Ian Nepomniachtchi’s top 20 exit shows Russian chess is down, but it’s not checkmated yet

A month after Ian Nepomniachtchi exited the FIDE World Cup kicking and screaming at one thing or another, he made another departure, this one much quieter. Nepo, a two-time world championship contender, exited the ranks of the world’s top 20 chess players in the FIDE ratings list published in the final month of 2025. This meant that for the first time since FIDE started publishing ratings lists from July 1971, there was no Russian chess player in the top 20 in the world.

Not having a Russian among the world’s top players in chess is akin to having the Brazil football team failing to qualify for a FIFA World Cup. A once-powerful chess empire — a country that, in its previous iteration as the Soviet Union, produced world champions like Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, Anatoly Karpov, Anatoly Karpov and Vladimir Kramnik like they were being produced on a conveyor belt — is now searching for its next champion.

Garry Kasparov, who has a claim on being recognised as one of the greatest chess players in history, once explained how the Soviet Union was able to churn out the world’s best players in a row.

“In the Soviet Union, chess was treated by the authorities as a very important and useful ideological tool to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Soviet communist regime over the decadent West,” Kasparov said on the ‘Conversations with Bill Crystal’ show in 2016. “We had millions of kids going through these networks in the country where there were very few options available for talented kids — business was not an option, politics was not an option, the law was not an option, and every parent tried to look for some opportunities for their kids, and chess was one of them. Music, ballet, some kind of science, sports in general, so that’s why Soviet authorities could channel this huge mass of potentially talented kids into this chess network.”

Nepo, a two-time world championship contender, exited the ranks of the world’s top 20 chess players in the FIDE ratings list published in the final month of 2025. (Picture Credit: Michal Walusza/FIDE)

That chess network is running on fumes these days as other chess empires emerge in nations like China, USA, India and Uzbekistan.

The signs of Russia’s fading imprint on the global chessboard had been visible for a while. In July last year, for the first time in FIDE ratings history, no Russian found a spot in the top 10 after Nepo slipped out. The 2024 World Chess Championship in Singapore was a duel between a Chinese grandmaster and an Indian teenager. World championships were once all-Soviet affairs. But over the past decade and half, the era of Magnus Carlsen and the age of Indian prodigies has coincided with Russians finding themselves on the periphery — a notion that would be impossible to imagine only a few decades ago when the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, but the chess czars shaped by the regime were still soldiering on.

“Russia is not the Soviet Union. It’s a fraction (of what the Soviet Union was),” five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand, who spent the prime of his career battling Karpov, Kasparov and Kramnik, had said in an Express Adda interview in 2024 when asked about the reasons behind Russian chess’ shrinking influence. “Of course, computers also came along and made all the training advantages that the Soviets had built up kind of irrelevant very fast. When the country broke down, a lot of Soviet chess players immigrated to other countries and started coaching there, so they passed it on.”

It must, however, be noted that Russian chess might be down on the canvas, but it’s most definitely not out cold.

Russian dominance ends: First time since July 1971 no Russian in world's top 20

Nepo's age when exiting top 20

Despite the 35-year-old Nepo not being anywhere close to sneaking into this year’s Candidates (an event that will be held to handpick a challenger to Gukesh at the next world championship), there will be some Russian representation in the form of Andrey Esipenko, who has an outside chance of winning. The women’s Candidates tournament, which will be held at the same time as the Open event in Cyprus, will have two Russians in the eight-player mix, Kateryna Lagno and Aleksandra Goryachkina.

Lagno and Goryachkina had also combined forces in November to help the Russian team, playing under the FIDE flag, win the 2025 Women’s World Team Chess Championships in Linares. This year, the Russian teams seem poised to make a comeback to playing under the national flag and other national insignia, three years after FIDE banned Russian symbols from competitions due to the invasion of Ukraine.

And while there are no Russian grandmasters in the top 20 in the open section, the women’s ratings list has three Russians in the top 10, with Polina Shuvalova joining Lagno and Goryachkina. The juniors sections too have Russians in the top 10 with Anna Shukhman (second in the world among girls), Volodar Murzin (third in the world among boys) and Aleksey Grebnev (world no 8 in juniors) being the players that the country can hope to carry on its legacy in the sport.

At the recently-concluded FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championship, Goryachkina also won the Women’s World Rapid title while in the open section Russian grandmaster Vladislav Artemiev took silver at the World Rapid event.

Russian chess might be a shadow of itself. But the once-mighty empire is not checkmated yet.