Mark Taimanov

Mark Taimanov
Taimanov in 1996
Full name	Mark Evgenievich Taimanov
Country	Soviet Union Russia
Born	(1926-02-07)7 February 1926 Kharkiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union
Died	28 November 2016(2016-11-28) (aged 90) Saint Petersburg, Russia
Title	Grandmaster
Peak rating	2600 (July 1971)

Mark Evgenievich Taimanov (Russian: Марк Евгеньевич Тайманов; 7 February 1926 – 28 November 2016) was one of the leading Soviet and Russian chess players, among the world's top 20 players from 1946 to 1971. Taimanov was also a prolific chess author. Taimanov became a Grandmaster in 1952, and in 1956 won the USSR Chess Championship. He was a World Championship Candidate twice, in 1953 and 1971. In 1971, however, Taimanov lost his Candidates match by 6–0 to Bobby Fischer. Taimanov excelled in team play representing the USSR. Several chess variations are named after him. Taimanov was also a world-class concert pianist.

Taimanov was born in Kharkiv where his parents studied at the time. They moved to Leningrad when he was six months old. His father Eugenie Zakharovich Taimanov was half-Cossack and half-Jewish; his family escaped to Kharkiv from Smolensk during the World War I. He was a student at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute and later made a career as a head engineer at the Kirov Plant and the Hydraulic Plant, but left it to work as an engineer at the Leningrad Conservatory and various Lenengrad theaters after his brother and his wife's relatives were imprisoned in 1937. Taimanov's mother Serafima Ivanovna Ilyina came from an Orthodox Russian family; she studied at the Kharkiv National Kotlyarevsky University of Arts. As a piano teacher she later introduced her son to music. Mark was the eldest of three children. When he was nine, he performed as a young violinist in the Soviet children's film Beethoven Concerto that was released in 1937. During the Great Patriotic War he and his father evacuated to Tashkent shortly before the Siege of Leningrad started; his mother along with his two siblings decided to stay in the city and had to survive the siege up till their evacuation on March, 1942.