When the death of Bobby Fischer was announced on Friday many were surprised to hear that he had still been alive. His great triumph against Boris Spassky at Reykjavik in 1972 had long since been tarnished by his association with the Milosevic regime in Serbia and by public revelations of the vilest antisemitic and antiAmerican conspiracy theories. He had lived the last 30 years of his life as a recluse, and an unpleasant one at that.

Fischer’s genius had degenerated into “a mind diseased” and it was time to bring down the final curtain on a life that had briefly lent the cold war an epic quality it otherwise entirely lacked. It was not chess, however, that had made Fischer mad; it was his renunciation of chess after the success of his self-appointed mission to defeat the Soviet Union at the game it had elevated into a national obsession.

Without chess and the cold war, the two things that had given his life its meaning, Fischer fell prey to his demons.

Like the Munich Olympics that coincided with it, the Fischer-Spassky match is etched in the memories of those who lived through it. It took place against a background of détente, yet the cold war was far from over. Henry Kissinger, then President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, grasped the importance of the match for both sides. He rang Fischer to persuade him to play, telling him: “America wants you to go over there and beat the Russians.” But it took the British capitalist Jim Slater to tempt the sulking Achilles out of his tent, with big money and taunts of, “Come out and play, chicken!”

On the Soviet side the stakes were even higher. Huge resources were devoted to stopping Fischer. Spassky was the last line of defence – but he didn’t really believe in his cause. Unlike his fellow Russian Viktor Korchnoi, Spassky did not defect – but he was eventually allowed to emigrate.

In the Kremlin the eventual defeat was felt keenly. The Soviet interior minister asked Colonel Baturinsky, the KGB man in charge of Spassky’s team: “How come you yielded the crown to an American? If I had my way, everyone who was in Reykjavik with Spassky would have been arrested.”

The Soviet Union had influenced Fischer’s destiny even before he was born. His American mother, Regina, had married a German communist. His real father was a Hungarian who, like his mother, was under FBI surveillance as a fellow traveller. From the age of six Bobby sought refuge in chess from his mother’s world of left-wing causes. He was a typical rebel of the 1960s – except that his rebellion took the form of extreme anticommunism.

From the day he set foot in a Manhattan chess club the boy had only one ambition: to be world chess champion. As soon as he could, he left school and family to pursue it. According to Arthur Koestler, when asked what chess meant to him, Fischer replied: “Everything.”

With an IQ of nearly 190 Fischer could never have been “normal”. He was a genuine prodigy: in 1957, aged 14, he became US champion. A year later he was already a grandmaster and a world championship candidate.

Fischer came to dramatise his struggle against the “Soviet school of chess” as a metaphor of the cold war. In 1972 he told the BBC: “It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians . . . It’s a microcosm of the whole world political situation.”

But it took 15 years of hard grind before he could persuade the free world to take him at his own valuation. Under western eyes chess was merely a harmless pastime. It was different in the eastern bloc. Chess had been the game of the intellectuals, played by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Chess masters were heroes of the Soviet Union, celebrities like cosmonauts and ballet dancers.

Nuclear weapons made superpower confrontation too dangerous to be unleashed – except in the realm of game theory. In the absence of a real war, the cold war could be fought out on the chessboard.

Fischer alone could take on the Soviets on this metaphorical battlefield, the war of ideas. After his victory over Spassky he declared: “The Russians had it all for 20 years. They talked of their military might and their intellectual might. Now the intellectual thing . . . It’s given me great pleasure . . . as a free person . . . to have smashed this thing.”

He could be equally churlish toward his fellow Americans. After Fischer won the world championship Nixon invited him to a reception at the White House. “I declined,” Fischer is reported to have told friends, “because I found out that they wouldn’t pay me anything for this visit.”

Fischer’s dislike of the American government was heartily reciprocated. Even during the great match with Spassky, which caught the imagination of the whole world, the American ambassador in Iceland was instructed not to spend one cent of taxpayers’ money on Fischer.

Yet when he won the match, Fischer savoured his moment of vindication: he had turned chess into an embarrassment for the Kremlin. “I did not think that there would come a day,” he said, “when chess would become headline news in our country and produce only a small comment in Pravda.”

By breaking the cosy monopoly of the Soviet grandmasters, he created what became known as the “Fischer boom” in the West. That was his legacy to chess. But Fischer also played his part on a much larger stage. By proving the Soviet Union could be defeated by an individual, he emboldened dissidents everywhere.

The cold war ended because the Soviets realised they could not win – as much on the intellectual as on the political and economic planes. That realisation began to set in with Bobby Fischer and “this little thing between me and Spassky”.

Daniel Johnson is the author of White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard (Atlantic, £22)

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