Moscow 1959

[Colin Patterson]

I seem to have uncovered a problem that I cannot quite resolve and wondered if anyone more knowledgeable than me in Soviet chess history might be able to help.

Most of my books (the usual tomes by Golombek, Sunnucks, Wade, Winter, Hooper & Whyld etc.) simply describe the April 1959 Moscow tournament (1-3 Bronstein, Smyslov, Spassky) as the Grand Central Chess Club tournament of 1959.

Graham Burgess, on the other hand, refers to it as the Alekhine Memorial in 'Chess Highlight of the 20th Century', as does the online database 365chess.com.

A third description exists in Di Felice (Chess Results 1956-60), where his source (Magyar Sakkelet) labels it the Chigorin Memorial.

Wikipedia has articles on both Memorials but excludes 1959 from either.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Neither my CHESS or BCM collections cover 1959 unfortunately, but there may be more definitive reference material out there anyway.

[John Saunders]

The BCM (June 1959, p177) merely refers to it as "an interesting international tournament held at Moscow in April".

[Christopher Kreuzer]

The Wikipedia article for Vasily Smyslov has a snippet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Smyslov

"He continued his winning streak at Moscow's Alekhine Memorial in 1956, a victory shared with his constant rival, Botvinnik. During this period, there were several triumphs in his city of birth, when he shared first place with Bronstein and Spassky in 1959, was a joint winner in both 1961 (with Kholmov) and 1962 (with Vasiukov), and won outright in 1963."

The majority of sources are probably correct to not call this an Alekhine or Chigorin memorial (which is not to say that the organisers at the time might not have tried to dedicate the tournament to the memory of either of the two). The best source I have found so far (by putting 'Bronstein', 'Smyslov', 'Spassky', 'april' and '1959' in a Google Books search) is this:

"In the 1959 challengers tournament he finished in fourth place, and in the same year he tied for first place with David Bronstein and Boris Spassky in the inaugural U.S.S.R. Central Chess Club international tournament."

From: 'Current Biography Yearbook 1967' - Page 394.

This link might work:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_Dy ... ss+Club%22

You might also want to follow up where this description of the event comes from on chessgames.com:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscol ... id=1018161

"The Moscow Central Chess Club organized their first international chess tournament, as an Alekhine Memorial, in 1959."

Finally, some speculation here, as to future editions of this 'Moscow International", which seems to have reached at least a 5th edition in 1963:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl ... &tid=79951

Similar confusion there over the 'Alekhine memorial' tag (lots of tournaments called Alekhine memorials without being in the same unified series), and the numbering. Searching on this name mentioned there 'Medjunarodni Turnir U Moskvi' might help.

Some more discussion of this here:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/bistro.pl?kpage=232

(Though Tim Harding might want to sit down before reading that...)

The links there (to an auction of the bulletin?) and to chess cafe.com (now behind a pay wall) no longer work.

I think the chess cafe article referred to there is by Tim Harding, so he may be able to help.

Final addendum:

https://zanchess.wordpress.com/2014/04/ ... get-dates/

That blog has preserved the Swedish auction description mentioned above.

[Leonard Barden]

My memory from decades ago when I owned the tournament bulletin is that it was the Central Chess Club tournament, and that any mention of Alekhine or Tchigorin was very low-key.

[Colin Patterson]

Thanks for your comments everyone. I hadn't realised that this was already a point of debate on cg.com. It seems that the Alekhine Memorial has more mileage than the Chigorin, but it's still not entirely convincing.

I've also discovered that the corresponding Russian Wikipedia page for the Alekhine Memorial echoes the English wiki for dates (i.e. excludes 1959) and appears to have a pretty solid reference to Karpov's Russian language encyclopedia. I'm inclined to believe that Karpov would have some idea, being a winner of the event himself.

One other contemporary source that I've just checked is Chess Review - they have an article ... but again no mention of any memorial. So for now at least, I'll settle on Central Chess Club.