The following is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript by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 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 Chess Cafe.

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 historyAlekhine, 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.

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." Alehine never practiced law, however, nor did he ever
sign his name "Dr." [Footnote 1According 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,
Gr�nfeld 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 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 coldcuts 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 2Readers 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. 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, Sportf�hrer 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 m�ssen 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.

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
‚migr‚ 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 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 3Only 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 R‚ti 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. END