White king and red queen
Subtitle: how the Cold War was fought on the chessboard
By: Daniel Johnson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780547133379
Subjects: History; World politics; Tournaments; Chess; Chess players
Description: Journalist, scholar, and chess enthusiast Daniel Johnson is our guide to one of history's most remarkable periods, when chess matches were front-page news and captured the world's imagination. The Cold War played out in many areas: geopolitical alliances, military coalitions, espionage, the arms race, proxy wars--and chess. An essential pastime of Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries, later adopted by the Communists as a symbol of Soviet power, chess was inextricably linked to the rise and fall of the "evil empire." This narrative recounts the singular part the Immortal Game played in the Cold War, from chess's role in the Russian Revolution, to the 1945 radio match when the Soviets crushed the Americans, to the epic contest between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972 at the height of détente, when Kissinger told Fischer to "go over there and beat the Russians," to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.--From publisher description.
Notes: Originally published: London : Atlantic Books, 2007.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [331-337) and index.
Table of contents: title: From Baghdad to St. Petersburg; title: The recreation of the revolution; title: Terror; title: The opium of the intellectuals; title: The émigrés; title: The patriarch and his progeny; title: The Jewish factor; title: The American way of chess; title: Bobby's odyssey; title: An achilles without an achilles heel; title: The death of Hector; title: The machine age; title: Defying the evil empire; title: The yogi versus the commissar; title: Soviet endgame : Kasparov versus Karpov; title: After the Cold War.