Mikhail Botvinnik was born in August 1911 in the holiday village of Kuokkala on the Karelian Isthmus. Now Botvinnik’s small homeland is called Repino in honor of its most famous resident, the Russian artist Ilya Repin.
First successes in chess
In the first decades of the 20th century, celebrities visited the village — from the singer Fyodor Chaliapin to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. If someone had a toothache, they turned to parents of the future grandmaster: mother Shifra (Serafima) Samoilovna Rabinovich worked as a dentist, and father Moses Girshovich Botvinnik made dentures.
The chess player’s parents were Jews; they were also united by a revolutionary past. The father forbade the mother to speak Yiddish with the children so that they would assimilate successfully.
Botvinnik started playing chess only at the age of 12, before that he was interested in photography and gymnastics. At the age of 20, Botvinnik became the USSR champion for the first time, and in August 1933 he received the title for the second time.
Becoming a chess player Botvinnik was not poor. Already at the age of 25, he had a black GAZ‑A and a document for free refueling in Moscow, which was signed by Joseph Stalin.
Victory at the World Championship and work in science
Botvinnik became the strongest chess player in the world only in 1948: It was not only the war that interfered, but also science. In the period from 1948 to 1951, Botvinnik did not play in a single tournament, devoting himself to his doctoral dissertation.
Botvinnik worked at the All-Union Electric Power Research Institute for more than 50 years. He became a Doctor of Science, designed and developed asynchronized turbogenerators that worked at power plants in the USSR.
Botvinnik so was impressed by the scale of the Chernobyl disaster, which appealed to the Soviet authorities with a request to move all nuclear power plants to the Far North, then transferring their energy to the mainland. However, I did not receive a response to my proposal.
Botvinnik became the first Soviet world chess champion and the sixth in the history of the game. He won the world title three times, and in total played 1202 games in chess competitions at various levels, scoring almost 70% of the points.
Life after career
After finishing his career, Botvinni created his own school, where he trained many grandmasters. He tried to use the achievements of chess theory to create artificial intelligence, including chess computers.
Botvinnik died on May 5, 1995 in Moscow from pancreatic cancer. As the nephew of the world champion Igor Botvinnik recalled, Mikhail Moiseevich died in full consciousness, with the greatest courage and dignity, and on the eve of his death he gave his relatives comprehensive instructions on the procedure for organizing the funeral.
Botvinnik left behind a child — daughter Olga. The chess player believed that a child should start learning as late as possible, so he forbade his daughter to read until she was six years old. This did not stop Olga from becoming a candidate of technical sciences, an employee of the O. Yu. Schmidt Institute of Earth Physics.