Boris Spassky, Soviet chess legend, is dead

It was a legend. World champion from 1969 to 1972, famous for his duel with the American Bobby Fischer in 1972, in the midst of the Cold War, the Soviet Legend of Chess Boris Spassky died at the age of 88, said the Russian failure federation on Thursday.

“A great personality is gone, generations of chess players have studied and study his parts and his work. This is a great loss for the country, ”said the president of the Russian failure federation, Andreï Filatov, quoted by the TASS agency.

A piece of life in France

After this defeat, Boris Spassky falls into disgrace. He settled in 1976 in France after marrying a Frenchwoman of Russian origin. He obtained French nationality two years later.

He did not find the public’s attention until many years later, in 1992 in Yugoslavia, during an unofficial revenge against Bobby Fischer, which he also loses.

The last years of Boris Spassky’s life have been marked by a mysterious family conflict and a return to Russia in troubled conditions. Victim of two brain attacks in 2006 and then in 2010, he disappeared two years later from his French home and found himself in Moscow, where he appeared old and weakened on Russian television, white hair and drawn lines.