Alexander Alekhine

Alexander Alekhine — chess champion with roots in the Russian Empire

Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine was born in Moscow on 31 October 1892 (19 October, Old Style), the date given in his baptismal record; some sources, including his own second collection of best games, give 1 November. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Alekhine, was a landowner and a member of the Fourth State Duma; his mother, Anisya Ivanovna, née Prokhorova, was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. He learned chess from his mother and his elder brother Alexei around 1903 and was soon playing by correspondence.

At fifteen he won the Moscow Chess Club's spring tournament, and in 1909 he took the title of Russian master. In January 1914 he shared first place with Aron Nimzowitsch in the All-Russian Masters tournament, and that spring, at the great international tournament in St Petersburg, he finished third behind Emanuel Lasker and José Raúl Capablanca. The outbreak of the First World War found him leading a tournament in Mannheim, where he was interned before being released; he then served with the Red Cross on the Austrian front.

After the Revolution he worked in Moscow, was briefly detained in Odessa in 1919 on suspicion of espionage, and in October 1920 won the All-Russian Chess Olympiad in Moscow, later counted as the first Soviet championship. In 1921 he left Soviet Russia for good and settled in Paris. He became a French citizen in 1925 by most accounts; the chess historian Edward Winter, from the correspondence of the French Chess Federation, dates his naturalisation to 1927. He also studied law in Paris.

Through the early 1920s he finished at or near the top of almost every tournament he entered, and he set world records for blindfold play in 1924, 1925 and 1933. In 1927 in Buenos Aires he took the world title from Capablanca, winning six games to three with twenty-five draws in a match lasting nearly three months. He defended it twice against Efim Bogoljubov, won San Remo 1930 and Bled 1931 by wide margins, and played board one for France in five Chess Olympiads.

In 1935 he lost the title to Max Euwe of the Netherlands, and regained it from him in 1937. He held it until his death in Estoril, Portugal, on 24 March 1946 (one account gives 25 March), aged fifty-three, the only world champion to die as titleholder. His two collections, My Best Games of Chess 1908–1923 and 1924–1937, are regarded as classics, and the Alekhine Defence bears his name.

Tracing the roots — Moscow (Russia)

Born in Moscow in 1892 into a wealthy family — his father a landowner and Duma member, his mother a Prokhorov — he became a master at sixteen, finished third at St Petersburg 1914 and won the first Soviet championship in Moscow in 1920 before leaving for France in 1921.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Moscow (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition