According to D. J. Richards in his noted text ‘Soviet Chess’ (1965), whose presented mode of history would not stand up in our post-modern world, there are two things we can jot down regarding Soviet chess history in the early 50s but don’t ask me which is more surprising: more than ‘100,000’ ‘from the countryside’ competing actively or that chess was not part of the national curriculum in schools (up to time of publication of course).
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