Fedir Parfenovych Bohatyrchuk (also Bogatirchuk, Bohatirchuk, Bogatyrtschuk; Ukrainian: Федір Парфенович Богатирчук; Russian: Фёдор Парфеньевич Богатырчук, romanized: Fyodor Parfenyevich Bogatyrchuk; 27 November 1892 – 4 September 1984) was a Ukrainian–Canadian chess player, doctor of medicine (radiologist), political activist, and writer.
As a youth, Bohatyrchuk sometimes traveled to chess tournaments with the great player Mikhail Chigorin (1850–1908), who had in 1892 narrowly lost a match for the World Championship to Wilhelm Steinitz.
In September 1914, Bohatyrchuk and three others (Alexander Alekhine, Peter Petrovich Saburov, and N. Koppelman) were freed and allowed to return home.
Some writers have asserted that Alekhine used his family's influence to arrange this; his wealthy father was a member of the Duma of Czar Nicholas II at this time.
[2][3] En route back to Russia, via Switzerland, Bohatyrchuk and Alekhine spent nearly a month in Genoa, Italy, while waiting for transportation to arrive, playing over one hundred games against each other.
Bohatyrchuk later stated that "The enforced stay in Genoa undoubtedly did more for my chess development than the games in subsequent years with ordinary opponents.
This was the first Soviet government-sponsored tournament, and had 11 of the world's top 16 players, based on ratings from chessmetrics.com, making it one of the greatest events in chess history.
During the mid-1930s, the Soviet Chess Federation requested that Bohatyrchuk play more frequently in top events, but he declined, due to his professional career obligations.
Bohatyrchuk has mentioned in his autobiography (printed in Russian in San Francisco in 1978) that just after this game the head of the Soviet Chess Federation, Minister of Justice Nikolai Krylenko, approached him and said: "You will never beat Botvinnik again!
During the Russian Civil War, 1917–1922, he was employed by a military hospital, and was a professor of anatomy at the Institute of Physical Education and Sport in Kiev.
While working with the Red Cross, Bohatyrchuk did a lot to help the Soviet prisoners of war kept in the German camps in extremely harsh conditions.
These activities irritated the Germans, and in February 1942 Bohatyrchuk was arrested and spent about a month in a Gestapo detention centre in Kiev.
There also exists information that, while working at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, Bohatyrchuk provided a cover to a Jewish female employee (a sister of the Kiev master Boris Ratner), thereby saving her from execution or deportation to a concentration camp.
There he joined the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, an anti-communist, collaborationist militia headed by the Russian general Andrey Vlasov.
In May 1944, in Prague, Bohatyrchuk played an 8-game clock simultaneous training series against local masters, including Čeněk Kottnauer, Luděk Pachman, Jiri Podgorný, and Karel Průcha, scoring an overall dominant (+7−0=1).
In March 1946, he won a 14-player round-robin for displaced persons, staged in the Allied camp at Meerbeck, Lower Saxony, Germany.
[9] Bohatyrchuk, writing in 1949 from Canada a letter to the British magazine Chess, was one of the first to describe the Soviet state's methods of high salaries and luxury benefits for promising and talented sportspeople, including chess players, along with intensive training, as part of an overall program to demonstrate the superiority of the communist system.
[14] Bohatyrchuk certainly won no friends in Soviet chess leadership with this activism, which shone undesired attention on their practices, while providing expert direct contradiction.
He wrote his autobiography: "My Life Path to Vlasov and Manifesto of Prague" (published in San Francisco, 1978) (in Russian: Мой жизненный путь к Власову и Пражскому Манифесту, Moy zhiznennyi put' k Vlasovu i Prazhskomu Manifestu).
His earlier achievements, particularly in USSR Championships, may have been sufficient for the higher Grandmaster title, but the Soviets blocked this for political reasons.
While living in Ottawa, Bohatyrchuk helped to train the young Lawrence Day (born 1949), who himself became a FIDE International Master in 1972, and who went on to represent Canada a national record 13 times at Chess Olympiads.