On Nov 19, 6:19 pm, William Hyde wrote:
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.

Quite so. As I wrote in 2001 (http://www.chesscafe.com/text/
skittles165.pdf), on the question of whether coercion on Keres might
have continued after 1948:

"Cafferty points out that in mid-1954, Botvinnik suffered something
of a fall from grace, the result of a 4-page letter he wrote to the
leaders of the new post-Stalin regime, which appeared in the Russian
journal Istorichesky Arkhiv (#2/1993, pp. 58-67). The letter dealt
with the highly-charged topic of socialist revolution in western
countries. Evidently its ideas were too unorthodox. The official reply
from the Central Committee was sternly critical, going so far as to
suggest that Botvinnik might not belong in the Communist Party!
Botvinnik apparently recanted his heresy, but the damage was done.
Cafferty says 'So, Botvinnik was not in such good standing with the CP
after 1954, when the emergence of other challengers meant that support
of [Botvinnik] was no longer such a vital government priority.'"

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