Did our grandfather ever play Paul Keres, Estonia’s national chess hero? I have not been able to find out, though it is a tantalising possibility. Johannes Napp won a chess prize in 1929, and from 1932 headed up the army chess club, in Tallinn.
Keres (1916-1975) started his rise to international chess stardom at this time. He won a tournament in Pärnu in 1929, and in 1930, the Estonian secondary schools championship. In 1935 Keres tied first in the Estonian Chess Championship, and that year made his mark at the Warsaw Olympiad as part of the Estonian team.
Early on Keres had no chess books or teachers to learn from. He played instead correspondence or postal chess, entering several such tournaments. At one point he was playing 150 correspondence games at the same time.
This was a heady period for chess, and Keres was part of it, winning or joint-winning 12 tournaments between 1930 and 1938. They included Bad-Neuheim in 1936 in which Keres tied first with the world champion, Russian-born Alexander Alekhine. In 1937 Keres won Semmering-Baden, a prestigious event at which the world’s best competed.
It was also a time of Stalin putting State funding into strengthening Soviet chess, and when Nazi Germany used chess as a propaganda tool, well told in David Shenk’s 2006 masterpiece The Immortal Game: A History of Chess.
Nazis and Soviets alike were on the hunt for top chessplayers, while a young Estonian continued to win or come runner up in tournaments, and made his fame for daring and combinative play.
In 1938 the Netherlands staged a tournament of the world’s 8 top chessplayers to identify a challenger to Alekhine who had held the title since 1927 (except 1935-1937 when Dutchman Max Euwe held it). Keres won the AVRO tournament, and at 22 was ready to take on Alekhine, only the match never took place. WWII intervened and Alekhine died of cardiac arrest in 1946.
At the outbreak of war Keres was playing at the Buenos Aires Olympiad. A photo of the Estonian team graces the pages of Egon Varnusz’s book Paul Keres’ Best Games Volume II (1987). One of them was Ilmar Raud who stayed on in Argentina and later died of starvation, aged 28.
Keres returned home and won a hard-fought match against Euwe in Rotterdam. He then played in two tournaments in Moscow and Leningrad in 1940 and 1941 when Soviet and, later, German forces occupied Estonia.
Somehow, Keres was back in Tallinn by 1942, winning a tournament there, and then under a German flag won or came second in tournaments in Salzburg, Munich, Tallinn, Prague, Poznan, Salzburg, Madrid and Linköping (1944), to then return to Estonia, once more under Soviet rule.
Incredible really, that Keres (and other chessplayers) could travel to successive tournaments in wartorn Europe, and, in Keres’ case, under several nationalities. Such was the prestige of chess at the time - a war game after all - and later, in the Soviet Union. No Siberian gulag for Keres after the war.
“One of the strongest players never to become world champion,” The Mammoth Book of the World’s Greatest Chess Games (1998, revised 2020) describes Keres. His international career spanned 40 years, being among the world’s top eight players for a quarter of a century, an astonishing achievement.
Johannes Napp met a very different fate, packed off to the Russian front in 1940, and last heard of at the battle of Velikiye Luki in 1942-1943. I wonder if he came across any news of Keres during his time as a Red Army conscript. I hope so. More to come.
コメント