Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of duty in the Soviet embassy in Peru, he turned
to journalism and worked on
Ogonek,
by the
1980s a liberal voice, supportive of Mikhail
GOR
-
BACHEV
's glasnost (openness) campaign. The edi-
tor in chief, Vitali Korotich, sent Borovik to
cover the
AFGHANISTAN
War. Borovik's accounts
of the war were distinguished by their honesty
and sensitivity in portraying the horrors of war
for young Soviet soldiers. A product of the cul-
tural elite of the late Soviet era, like his father,
he moved easily between the worlds of Soviet
and international journalism. A translation of his
writings on the Afghan war,
The Hidden War: A
Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in
Afghanistan,
was first published in English to
some acclaim in 1992. Artyom Borovik was
killed in an airplane crash on March 9, 2000,
with eight others on a charter flight going from
Moscow to Kiev.
onship, he spent most of World War II using his
engineering skills at a high-tension laboratory in
the Urals, for which he later received an Order of
the Badge of Honor. By the end of the war
Botvinnik had emerged as the almost unchal-
lengeable dominant Soviet chess player, winning
back-to-back USSR championships in 1944 and
1945. Negotiations were in progress for a highly
anticipated match with Alexander
ALEKHINE
, the
eccentric Russian émigré and then world cham-
pion, when Alekhine died in Portugal in 1946.
The world title remained vacant until 1948,
when the 34-year-old Botvinnik won a special
tournament organized by the International
Chess Federation. For the next 25 years, Botvin-
nik held the title from 1948 to 1956, 1958 to
1960, and 1961 to 1963, losing only to Vasily
Smyslov in 1957 and Mikhail
TAL
in 1960, before
reclaiming his title. Known for his orderly, prag-
matic, even cold approach to chess, Botvinnik
became, more than any other Soviet player of
his era, the exemplar of the superiority of the
Soviet chess “system” and, hence, in the ideo-
logical context of the cold war, of the superiority
of the Soviet system itself. By 1963, when he lost
the world title to Tigran
PETROSIAN
, Botvinnik
was no longer able to keep up a young cadre of,
mostly Soviet, contenders. Although he won the
Hastings Tournament in 1966, he announced his
retirement in 1970 and returned to his other
intellectual passions: electrotechnical theory and
computer chess programs.
Botvinnik, Mikhail Moiseevich
(1911-1995)
chess player
One of the greatest Russian and world chess
players of all time, Botvinnik held the title of
world champion for all but two years from
1948 to 1965. Botvinnik was born in St. Peters-
burg to a dental technician and a dentist who
separated when he was nine. He started play-
ing chess at the age of 12. Two years later, in
1925, the first intimation of future greatness
came when he defeated the then world cham-
pion, José Raul Capablanca, in a simultaneous
exhibition. Although he won the title of chess
master in 1927, he did not devote himself full
time to chess until he completed his engineering
studies at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in
1933. By then he had won two Soviet chess
championships, in 1931 and 1933. His first major
international victory came in 1935 at the Mos-
cow International, where he tied for first with
Salo Flohr, For the rest of the 1930s, Botvinnik
continued to consolidate his position as one of
the rising young stars in international chess.
After winning the 1941 USSR chess champi-
Breshko-Breshkovskaia, Ekaterina
Konstantinovna
(1844-1934)
revolutionary
Affectionately known as the “Grandmother” of
the Russian Revolution, Breshko-Breshkovskaia
participated through all the major stages of the
revolutionary movement between 1861 and
1917. Like other revolutionaries of her genera-
tion, Breshko-Breshkovskaia was born into a
noble serf-owning family and was disillusioned
by the terms under which serfs were emanci-
pated in 1861. Under the influence of populist
Search WWH ::
Custom Search