"The lawyer who organized modern chess in the shadow of the war"
This book is, in one way, a biography of Folke Rogard, focusing mostly on his roles as FIDE President and organizer of modern chess. However, it only briefly discusses the other facets of his life as a father, husband, lawyer, businessman, and in private. The portrayal of Rogard primarily centers on his organization of chess and his presidency of FIDE, a position he held for more than two decades. Being in that genre, it aims to capture his personality –what his driving forces were and the constraints that held him back.
Chess is the ultimate game of war, and this book presents the first story of the game as part of cultural warfare – winning the hearts and minds – during the Cold War, built on reliable sources never used before. The person in the centre of the story is Folke Rogard, the president of the World Chess Federation (FIDE) between 1949 and 1970. He reshaped FIDE and organized international chess during an epoch when the communist East and capitalist West battled on many fronts. We knew from earlier works something about how the state-sponsored Soviet chess machine developed, and here we will also get a grasp of US strategies and actions. The Swedish lawyer Rogard was caught in between, trying to mediate and act neutral. Failure from his side would have divided the chess world even more and stalled the organization he was trying to build.
Henrik Malm Lindberg is an associate professor in economic history at Uppsala University, a fellow at the Ratio Institute, and works as deputy Head of Secretariat at the Migration Studies Delegation. He is a regular contributor to many chess periodicals, writing mainly about historical aspects of the game or the players. Henrik Malm Lindberg is a masterclass player, once barely above 2300, but those days seem to be gone. His claim to fame as a player comes less from his draw with an eighty-year-old Svetozar Gligoric and more from the win against a ten-year-old Magnus Carlsen. FIDE-president Folke Rogard. The lawyer who organized chess in the shadow of the Cold War is his first biography.
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