5 May 2015
A Book Devoted to 70 Years of Victory is Published in Yekaterinburg
Book presentation was made on April 25.
This unique edition was presented at the regional seniors tournament in Yekaterinburg on April 25 – 26.
This book is dedicated to those chess players of Sverdlovsk (former name of Yekaterinburg) of a pre-war period who died during the Great Patriotic War and bears the title They Did Not Return from the Battle Front.
The first part of the publication presents an essay of the well-known Yekaterinburg trainer and Master of Sports Anatoly Terentiev about chess life in Sverdlovsk within the period from 1941 to 1945.
“Very few people are aware today”, explains the president of the Chess Federation of the Sverdlovsk Region Igor Chernogolov, “that during the war a lot of well-known Soviet chess players were evacuated to the Ural Region and made their contribution to the overall victory in the War. During the four years of war there were organized and carried out more than 800 simultaneous games, 220 chess tournaments and 300 lectures, which took place in the hospitals and military units of the Sverdlovsk Garrison.”
The second part of the book refers directly to those chess players of Sverdlovsk who were summoned to the battle front in the beginning of the war and never returned home.
According to the 2014 Russian Champion Grandmaster Igor Lysyj, the authors managed to carry out a tremendous amount of work in order to retrieve all pieces of information about these players.
"This book,” adds Igor Lysyj, “is a collection of unique photos and chess games of those years. The majority of them is published for the first time. The retrieved archive records allowed to restore as much as possible the life history of five Sverdlovsk chess players who participated and were even winners or prize-winners of some large-scale local chess competitions during the years that preceded the outbreak of War. It suffices to read just a chapter about the two-time Sverdlovsk Youth Champion Yuri Komarov, Gymnasium No. 9 graduate, whose real name and death circumstances have remained unknown until this day."
This, however, is not the end of the work on the book. The press-secretary of the Regional Chess Federation Konstantin Bronnikov clarifies that the search for information on the pre-war chess players of Sverdlovsk is in progress.
Already after the first edition of the book was published there were discovered more data about several other residents of the city who played in chess competitions in Sverdlovsk in the pre-war period. These materials are planned to be added to the second edition of the collected book.
It is necessary to mention that the book was printed in a rather limited circulation. However, the press service of the Chess Federation of the Sverdlovsk Region intends to post online version of a number of selected chapters on its own website for a wide readership. The first several chapters will be posted on the web resource as soon as the first days of May.
Information prepared by Konstantin Bronnikov
