Pyotr Romanovsky

Lore

After the war, Romanovsky finished second to Alekhine at Moscow in 1920, the first USSR Chess Championship. He became Soviet Champion in 1923 at the second USSR championship in Petrograd, and again in 1927, sharing the title with Fedir Bohatyrchuk at the fifth USSR championship in Moscow. In 1925 he tied for first with Grigory Levenfish, Alexander Ilyin-Genevsky and Ilya Rabinovich in the Leningrad City Chess Championship. Later that December he tied for seventh and eighth in the Moscow 1925 chess tournament.

In 1927 he won in Leningrad. His best international result came in Leningrad 1934, finishing tied for second place with Nikolai Riumin, behind Mikhail Botvinnik. That same year, 1934, he was the first Soviet chess player to be awarded Honoured Master of Sport. During the worst period of the Siege of Leningrad in winter of 1941–42, a rescue party reached his home.

They found Romanovsky half-conscious from starvation and cold. The rest of his family had frozen to death. All the furniture in the house had been used for firewood. A chess manuscript which had been in preparation by Romanovsky was also lost at this time.

Upon his recovery, Romanovsky found strength to live on, started a new family and continued to work tirelessly to promote chess and train chess players.

Biography

Pyotr Romanovsky’s chess career started in Saint Petersburg. In 1908 he placed fourth in a field where Sergey von Freymann and Karl Wilhelm Rosenkrantz shared the top spot. The next year he finished tied for 10th and 11th in a tournament won by Alexander Alekhine. In 1913 he came second to Smorodsky, and in 1914 he tied for first with von Freymann in a hexagonal event.

He then played at the Mannheim 1914 chess tournament, the 19th DSB Congress, which started on 20 July and ended on 1 August when World War I broke out. There he tied for second through fourth in the Hauptturnier B section. After Germany declared war on Russia, eleven Russian players—including Alekhine, Bogoljubow, Bohatyrchuk, Flamberg, Koppelman, Maliutin, Rabinovich, Romanovsky, Saburov, Selezniev, and Vainshtein—were held as internees in Rastatt, Germany.

On 14, 17, and 29 September 1914, four of them—Alekhine, Bohatyrchuk, Saburov, and Koppelman—were released and allowed to return home through Switzerland. While still interned, Romanovsky competed in three events: he tied for fourth and fifth in Baden-Baden in 1914, which Flamberg won; he took third at the Triberg tournament of 1914/15; and he tied for fifth and sixth at Triberg in 1915, both of which Bogoljubow won. In spring 1915, due to a heart condition, the Red Cross secured his release, and he went back to Petrograd.

Once home, he held a simultaneous exhibition at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute to raise funds for the Russian players still detained in Germany.

Guide

FIDE awarded Romanovsky the International Master title in 1950 and the International Arbiter title in 1951. In 1954, the Soviets withdrew their application for Romanovsky to receive the Grandmaster title, which had been based on his first place in the 1927 USSR championship.

Because anti-Stalinist Fedir Bohatyrchuk had shared the title in 1927, and he was no longer recognized in the USSR as the result of his having defected, the USSR Chess Federation did not want to give the GM title to Bohatyrchuk, so they withdrew the application for Romanovsky as well. Before his death, Romanovsky published two books on chess middlegames, which were translated into English in 1990: Chess Middlegames: Combinations, and Chess Middlegames: Strategy, both published by American Chess Promotions. In 2013 Quality Chess published both volumes together as Soviet Middlegame Technique.