Living Chess in Uritsky Square: A Performance Meant to Build an Empire

Above them, from balconies and windows overlooking the square, thousands watch in silence, following every move. Somewhere in the city, in two separate rooms, sit Pyotr Romanovsky and Ilya Rabinovich, the two strongest chess players in Leningrad, calling their moves in by telephone for runners to relay to the living pieces on the ground. It's July 1924. The place is Uritsky Square, once known as Palace Square, and the game will run for hours before either side concedes.

It's tempting to tell this as a curiosity - a strange, photogenic footnote from Soviet history, good for one line in a trivia quiz. The trouble is, that framing misses the point entirely. This wasn't entertainment that happened to turn spectacular. It was the premiere of a carefully engineered state campaign, and the man behind the whole production never once set foot in the square.

His name was Nikolai Krylenko, and by trade he was anything but a chess man - a lawyer, a revolutionary, one of the leaders of the October Revolution, later the Soviet Union's chief prosecutor and Commissar for Justice. But starting in the mid-1920s, his real passion became something that, on the surface, looked almost trivial: turning chess into a weapon. Not metaphorically - Krylenko spoke about it in the literal language of military campaigning. "Chess is a mighty instrument of intellectual culture," ran one of his slogans. "Chess is an instrument of politics," ran another. Under his direction, the 1924 All-Union Chess and Checkers Congress centralised the entire movement under the state's Supreme Council of Physical Culture, with one clear aim: a chess circle in every factory, every military club, every student dormitory, every reading hut in the most remote village.

The living game in Uritsky Square wasn't a side amusement thrown into the middle of that campaign. It was its single most effective advertisement. That very same year, Soviet authorities opened organised chess circles to children for the first time - until then, the circles had been reserved for adults. Krylenko also launched his own magazine, 64, which is still published today, nearly a century later. The point of the whole machine was never to teach citizens the rules of the game. The point was to make them the best in the world at it, and to let that superiority, demonstrated publicly, stand as proof that the entire system - not just the chess, the politics behind it - was superior to anyone else's.

Krylenko himself never lived to see the plan pay off. He was arrested in 1938, during the Great Purge, and executed that same year - one of thousands of victims of the very system he'd helped build. The machine he'd set in motion, however, kept running without him. Seven years after his death, in 1945, Soviet and American teams played a radio chess match, exchanging moves by telegraph without ever meeting in person, not unlike Romanovsky and Rabinovich two decades earlier, only across a much greater distance. The United States, which had dominated the world chess Olympiads up to that point, lost 15½ to 4½. The defeat stunned the chess world and marked the start of an era in which Soviet grandmasters - Botvinnik, and later Spassky, Karpov, Kasparov - would rule the top of world chess almost without interruption for the rest of the century.

Mikhail Botvinnik, the first Soviet world champion, later described Krylenko's presence in those years, in his own autobiography, as something he felt even when the man wasn't physically in the room - an "invisible presence," as he called it. Something like a ghost who had set the whole discipline's direction, without ever living to see where that direction actually led.

Add it all up, and the scene in Uritsky Square takes on an entirely different weight. What looks like an eccentric photograph from the 1920s - soldiers standing in for pawns, cavalry standing in for knights, two men commanding human bodies across a square by telephone - was, in fact, the opening of a game that would go on being played for the next seventy years, with ambitions far bigger than one square. Krylenko set the first pieces down. He lived to see neither the first casualty nor the checkmate. The square has long since emptied, the chalk long since washed off the cobblestones - but the game he set in motion that evening is, in one sense, still being played.