Russian Chess Terms and Notation: A Reader's Glossary

What a Russian game score looks like

Reading a chess book in Russian is less daunting than it sounds, because the game itself is written in a notation that is mostly numbers and Latin-looking files. The squares are named as in every algebraic system, a to h and 1 to 8. What changes is the way the piece is marked, and in Russian publications that is a Cyrillic letter.

Piece	Letter	Word
King	Кр	король
Queen	Ф	ферзь (also королева)
Rook	Л	ладья
Bishop	С	слон
Knight	К	конь
Pawn	no letter	пешка

The king takes two letters, Кр, and the knight takes the single letter К, from конь, so the two are kept apart. The pawn, as in English notation, is normally not marked at all. Russian publications also traditionally write a capture with a colon where English writes x, and a checkmate may be marked with a capital X.

So a move such as Л:e5 reads as “rook takes e5”, and Кр:d2 as “king takes d2”. After an hour with the table above, most readers can follow a printed game score, even without understanding a word of the surrounding text.

The figurine shortcut

Many books skip the problem entirely. Figurine algebraic notation replaces the piece letter with its picture, so that the knight move Nc6 becomes the knight symbol followed by c6. Chess Informant pioneered this style, and it is now standard in chess literature. A reader who knows the pictures needs no letters at all, which is the main reason that books in different languages are easy to compare move by move.

The notation itself has a history that explains the Russian usage. Algebraic notation came into general use in German chess literature in the nineteenth century and was then adopted in Russian chess literature. FIDE stopped recognising descriptive notation in 1981, after which algebraic notation became the international standard. A reader who learned chess from descriptive notation will therefore find the squares of Russian books new, whereas the algebraic grid is the same in every language.

The words around the moves

The vocabulary that appears in commentary is short, and a good part of it looks borrowed from other European languages. The glossary kept by the Russian-language Wikipedia, together with its article on check, gives the following terms:

• шах: check, a position in which the king is under attack
• мат: checkmate, a position in which the king is in check and the check cannot be avoided
• пат: stalemate, a position in which the side with the move cannot make one; the game is then a draw
• ничья: a draw, the result of a game in which neither player managed to win
• взятие на проходе: en passant, the special pawn capture of an enemy pawn that has just advanced two squares
• дебют: the opening, the start of the game
• миттельшпиль: the middlegame, the main part of the game, usually following the opening
• эндшпиль, also окончание: the endgame
• цугцванг: zugzwang
• вилка: a fork, a move that attacks two or more enemy pieces at once
• гамбит: a gambit, an opening in which material, usually a pawn, is sacrificed for quick development
• жертва: a sacrifice, giving up material for a decisive or positional advantage
• зевок: a blunder, described there as a gross error that usually costs a valuable piece or the game

Дебют, миттельшпиль, эндшпиль, цугцванг and гамбит sound close to their English or German counterparts, so they are recognisable once the alphabet is known. That makes the alphabet the real first step.

A sensible order of learning

A workable sequence follows from how the language is used in chess texts. First the Cyrillic alphabet, since every other step reads it. Then the six piece names and letters from the table, then check, mate, stalemate and draw, which turn up in every annotated game. Opening names are usually proper names or borrowed words, so they need little extra effort. Terms for tactics and strategy can wait until the reader actually meets them in a text.

A parallel habit saves time: keep one book with figurine notation and one without, and compare the same game in both. After a few games the letters stop needing a lookup. The Russian glossary linked below gives definitions for most of these terms.

The background of how chess literature developed, in Russia and elsewhere, belongs to the chess history section. Readers who prefer to see how letters and symbols are encoded on screen can look at the article on Unicode chess symbols, and the computer chess section covers how databases store games independent of language.

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