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Hosted by The following is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript by Hans Kmoch
(1894-1973). Kmoch’s career as a player, journalist, and arbiter brought him
Mark Donlan into contact with some of the greatest players of all time. We extend our thanks
to Burt Hochberg, who owns the manuscript, for allowing us to publish this
excerpt, which he has edited especially for the ChessCafe.

Grandmasters I Have Known

by Hans Kmoch

Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine, “doctor juris” (1892-1946)

In 1971, amid the excitement over Bobby Fischer’s assault on Boris Spassky,
there was cause to remember one of the greatest figures in all of chess history.
Chess Mazes
by Bruce Alberston
Alekhine, who had died twenty-five years earlier while still holding the title of
world champion.

Some time ago I wrote an article about Alekhine called “Alekhine and His
Luck.” Since he was a contemporary of mine whom I had known well for many
years, I felt I could avoid the usual presentation of him as a great chess genius
and paragon of virtue. Instead, I wrote about his personality and about my own
experiences with him, which meant showing him to be, among other things, an
alcoholic, a political opportunist, and an anti-Semite in the Nazi style.

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When my article appeared in the Deutsche Schachzeitung, a Berlin chess

magazine, it met with considerable disparagement on the part of some ardent
Aryans. One German professor insisted that he had never seen Alekhine drunk
and that therefore Alekhine could not have been an alcoholic. Another German
professor explained everything by pointing out my own inferiority. A man who
used to belong to an Aryans-only chess club in Vienna condemned my article as
irreconcilable with the fact that I had once held the position of Alekhine’s
second. A famous non-German musician, employed in the United States,
expressed his contempt both for me and for the publisher of my article.

The present article is, by and large, an English version of that article. There are
two details I want to add. One is the way I spell his name here “Alekhine”
became the only correct spelling in the Latin alphabet when its bearer took
French citizenship. I should also point out that Alekhine obtained his doctorate,
to use his own words, “in the regular way, not just ‘honoris causa’, like
Emanuel Lasker.” Alekhine never practiced law, however, nor did he ever sign
his name “Dr.” [Footnote 1: According to records in the Hanon W. Russell
archives, Alekhine never completed his doctoral studies and thus did not
actually receive his doctorate. Although Kmoch may never have seen Alekhine
use “Dr.” with his signature, there are many examples of the “Dr.” signature in
the Russell archives. B.H.]

Alekhine’s savior was his third wife, Nadasha (or Natasha), whom he married
in Paris, where they both lived, in 1925, shortly before the tournament that year
in Baden-Baden. Like Alekhine, Nadasha came from a wealthy Russian family
and was well educated. In addition to Russian, she spoke German, French, and
English, and knew everything about etiquette. She always acted decently and
displayed exquisite taste in matters of art.

In appearance, however, this perfect lady was perfectly ridiculous, always

conspicuously dressed and loaded down with costume jewelry. Once when the
Alekhines’ were staying in Vienna, my hometown, and my wife had taken
Nadasha out to tea a few times, I heard waiters in the cafe refer to her among
themselves as “the Christmas tree.” Adding to the strange impression she made
was her posture, which suggested an imminent family event a possibility that
her wrinkled face irrefutably denied. When at Baden-Baden the rumor spread
that Madame Alekhine had previously been widowed first by a general and then
by an admiral, Grünfeld estimated that her age must have been somewhere
between seventy and eighty. “It takes time to become a general or an admiral,”
he reasoned, apparently assuming that she had married two cadets.

Nadasha’s motherly care and moral guidance nurtured her “Shura” to the world
championship in 1927 and to the pinnacle of a fantastic tournament career with
first prizes at San Remo 1930 and Bled 1931.

At Bled, Alekhine’s superiority drove the proud Nimzovich to despair. When he

resigned to the world champion after only nineteen moves he was near tears.
“It’s incredible,” he complained. “Only a few years ago we were all about
equal,” he said, referring to the chess elite of that time, “but now he treats us

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like patzers.”

It was also at Bled that Alekhine started to indulge openly in unrestrained

drinking. One day, when he joined our wives and me at afternoon tea, his
behavior was erratic and he had difficulty speaking. When he snuffed out his
cigarette in my wife’s cake, Nadasha rose and led him away. Returning alone
after a few minutes, she said to my wife, in grammatically broken German,
“Excuse me, dear. Alekhine – Russian pig. Now sleeping like child.”

At the closing ceremony of that tournament, Kostic, that inveterate enfant

terrible, caused some further painful embarrassment by calling from his end of
the table to the other end, where the world champion was sitting next to a few
high officials, “Herr Alekhine!” he always called him “Herr.” “What was it that
made you so drunk yesterday, cognac or klekovaca?” (Klekovaca is the Slovene
equivalent of gin.) Alekhine mumbled some denial, but Kostic persisted. “Of
course you were drunk! How else could I have beaten you seven to one? I’m
very good at skittles, that’s true but seven to one is too much!”

