David Bronstein - Early Life

Early Life

David Bronstein was born in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, to a Jewish mother and father. Growing up in a poor family, he learned chess at age six from his grandfather. As a youth in Kiev, he was trained by the renowned International Master Alexander Konstantinopolsky. He finished second in the Kiev Championship when he was only 15, and achieved the Soviet Master title at age 16 for his second-place result in the 1940 Ukrainian Chess Championship, behind Isaac Boleslavsky, with whom he became close friends both on and off the chessboard. He would later go on to marry Boleslavsky's daughter, Tatiana, in 1984.

After completing high school in spring 1941, his plans to study mathematics at Kiev University were interrupted by the spread of World War II throughout eastern Europe in the early 1940s. He had begun play in the 1941 semi-final of the Soviet Championship, but this event was cancelled as war began. Shortly after the war's conclusion, he began attending Leningrad Polytechnical Institute where he studied for approximately one year.

Judged unfit for military service, Bronstein spent the war performing various jobs; this included doing some reconstruction of war-damaged buildings and other clerical/labor type jobs. Also during the war, his father, Johonon, was unfairly imprisoned for several years in the Gulag and was detained without substantial evidence for committing any crimes, it was later revealed. The rumor that Bronstein was related to the disgraced former Soviet Communist leader Leon Trotsky (whose real family name was Bronstein), was treated as unconfirmed, but doubtful, by Bronstein in his book The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1995). This belief could have explained the imprisonment of Bronstein's father.