Red Letters

This is an important work for chess history and also will be of great practical interest as numerous previously unknown or forgotten master chess games are made available in the West for the first time. The Correspondence Chess Championships of the Soviet Union were a series of high-level postal chess events held continuously from 1947 onwards and involving many leading masters and grandmasters of chess from the USSR. Many players who then or later were famous as professional grandmasters or opening theoreticians competed in these events at one time or another. On the break-up of the USSR in the 1990s, the preliminaries of the last two championships had begun and these were completed by the Russian federation with players from other nations of the former USSR. The final of the last championship was due to end in December 2001, about 10 years after the break-up of the Soviet Union; the quarter-final stages had just begun ten years earlier. Sergey Grodzensky profiles the champions and other leading personalities and presents the best games from the events. The games were collected by Tim Harding with assistance from his co-author and from German journalist and correspondence chess gr