Sometime earlier I had had an experience of my own with respect to Alekhine’s

drinking. On the Riviera, where my wife and I were vacationing shortly after
the San Remo tournament, we happened to meet Alekhine. He was alone, and
the lack of Nadasha’s care was grotesquely apparent. He was unshaved and
sloppily dressed, ate his breakfast of hard-boiled eggs with dirty bare hands,
and washed down his food with gulps of vermouth. On another day, when his
breakfast consisted of cold cuts and a bottle of champagne, he hardly touched
his food but emptied the bottle quickly.

One night when I was out dancing with my wife, Alekhine entered the place
just as the band was beginning a Viennese waltz. Alekhine never danced, but on
this occasion, though for obvious reasons he was unsteady on his feet, he asked
my wife to join him in the waltz. The result was that they both had to be helped
up from the floor. We left immediately and I took Alekhine home. There was a
moment of anxiety when the world champion, in the process of entering the
taxi, almost propelled himself out the other side. [Footnote 2: Readers familiar
with Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Defense will recall a crucial scene in which
Luzhin, Nabokov’s chess grandmaster, falls out of a taxi in precisely this way.
B.H.]

Sometime between Bled 1931 and his 1934 match against Bogolybov, Shura
dropped Nadasha. A fourth wife undertook to carry Alekhine’s luck, but she
bore him to his doom. Madame Number Four was an American, also of
advanced age, in appearance more a barren trunk than a Christmas tree. She
lived in France, where she owned an old castle as well as some land suitable,
according to Alekhine, for raising sheep. (When I asked him how many sheep
they had, he admitted that there were only two “but two is enough, as Adam and
Eve proved.”) When she was younger, Madame had been a very skillful painter
of miniatures, but while married to Alekhine she no longer pursued that hobby.

Unfortunately, Madame Number Four liked liquor as much as her husband did.

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Both were drinking heavily during Alekhine’s 1934 match against Bogolyubov,
which was played in several cities in Europe. I acted as Alekhine’s second
(which today means being almost a partner, but in those days was hardly more
than a formality). One day in Munich Alekhine invited me to his room, where
Mrs. Alekhine played hostess. She opened a large trunk, which, to my
amazement, contained nothing but liquor bottles – a traveling bar. I had a
feeling of foreboding for the man whose chess genius I so greatly admired.

A major scandal occurred when the three games at Munich were finished and
the whole chess troupe was about to leave for Bayreuth, where the next game
was scheduled. The special cars for the trip and all the passengers had been
ready for a long time, but the Alekhines’ kept them waiting. Eventually,
Madame appeared alone in the hotel lobby, very drunk, and shouting, “We
won’t play! We won’t play!”

The organizers finally succeeded somehow in loading both Alekhines’ into one
of the cars. The trip took all night, and although the next game started ten or
twelve hours later, Alekhine won.

It is incredible how long Alekhine remained on top despite his pernicious

addiction to alcohol. Euwe’s victory in their 1935 match for the world
championship must not be underestimated, especially because for exactly half
the match Alekhine totally abstained from alcohol. But neither should
Alekhine’s recovery of the title in 1937 be overrated, since in that match Euwe
was the victim of public opinion in his native Holland that favored him so
strongly that even his sober mathematical mind was muddled by over-optimism.

Alekhine’s powers started to wane in 1935, and although he avoided alcohol

completely for the next five years the years of the great tournaments at
Nottingham 1936, Kemeri 1937, and AVRO 1938 his decline continued. He
was still great, but he was no longer unique.

Alekhine’s views on many subjects changed often over the years, probably due
in part to the effects of alcohol. During the 1934 match with Bogolyubov,
Sportführer von Tschammer und Osten, a leading Nazi, invited the entire chess
troupe to a banquet, where Alekhine was a guest speaker. During his speech,
which he gave in German, he referred to the leaders of the Soviet Union by
saying, “Die Schufte müssen verschwinden” (these scoundrels must disappear).
But Alekhine soon sought the favors of these “scoundrels.”

Thanks to Euwe’s victory in the world championship, there was a chess boom
in Holland after 1935, and during important chess events Russian chess editors
called daily from Moscow to ask (usually me) for the latest news. When
Alekhine found out about this, he became very eager to receive one of these
calls himself. Reports by Flohr and Fine, and probably some other “explorers”
of the Soviet Union, had convinced him that a chess tour in the country of his
birth might be very profitable. He could earn as many rubles as he wished and
convert them into jewelry, and in that way take his earnings out of Russia to his
new homeland, France. He was fishing for an invitation to the Soviet Union.

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After the 1939 Olympiad in Buenos Aires, Alekhine sent me a friendly card
from France. It was the last message I ever received from him. The war in the
West started, France collapsed, and Alekhine, who was serving as a sanitation
officer in the French army, landed in Toulon. There he met an old friend of
mine, an antiques dealer from Vienna, and together they made plans for a dash
for freedom across the Pyrenees. But on the crucial day Alekhine changed his
mind and returned to Paris, where he surrendered to the Germans. My friend
fled alone and eventually reached New York with one dollar in his pocket. He
became a well-to-do American citizen, a dealer in antiquities. For many years
he was an ardent chess player at the Manhattan Chess Club. Walter Ephron was
his name. He died in New York in 1972, at the age of seventy-seven.

