When Western propaganda painted a drab, gray picture of life in USSR, bohemians in the capital city of the Latvian Socialist Republic, Riga, partied hard, played jazz, dressed up in mod clothes and loved passionately. One of the brightest meteoric stars to appear in that mix was Michail Tal. Independent, brainy and a bit of a spoiled enfant terrible, at 23 he became the youngest Chess Grand Master of the World. TAL is the story of his loves, his brilliant chess conquests and painful defeats and his protracted «war» with the KGB bent on keeping his genius in line with Soviet dogma.With an inexplicably magnetic attraction for women, Tal’s bedroom adventures of ten put him on a collision course with both his family and conservative Soviet authorities. Tal’s 1st wife, Sally Landau, a jazz singer and an actress whom he married the day after they met, raced with her husband across this complicated landscape until they both burned up in each other’s orbits. After a wild and drunken period of debauchery, drugs, alcohol and another impulsive marriage to a young Georgian beauty that lasted for a day, Tal finally met Gelia, his life companion. Immediately, after they moved in together, Tal’s wildness clashed with her desire for stability and normalcy sometimes with painful results. Tal’s family’s alternative lifestyle was a continual source of laughter, outbursts of passions and frightening brushes with harsh soviet realities. His biological father Robert was a wheeler-dealer black marketeer, his brother a skirt-chaser and his mother, Ida, a happy polygamist. In spite of the opportunity to defect to the West orchestrated by Tal’s friend, a black jazzman, Alex Reed, Tal returned to Riga after each tournament. This was always his choice rather than the result of the constant threat by his KGB minder, Deputy Gagarin, to retaliate against his family if he did. In the end it is Gagarin who defects while Tal returns to the USSR crowned Blitz Chess Champion of the World. In the background of Tal’s story is the rarified world of chess masters and the clash of cultures and political systems of the time.