1938, with 14/21, ahead of Lilienthal and Viacheslav Ragozin. Chessmetrics.com ranks this as a 2684 performance. In the Leningrad-Moscow tournament of 1939, Alatortsev tied for 9th-10th places on 9/17, as Flohr won. He had to qualify for the next Soviet final, and in the semi-final at Kiev 1940, he scored 9½/16 to tie for 4th-7th places, but did not advance to the final, losing out on tiebreak. Chessmetrics ranks him as #21 in the world for August 1940, with a rating of 2626. War years With the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, organized chess was put to a stop for the next several years; but Alatortsev's solid pre-war results earned him an invitation to a strong event at Kuibyshev 1942. He made 6½/11 for seventh place, as Isaac Boleslavsky won. He then scored 7/15 at the 1942 Moscow Championship. Post-war form drops With the Axis forces in full retreat by 1944, organized chess slowly got going again in the Soviet Union. Alatortsev struggled in the 1944 Soviet Championship at Moscow with just 5½/16 for 16th place, as Botvinnik won. He had to return to qualifying for the next Soviet final, and made it through at Moscow in the semi-final with 10½/15 to tie for 2nd-4th places, as David Bronstein won. In the final that same year in Moscow, he scored just 7½/17, as Botvinnik dominated the field. Alatortsev played the 1945 Latvian Championship at Riga, and won the tournament (but not the title; he was playing hors concours). He scored 8½/15 in the 1946 Moscow Championship to tie for 4th-5th places, as Bronstein won again. He was below 50 per cent for the next two Soviet finals as well; in the Soviet Championship at Leningrad 1947, he made 7½/19, as Paul Keres won, and then in the next edition at Moscow 1948, he finished well down with 7½/18, as Bronstein and Alexander Kotov won. Alatortsev qualified successfully through the semi-final at Moscow 1949 with 9½/16, and then he played his last Soviet Championship final at Moscow 1950, scoring 9/17 to tie for 7th-10th places, as Keres won. Coach, organizer, author It was clear that the new generation of Soviet players was taking over the top places in tournaments. Players such as Alexander Kotov, Isaac Boleslavsky, David Bronstein, Efim Geller, Yuri Averbakh, Tigran Petrosian, and Mark Taimanov were all younger and had the benefits of organized Soviet training,