17 May 2015
“Chess In 1941-1945” Exhibition in the RCF Chess Museum
The exhibition opens on May 19 and will display many unique items.
The exhibition “Chess during war. 1941-1945” opens in the RCF Chess Museum on May 19 at 5 pm local time. Many unique documents and items will be displayed for the first time, revealing the role of chess during the hardest period in our country's history.
Among the items is the only chess book published during the war, a chess manual that traveled the whole war with its owner, unique crosstables of the Leningrad championships of the blockade period, a scoresheet with the key game of one of the championships, materials about Moscow chess life of 1941, a newspaper “Women chess players in hospitals” of 1944, which was stored in an inconspicuous roll for decades, photos and documents of top chess players working in hospitals for the wounded soldiers, a poster of Kuibyshev tournament of 1942, that was played not too far from the Stalingrad battle, a poster inviting schoolboys to the Leningrad Pioneer Palace and its chess section in 1944, many chess-related photographs from the battlefront, tournament reports, chess cartoons.
There is also a photo of Soviet participants of the first post-war international tournament with the fallen Reichstag on the background, fulfilling Samuel Marshak's promise “We gave a check on Dnepr and will checkmate in Berlin!” (an excerpt from the poem written for the 13th USSR Chess Championship).
