Vishinsky

Maria Theresa and Frederick II play chess as Ares watches in an allegory for the Seven-Years War

     In a kind of Cold War allegory,  the Sept. 29, 1947 issue of "Time" featured the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs (who had been accusing the USA of warmongering) behind whom the artist, Ernest Hamlin Baker—who designed over 300 "Times" covers—used a position from a game between a youthful American and a older Russian in which the overconfident Russian rashly overplayed his hand and was quickly crushed.

This September 1947 headline earned the following response:



Could it get much colder?

     "Chess Life" in its November 5, 1947 issue wrote:

"TIME" and Chess and Artist Meet
Featured in the background of a portrait of Vishinsky on the cover of Time magazine for September 29 was a chess board with men in position, white and red.  The artist, Ernest Hamlin Baker, knows his chess, for he conveys his opinion that Vishinky's tactics are obsolete by reproducing a position in the game, Marshall-Tchigorin, Monte-Carlo, 1902, in which modern theorists consider Tschigorin's tactics to have been inadequate and obsolete.  Perhaps the pun was also conscious, for Marshall played the White pieces in the game.

Here is the cover:

Andrei Vishinsky, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs
"Life" magazine, August 30, 1948

     Here is the game (set to the same position):

     Tschigorin employed the Chigorin Defense to the Queen's Gambit.

     Curiously:
     Life magazine had run an article in its Jan. 29, 1940 issue in which Frank Marshall, touted as a great player and a great teacher, demonstrated this game in photos. He claimed that Tschigorin resigned after 8. Qh5+ (Marshall made the same claim in his 1914 Marshall's Chess Swindles, page 116 and  Irving Chernev gives the same truncate version in his 1974, Wonders and Curiosities of Chess.   However. chessgames.com and other databases give the longer version, perhaps from A. J. Gillam's 1997 book, Monte Carlo 1902 ):