchnoi characteristically castigated himself for playing “very badly”.

That search for perfection has finally ended.

Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess player