On Nov 19, 5:07 pm, Taylor Kingston wrote:
I agree that Botvinnik would probably have preferred to play
Boleslavsky, against whom he had a big plus score, but apparently he
was either unaware of Vainstein's manipulations, or he lacked
sufficient influence to counter them,

This bears on a point I forgot to make.

It seems to be a mistake to assume that there was only one view in the
upper circles of Soviet chess. There were usually several centres of
power, and even Botvinnik could be defeated politically.

I seem to recall a CL&R column (in the Parr years) by Alburt in which
he commented that both Karpov and Kasparov had Kremlin connections,
but different and opposing ones. This does not appear to have been a
new situation.

or he simply chose not to do
anything about them while the tournament was going on. But he was not
about to accept being odd man out in a triangular event.

That would be easy to fight against, as it would involve getting FIDE
to overthrow its new system, and the Soviets wanted to look like
reliable FIDE supporters.


William Hyde