"Larry Tapper" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Nov 12, 4:40 pm, Taylor Kingston wrote:

After following these various arguments for some time, I'm still one
of the doubting Thomases who think that it is simply not known whether
Keres deliberately threw any of the Botvinnik games. That is, there
isn't enough evidence to distinguish between the two scenarios: (1)
Keres was rattled by the political pressure; and (2) Keres consciously
gave in to the political pressure. (Of course there are other
possibilities, e.g. Keres was simply in poor form or Botvinnik had his
number.)

or (3) he was exhausted?

Contextually though any lapsus on the part of Keres can be argued by
exclusion; that is, what set Keres/Botvinnik apart from all other Russian
championships so that there would be no pressure? Contexts can attain more
or less weight in any individual case - yet the context of coercian here was
the norm, no?

I trust that the _existence_ of the political pressure has never
really been in dispute, except maybe among some hard-core defenders of
the Soviet system. What we learned from the new Whyld evidence was
that the subject of Comrade Stalin preferring a Botvinnik victory was
explicitly discussed.

He gained his understanding from the Linders [father and son] when they met
in Berlin. Pity Ken didn't consult a certain GM in the Crimea, or in fact,
use second sourcing since he would corroborate the issue more fully.

The argument, Larry, is if there was coercian, there are also those who
would hide it, diminish it. Those who would are openly discussed in Russian
chess circles. In this instance we have to understand the weight of Stalin's
'preference' as an instruction to one of the 3 cultural shows put on by the
Soviets.

But even had this not happened, Keres was smart
enough to understand what he was up against. So the so-called new
revelations do not really strike me as revelations at all. This is
where Taylor Kingston and I part ways --- I thought his apparent
recantation ("The Commies did it") was no more justified by the new
evidence at hand than it already had been long before that.

It seems to me that if Evans contributed anything of value to the
debate, it had to be his experiment with forensic game analysis
("emanations from the games", as Larry Parr put it). We didn't need
Evans to inform us that as a politically suspect Estonian challenger
in 1948, Keres must have been feeling the heat.

Look Larry, its not 'heat'. Its Siberia! His Estonian background would have
weighed against him somewhat, but hob-nobbing around Germany during the war
weighed more, eh? The Soviets hardly engaged outside the Bloc until 1953
since they feared foreign agents polluting their scene [and sometimes by
reporting it!]

I think a second point is that whatever Evans can relate to us about his
opinion, and however well, we have to remember that he is not referring to
any abstraction, as if to say, by comparitive evaluations by Fritz of the
suspect games.

The psychological and social pressure on these games is a very strong
factor, and indeed, they can be invisible to most of us since we never
experienced it in our own play. But GMs do, and some have written supporting
this otherwise invisible factor. Its not like the annoyance of a rainy day
at Manhattan Beach. The context is Josef Stalin's 'preferrences'. On the
whole, he seems to have got his way even if it meant shifting a million
people or so.

It was much later in the Soviet era until any semi-open dissent appeared -
after the Age of the Dictators was in decline, and perhaps first emerged
with 'bad boy' Boris Spassky.

So if you were engaged with that subject in an earlier time, you knew there
were no exceptions tolerated without great risk being attached, even lethal
risk, and then the conversation turns to the /extent/ of 'pressure' on
various individuals, not the existence of it.

Phil Innes

Larry T.