The Soviet Union - Tumblr Posts
The class politics, founded on an idealization of making it from rags to riches, also sit rather oddly with some of the Cold War tropes at work here. Beth is constantly spending time trying to find funds to attend tournaments, especially the one in Moscow. Only an anti-communist church organization is willing to send her there in exchange for publicly announcing her Christian beliefs and anti-communism, whereas the State Department won’t fund her but wants to surveil her.
In contrast, the Soviet chess players didn’t have to fundraise. They are portrayed as a society of suit-wearing poshos honing their craft in gorgeous buildings — we are also told that these players had been learning since they were four, thus framing chess as an elite pastime. This is counterposed to an American queer orphan who had been fighting her whole life to get to that table. The show thus weaponizes disenfranchised identities in the United States to cast the Soviet players as having had it easy.
In a way, they did, but only insofar as the awesome surroundings put on display here reflect the original experiment in “luxury communism.” Far from Soviet players being aristocratic, here the very things that the bourgeoisie enjoyed in imperial Russia were given to the proletariat to be enjoyed as well. For the USSR also insisted on the importance of bringing high culture to the masses — including opera, ballet, literature, sports, health resorts, chess, and so on.
One of the American chess players comments to Beth, “You should see where the Russians play, while we have to play in this small college.” Well, there was a reason for that. Those beautiful buildings used for chess were either palaces expropriated from the nobility or newly built halls.
In the final scene, the show tells us the real workers are outside playing chess in the streets — and the final episode even ends with Beth escaping her State Department chaperone to play with them. So, it seems that she is quitting the Cold War, and joining chess players outside who seem a lot like her janitor friend, Shaibel.
Yet, if Beth is unwilling to be part of the Cold War, in many ways the entire show perpetuates it. All these details set up the moral authority of the American girl over the Soviets. Though the barbs against the Soviet Union are usually more or less subtle, the swipe at Nona Gaprindashvili as being a woman chess player who never faced men was not. Once again, the real progress for women in the Soviet Union is simply ignored or derided in favor of “girlboss” feminism from the United States.