This was Panov's way of describing the fact that in some of his analyses Keres had credited American players, and even the Ukrainian Bogoljubov, who had left the USSR in 1925 and settled in Germany. Or, as Panov informed the KGB: "The justifiable anger and astonishment of Soviet chess players is provoked by the numerous systematic, completely baseless, offensive mentions of the fascist underling Bogolyubov."

It is not known if the KGB ever called Keres in for a further interrogation over his opening analyses. But the bulk of his extraordinary chess career was played under this shadow. In 1948, when he took part in the tournament to establish a successor to the world championship left vacant by the death of Alexander Alekhine, Keres was told by the KGB that it would be trouble for him and his family if Stalin's favoured candidate Mikhail Botvinnik should fail as a result of anything he did: in other words, Keres should not beat him. And, as it turned out, Keres lost four of his five games against Botvinnik, who went on to win the supreme title. However, it is also known that Botvinnik was furious when he found out that the authorities had been intervening in this way. He wanted to win on his own terms, and in any case believed he had the measure of the Estonian.

Very few others did, however. In his tournament career Keres won against every world champion from Capablanca to Bobby Fischer, making him the only player apart from Viktor Korchnoi ever to have beaten nine undisputed world champions. It is with reason that he is regarded by many as the greatest master never to have become world champion. He once said: "I have been unlucky — like my country." Dying of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 59, Keres did not live long enough to witness his country's restoration of its independence — which it marked by putting his portrait on one of its new banknotes.

Today, Estonia is one of the ex-Soviet nations fearful of the Russian imperial revanchist Vladimir Putin. As Sosonko notes in his commentary on this excavation from the KGB archive: "Regardless of its content we can acknowledge that Panov's review can be considered an example of the journalism of the time — as well as some of the journalism of today's Russia. Suspicion, the search for potential enemies everywhere and anywhere, the inflation of achievements, a sense of historical destiny, a division of the world into ours and the foreign can be noted in many aspects of Russian life nowadays." 
 
In the circumstances, perhaps it is a fitting irony to end with a game won by Keres representing the Soviet Union — and playing a variation named after the man who shopped him to the KGB. The victim on this occasion (the Leipzig Olympiad of 1960) was the Romanian master Corvin Radovici.