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Chess

The Godfather

21 April 2016

1:00 PM

21 April 2016

1:00 PM

It is often asked how chess became so popular in the USSR. My answer is that most areas of creative thought were closely supervised by the state; literature, art and even music, as Shostokovich and Prokofiev found, were subject to government control. Shostokovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was severely criticised by the Communist Party Congress, for instance.

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