Boris Spassky arrived in Reykjavik in 1972 with two national academies of science behind him. Bobby Fischer arrived late, alone and furious about the television cameras.

Both governments understood exactly what that imbalance implied, which is why the loss cost Moscow far more than a trophy.

What the Soviet state had actually built

Soviet chess was a program with paperwork, and the paperwork survives. In his political history of the game in the USSR, the historian Michael Hudson documents the slogans adopted by the state Chess Section in the 1920s under Nikolai Krylenko, the Bolshevik prosecutor who ran it. Chess as a powerful weapon of intellectual culture. Chess in every workers’ club and every peasant reading room. Krylenko’s brief ran two ways at once: raise the cultural level of the masses, and manufacture masters who could beat anyone. Hudson’s verdict on where that led is blunt: he calls Soviet control of the world title an important weapon on the cultural front of the Cold War.

Delivery was the impressive part. Records compiled by the archivists at Soviet Chess History show the 1924 All-Union Chess and Checkers Congress centralising the game under the Supreme Council of Physical Culture. From there it was pushed out through trade unions, factory clubs, schools, army units and village reading rooms until it stopped looking like a hobby and started looking like plumbing.

Why losing carried a bill

Nikolai Romanov, who chaired the USSR Committee on Physical Culture and Sport after the war, described the logic in his memoirs with startling candour. In a passage quoted by the Human Rights Foundation, he explained that once the Soviet Union chose to compete abroad it was obliged to guarantee victory, because the alternative was a Western press corps using any defeat to smear the whole nation. Permission to travel, he wrote, required a personal note to Stalin promising the win.

Sit with the mechanics of that for a second. An athlete’s exit visa was contingent on a result that had not happened yet.

That arrangement carries an obvious flaw. A state which treats a scoreboard as evidence for its ideology has signed up to win every time, indefinitely, against everybody.

Eight grandmasters, two academies and a laboratory

The support built around Spassky is catalogued by his coach Nikolai Krogius in a biography of the champion, excerpted and translated on Chess.com. A consultative committee was convened: Botvinnik, Smyslov, Petrosian, Tal, Keres, Kotov, Korchnoi and Averbakh. The Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences were brought in for diet, conditioning and recovery, working alongside a chess laboratory created for the occasion. Five of those grandmasters filled out a written questionnaire on how to beat Fischer. A training camp outside Moscow chewed through roughly five hundred of his games. Spassky himself went on 500 roubles a month, worth a Soviet minister’s salary, plus a better flat.

Fischer, per the same account, worked by himself. Kotov, who had watched the American demolish Mark Taimanov six games to nil, reported back that he analysed his adjourned positions alone, without seconds. His federation could not have funded a laboratory if it had wanted one.

So the inference sitting on the board in Reykjavik was awkward. A game the USSR had industrialised for fifty years was about to be taken by one self-taught man from Brooklyn with no institution behind him. Every other claim resting on that same reasoning was suddenly up for debate, and the debate would happen in Washington and Bonn and London.

Washington had done its own arithmetic

“America wants you to go over there and beat the Russians.” Henry Kissinger said it down a telephone line to a stalling Fischer on 3 July 1972, and declassified transcripts published by the National Security Archive show the call was set up after the broadcaster David Frost asked him to intervene. Those records also catch Kissinger joking to a Time correspondent that Fischer’s participation gave him cover for a meeting with Le Duc Tho. By November he was advising Nixon  against inviting Spassky to the United States, on the strength of rumours the beaten Soviet champion might defect.

What happened to the man who lost

Did the establishment break him? Not straight away. Spassky went down 12.5 to 8.5, and Fischer took the title when Spassky resigned game twenty-one by telephone rather than resume an adjourned position he had already lost. Years afterward, in Chess.com’s account of his life, he sounds close to grateful, describing the day the title left him as something other than unhappy.

The real penalty arrived a decade later, and for a different reason. Spassky later said that winning first prize at Linares in 1983, ahead of Karpov, was what set it off. He was living in France by then but still playing under the Soviet flag. Karpov’s fury cost him that flag, and with it his stipend from the Sports Committee.

Moscow’s answer to 1972 was Anatoly Karpov, who reclaimed the championship in 1975 without playing a move, because Fischer refused to defend it under the conditions on offer.

So the machine won its championship back on a forfeit, from a man who had proved it beatable exactly once and then walked away from the board for good. The defeat Krylenko’s successors spent five decades insuring against turned out to be survivable. Both sides kept their story. Only one of them had to keep paying the premiums.