On Nov 21, 7:05 pm, " wrote:

The KGB wanted to execute Keres for treason, and his family was
was also in peril. -- Larry Evans

Has this ever really been established?
In the first place, strictly speaking, the KGB (Committee for State
Security) did not exist until 1954, therefore it seems unlikely it
could have wanted to do anything in 1945 or 1946. At that time the
relevant police organ would have been the People's Commissariat for
Internal Affairs, the NKVD. Perhaps a distinction without a
difference, but it's important to keep facts straight.
All manner of rumors have floated around about Keres in the
immediate post-war years: he was arrested, he was not arrested, he was
going to be executed, he was too valuable to be executed, Botvinnik
wanted him killed, Botvinnik wanted to save him, etc. etc. Few if any
of these seem to have any basis.
Valter Heuer, a close friend of Keres, wrote extensively of Kere's
post-war travails in "The Troubled Years of Paul Keres" (New In Chess,
#4, 1995). He describes many harships, including Keres being
interrogated by police, yet he mentions no arrest at all ever taking
place. In fact, a high-ranking official in the Estonian Communist
Party, Nikolai Karotamm, was very pro-Keres.

This is not to suggest Keres was well-treated in the immediate post-
war years -- he definitely was not. As Bernard Cafferty wrote in the
BCM of February 2000:

"A document of 29th August 1946 states that ... serious compromising
material had been discovered on Keres, by reason of his collaboration
with the Germans ... and his links with active participants of the
Estonian 'bourgeois-nationalist underground'."

Such suspicions could certainly be grounds for arrest and even
execution in Stalin's USSR. But, I wonder, did any arrest actually
take place? And did anyone really want "to execute Keres [or his
family] for treason," and if so, who, and what is the evidence that
they did?