[3] His father Evgeny Zakharovich Taimanov was Jewish;[4] his family escaped to Kharkiv from Smolensk during World War I. Evgeny 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 Leningrad theaters after his brother and his wife's relatives were imprisoned in 1937.

[5] Taimanov's mother Serafima Ivanovna Ilyina came from an Orthodox Russian family; she studied at the Kharkiv National Kotlyarevsky University of Arts.

In 1956, after finishing equal with Yuri Averbakh and Boris Spassky in the tournament proper, he won a match-tournament ahead of them, for the title.

[15] After his loss to Fischer, the Soviet government was embarrassed, and, as Taimanov later put it in a 2002 interview, found it "unthinkable" that he could have lost the match so badly to an American without a "political explanation".

The official reason given for punishing Taimanov was that he had brought a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into the country, but that explanation was merely a bureaucratic pretext.

[18] In the inaugural Russia (USSR) vs Rest of the World team match, Belgrade 1970, he played board seven, and scored (+2−1=1) against Wolfgang Uhlmann.

Taimanov was one of the few players to have beaten six world champions (Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, and Anatoly Karpov).

With his first wife, Lyubov Bruk, he formed a piano duo, some of whose recordings were included in the Phillips and Steinway series Great Pianists of the 20th Century.

[19] Taimanov personally knew composer Dmitri Shostakovich, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter.

[20][21] Fifty-seven years separate his oldest child (who was also a strong chess player and on one occasion, participated in the final of the Leningrad City Championship) and his twins.

[22] His younger sister Irina Taimanova (born 1941) is a prominent opera director, TV presenter and professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.