From Stalin/Krylenko to MAGA: Politicizing the Nonpolitical Realms of Chess and Science

Soviet Chess: By 1929 tensions were rising in the top levels of organized tournament chess between mostly old school, pre-revolutionary chess players, organizers and journalists asserting that chess was a form of art that existed separate from politics.  Indeed, chess was viewed this way by one well-known and respected journalist/magazine publisher N. I. Grekov, owner and publisher of the chess magazine Shakhmaty. Unfortunately for Grekov and those like him, chess organization in the Soviet Union had come under the bureaucratic control of Deputy Soviet State Prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko.  The man who would stage Stalin’s initial “show” trials was determined to develop and use chess as a political tool of the Soviet state.  

Because Grekov was so highly respected in the Russian/Soviet chess community and Soviet political power was still undergoing a process of consolidation, his magazine was simply allowed to quietly wither and die. Still, the last vestiges of Capitalism in Soviet chess had to be rooted out and destroyed.  The public presentation of this mission was initially delegated in great measure to a chess publication whose editors clearly understood the political role being assigned to chess by the state. This was made clear in the pages of Shakhmatny Listok. 

“We reiterate: as a reaction to those rising tendencies in the chess environment, The Executive Bureau shall highlight the political content in its activity even more sharply, and shall pursue the slogan “Chess is a weapon of politics” even more acutely.  From now on, the proponents of the slogan “Chess is outside of Politics” shall be considered our enemies.” (Shakhmatny Listok, December, 1929)

Trump/RFKJr/MAGA and Science: Should science exist apart from the politics of any specific White House administration?  Ask parents who lost a child to measles because they listened to and acted in accordance with the “advice” of an administrator with no training in science. The US Office of Management and Budget proposes to insert “political oversight” into the federal grant making process. https://cen.acs.org/policy/research-funding/omb-federal-research-grants-peer-review-political-appointee/104/web/2026/06 

How far might political oversight of science go? It has been said that the Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who confessed to killing more than fifty children in the Rostov area, might have been caught earlier if Soviet officialdom had not taken the position the serial murder was strictly a mental disease occurring only in the decadent, Capitalist West….

Different times, but the same authoritarian playbook is being used.