It would have been inconceivable in the glory days of the Soviet chess empire. For the first time since 1971 when Fide, the world chess body, began publishing its rating lists – then annually and now monthly – there are no Russians ranked in the classical world top 10. Bobby Fischer was No 1 in the first Fide list, published on the eve of his Reykjavik match with Boris Spassky, but after Fischer gave up active play Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov took over.
In 1970, when the USSR team defeated the Rest of the World, or in the decades when Mikhail Botvinnik, Karpov, and Kasparov were the game’s supreme masters, it would have been a joke to suggest that Russian supremacy would disappear within half a century and be replaced by a rivalry between India and the United States.
