I know that some of you are very knowledgeable about the Soviet period chess piece sets. Lets take the Latvian set (Mordovian) to start with. I do know, through what I have learned here, that this design was mass produced at gulags by political prisoners. What about the original design or the nicer sets that would have been played with at championships? Were there also chess game manufacturers that were not composed of prisoners?
Where chess sets were made, by whom, and how in the Soviet Union are good questions. Over time, they were manufactured in three different types of enterprises. In late Tsarist times, chess was a pastime for the rich and powerful, a small group. Relatively few sets were required. Aside from those made by the highest level artisans commissioned by the Tsar to make sets for the royal family, those for the rest of the elite were made by small collectives of artisans known as "Artels." After the revolution, Soviet law recognized Artels, and Artels continued to make high end sets for upper level events, NEP-men, and party apparatchiks. This is a high quality, upper end set of the mid-thirties made by Artel Prometheus in Leningrad, a Botvinnik-Flohr II set similar to those used in the 1934 Leningrad Masters and 1935 and 1936 Moscow International Tournaments.
But early on, the state took on a deliberate program of what historian Michael Hudson has termed "Political Chess," which had two broad goals. The first was to expand the playing of chess to the masses of workers and peasants in order to increase their level of culture. This expanding pool of players would increase the level of play by increasing the ability to identify players of talent, and to provide them the opportunity to improve by increasing the quantity and quality of competition. This in turn would serve the second broad goal of Political Chess--to meet and exceed the West in an area of cultural and and intellectual competition, thereby demonstrating the superiority of Socialism.
The numbers of players began to increase very rapidly, but more and cheaper sets were needed than the Artels could provide. This led to the utilization of Gulag wood- and furniture-shops to manufacture sets, and to the development of simplified designs that could be manufactured by semi- and unskilled prisoners pressed into wood-working. This is a Second-Quality "Mordovian" (fka "Latvian") set manufactured in the late 1930s in the Berezovsky Children's Penal Colony in Siberia, close to Krasnoyarsk.
As time wore on, the Artel system wore down, the Gulag system wound down, and production was undertaken by state factories, many of them originating from Artel and Gulag workshops, but expanded by capital investment and worked by wage laborers. Designs continued to be simplified, particularly knight designs, which in many cases simply became slabs with a few gouges in them for eyes and manes, and in other cases, molded plastic heads and torsos. Sets for high level competitions, however, continued to be made by highly skilled artisans until the seventies and eighties, when factory sets were used in some of these events. This is a 1970s-1980s Mordovian (aka "Latvian") set manufactured in a factory. It's the same style as the set used in Beth Harmon's climactic match in Queen's Gambit. Note the slab knight.
This is a 1970-80s Grandmaster IV set, also manufactured in a factory. It is a simplification of the Grandmaster III design that first appeared around 1950 and used in Soviet Championships and other high-level events. Note the plastic finials and knight-heads, and that the rook merlons, miter cuts, and coronet crenellations found in the GM3 design have been eliminated.
I know that some of you are very knowledgeable about the Soviet period chess piece sets. Lets take the Latvian set (Mordovian) to start with. I do know, through what I have learned here, that this design was mass produced at gulags by political prisoners. What about the original design or the nicer sets that would have been played with at championships? Were there also chess game manufacturers that were not composed of prisoners?