Ideas, Openings & Improvement

The United States had won four straight Olympiads. Then, over four days of radio transmissions, the Soviet Union announced it was about to own the sport for fifty years.

One Soviet official decided chess could raise the cultural level of the working class. What followed was the most successful state chess program the sport has ever seen.

Three separate stories, a radio match, a defection, a world championship, tell one story when placed side by side: for fifty years, a chessboard was one of the Cold War's actual battlefields.