Red Pawns, Red Soldiers: How the Bolsheviks built a chess superpower

The latest Chess Olympiad began in Samarkand, a historic city in Uzbekistan, this week. Uzbekistan has been making huge strides in chess. The current challenger to D. Gukesh's world championship title is Javokhir Sindarov, a young phenom from Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan won gold in the 2022 Olympiad in Chennai. It is also no coincidence that Uzbekistan was once a Soviet republic like many other modern powerhouse nations in chess.The erstwhile Soviet Union entered the Chess Olympiad for the first time in 1952 in Helsinki and won it. Between its first appearance in 1952 and final appearance in 1990, it participated in nineteen Olympiads and won eighteen while finishing second in the lone Olympiad it did not win.After the collapse of the USSR, Russia won the next six Olympiads in succession between 1992 and 2002.