Selected Games

Peter Romanovsky (1892-1964) was Soviet chess champion in 1923 (outright) and 1927 (jointly with Bogatyrchuk). According to Chessmetrics he was ranked 12th in the world in 1925. Romanovsky was also one of Soviet chess’s greatest teachers, standing at the very foundation of the Soviet Chess School. His pupils included Averbakh, Zak, Alatortsev, Lisitsin and many others, and he provided much guidance to Botvinnik in his early career. Author of 16 books, Romanovsky stood for active, fighting and objective chess where the requirements of the position took precedence over positional rules of thumb. The first half of this book comprises a detailed biography written by chess historian and world chess composition champion Sergei Tkachenko. Tkachenko tells the incredible story of a man who spent nearly a year as a captive in Germany at the start of WWI after participating in the Mannheim chess events of 1914, endured the hardships of Civil War and NEP Russia, won two Soviet championships and lived through the horrors of the Siege of Leningrad in 1941-42, suffering unspeakable family tragedy as he did so. Romanovsky narrowly escaped an early death on three separate occasions.