this performance, Alekhine became a grandmaster in his own right and in the eyes of the audience." In July 1914, Alekhine tied for first with Marshall in Paris. World War I and post-revolutionary Russia In July–August 1914, Alekhine was leading an international Mannheim tournament, the 19th DSB Congress (German Chess Federation Congress) in Mannheim, Germany, with nine wins, one draw and one loss, when World War I broke out. Alekhine's prize was 1,100 marks (worth about 11,000 euros in terms of purchasing power today). After the declaration of war against Russia, eleven "Russian" players (Alekhine, Efim Bogoljubov, Fedor Bogatyrchuk, Alexander Flamberg, N. Koppelman, Boris Maliutin, Ilya Rabinovich, Peter Romanovsky, Pyotr Saburov, Alexey Selezniev, and Samuil Weinstein) were interned in Rastatt, Germany. On September 14, 17, and 29 of 1914, four of them (Alekhine, Bogatyrchuk, Saburov, and Koppelman) were freed and allowed to return home. Alekhine made his way back to Russia (via Switzerland, Italy, London, Sweden, and Finland) by the end of October 1914. A fifth player, Romanovsky, was released in 1915, and a sixth, Flamberg, was allowed to return to Warsaw in 1916. When Alekhine returned to Russia, he helped raise money by giving simultaneous exhibitions to aid the Russian chess players who remained interned in Germany. In December 1915, he won the Moscow Chess Club Championship. In April 1916, he won a mini-match against Alexander Evensohn with two wins and one loss at Kiev, and in summer he served in the Union of Cities (Red Cross) on the Austrian front. In September, he played five people in a blindfold display at a Russian military hospital at Tarnopol. In 1918, he won a "triangular tournament" in Moscow. In June of the following year, after the Russians forced the German army to retreat from Ukraine, Alekhine was charged with links with White movement counter-intelligence and was briefly imprisoned in Odessa's death cell by the Odessa Cheka. Rumors appeared in the West that he had been killed by the Bolsheviks. 1920–1927 When conditions in Russia became more settled, Alekhine proved he was among Russia's strongest players. In January 1920, he swept the championship of Moscow (11/11), but was not declared champion because he was not a resident of the city. In October 1920 he won the All-Russian Chess Olympiad in Moscow (+9−0=6); the tournament was retroactively called the first USSR Championship. His brother Alexei took third place in the tournament for