The German victories in Russia apparently changed Alekhine. On his return to

Paris he returned also to the bottle. Then he suddenly attacked the Jews in a
series of articles for Die Deutsche Zeitung in den Niederlanden, a Nazi
newspaper published in occupied Holland. Under the headline “Aryan and
Jewish Chess,” he pointed out that many players whom the chess world had up
to that time considered the greatest of masters were in fact, since they were
Jews, rather mediocre. The Jew Reuben Fine would not be the next world
champion, he now asserted, contrary to his own prediction before the war.
Referring to the match he had lost to Euwe in 1935, he attributed his defeat to
the religion of my wife “Referee Kmoch,” he wrote, “has a Jewish wife, so one
can imagine how objective he was.”

Such nonsense was normally unfit to print, but given the conditions in Europe
at that time it was threatening in the extreme. Under the watchful eye of the
Gestapo, such statements could mean death for the attacked Jew and even for
his or her non-Jewish spouse. Since my wife and I were already in constant fear
that she might be deported, Alekhine’s accusation was very frightening.

Much later, some noble whitewashers, people of the same category as the above-
mentioned German professors, explained that Alekhine had been forced to write
those infamous articles. But that is simply a variant of the story of the drunkard
who befouls his pants and then wonders who might have done it.

While reading those articles, I remembered that Alekhine used to get angry if
his name was pronounced Al-YOH-khin, the way Russians sometimes
pronounced it. The correct Russian pronunciation, he said, was Al-YEH-khin,
explaining that the name was derived from that of a tree (‘alyesha’) that grew
abundantly near one of his family’s estates. “Al-YOH-khin,” he claimed, was a
Yiddish distortion of his name, like Trotsky for Troitsky or Feigl for the
German Vogel. But strangely, no one whom I ever heard pronounce the name
Al-YOH-khin was Jewish. One was a friendly elderly gentleman named (I
believe) Tereshchenko. A Russian émigré like Alekhine, he had been named to
the position of Alekhine’s second in the 1929 match against Bogolyubov
mainly to please the world champion. He immediately antagonized Alekhine by
addressing him as “Gospodin [Mr.] Alyokhin.”

Alekhine once told me that his family originally owned seven estates. The five

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from his father’s side, worth two million rubles in gold, had been gambled away
by his father in Monte Carlo. The world champion apparently had been hoping
for some time that the Germans would restore to him the two estates left by his
mother. He was the only heir; his brother, whom I met in Moscow during the
1925 tournament, was murdered shortly afterward in connection with a love
affair, according to newspaper reports outside Russia. There was a great deal of
tragedy in his family.

After his return to Paris and his debut as an anti-Semitic author, Alekhine went
to Germany and then to occupied Poland, where he lived most of the time.
There he was an esteemed guest of Governor Hans Frank, who became known
as the “Butcher of the Poles” and was hanged as such at Nuremberg. I had met
Reichminister Frank several times during the 1934 match. He displayed a
genuine interest in chess and showed no hostility toward the Jews Mieses and
Nimzovich, who were there as reporters. I never quite understood how Frank
could have become such a monster in Poland.

When it became obvious that Germany was losing the war, Alekhine fled to
Spain on the pretext of participating in a tournament there. But when he arrived,
instead of entering the tournament he claimed he was ill, and he remained ill
even later, thus avoiding having to return to Germany. He was not eager to
return to Nazi-controlled France either, since his service as a French officer
during the war might have counted heavily against him. He was now having to
deal with the consequences of the politically dangerous path he had chosen (a
path similar to but not quite so dangerous as that of the Soviet chess master Dr.
B., now living in North America, who had accepted a high rank in the pro-Nazi
Russian army of General Vlassov.) [Footnote 3: Only the initial is given in both
the German and English manuscripts of Kmoch’s book. Who “Dr. B.” might be
is anybody’s guess. B.H.] He was not welcome in England, either. Although the
organizers of the London 1946 tournament would have been delighted with the
participation of the world champion, they refrained from inviting Alekhine
because of his wartime activities. Alekhine never again left the neutral territory
beyond the Pyrenees.

Once while traveling in German-occupied territory, Alekhine contracted scarlet

fever. This was in Prague, where Réti had died of the same malady in 1929.
Alekhine recovered, thanks to his good physical condition, but his heavy
drinking probably had done too much damage. Alexander Alexandrovich
Alekhine, born in Moscow on November 1, 1892, died at Estoril, Portugal, on
March 24, 1946, while still world champion. Other reports notwithstanding, he
actually died of a stroke. Najdorf assured me of this after speaking with the
physician who had performed the postmortem examination of Alekhine’s body.

Around 1953, while I was the secretary of the Manhattan Chess Club, Madame
Four visited the club. She would not talk of the past, nor would I. I invited her
to dinner, but she took only toast and tea. Soon afterward I learned she had
died, at about eighty years of age.

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