Red Pawns, Red Soldiers: How the Bolsheviks built a chess superpower

 In his latest Grandmaster View column, 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. From Ilyin-Zhenevsky and the Red Army to Botvinnik, Tal, Karpov and Kasparov, Aarav traces how a century-old state-backed experiment helped build the Soviet chess machine, and a legacy that still shapes the chess world today. In his latest Grandmaster View column, 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. From Ilyin-Zhenevsky and the Red Army to Botvinnik, Tal, Karpov and Kasparov, Aarav traces how a century-old state-backed experiment helped build the Soviet chess machine, and a legacy that still shapes the chess world today.