One of the early Soviet heroes of international chess as well as a renown coach and chess theorist.
He won the Kiev Championship an unprecedented five times in a row from 1932 to 1936.
He won the first Soviet Correspondence Chess Championship in 1951 and he received an honorary Grandmastership later in life, in 1983.
He was born and raised in the Soviet Union in what is now Ukraine.
He was perhaps one of the biggest Soviet chess stars before Boris Spassky rose to fame.
