Alexander Alekhine: how the myth of Aryan chess tarnished his legacy

Alekhine and Aryan chess: the stain that will not wash out

Alexander Alekhine is the only world champion who died undefeated. He is also the one who tried to classify chess by race, a stain that no brilliant move has been able to erase. In his writings of the 1940s, under the idea of "Aryan and Jewish chess", he described an attacking, bold and artistic style as opposed to a defensive, materialistic and speculative one. The theory does not survive contact with the facts: Mikhail Tal, who was Jewish, demolished any such pigeonholing with his volcanic play.

The arbitrary list of styles

Alekhine cited Morphy, Anderssen, Philidor, Chigorin, Pillsbury, Marshall and Capablanca as examples of the "Aryan style". The great players of Jewish origin were left out or treated poorly, starting with Emanuel Lasker, whom he accused of never having contributed a single creative idea and of merely copying Paul Morphy. The irony is that Lasker had dominated the world championship for decades, and his career precisely contradicts the scheme: a pragmatism that was neither racial nor cowardly.

Exile, Spain and the end

Alekhine did not write in a vacuum. A Russian aristocrat dispossessed by the Revolution, he described himself as "a wanderer between two wars". In 1943 he fell ill with scarlet fever in France and ended up in Spain, where he lived off second-rate tournaments and private lessons. In 1945, when alleged antisemitic comments under his name were published in the Pariser Zeitung, he was excluded from the Hastings and London tournaments. He played his last match in February 1946 against the Portuguese player Francisco Lupi. He won. Shortly afterwards he died, undefeated as champion.

The authorship of those articles is still disputed. Pressure from the Nancy regime on one side; the personal bitterness of exile on the other. What is documented is the damage: a life devoted to the board ended with the player isolated, awaiting a ban that arrived just as the world was settling scores with Nancy. Meanwhile, the champion of cats — he is said to have had at least ten, and they accompanied him to tournaments — left a legacy that remains impossible to untangle: the greatest of his era, and the author of the ugliest page in the history of chess.