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International German Championship 1981
In 1981, as is well known, the Iron Curtain was still up, and the ‘Wall’ still had a few years of life ahead of it. Moreover, the Cold War was ‘hotter’ than ever. But the Iron Curtain was not equally impermeable to every citizen of an Eastern bloc country.
While citizens of the German Democratic Republic were indeed hermetically sealed off from the West, Romanian or Bulgarian grandmasters could travel to tournaments in capitalist countries. Victor Ciocaltea (on the teaser picture, the Romanian grandmaster is the one getting up from his chair) finished sixth in Bochum, just two years before his death. His compatriot IM Mihail Ghinda (born 1949) also played, as he often did in Western territory.