Mating Checked

Moscow does not suffer defeat graciously--at least if its treatment of Boris Spassky is any clue. Since his 1972 loss to Bobby Fischer in the battle for the world chess championship, Grand Master Spassky, 38, has been snubbed by the Soviet government, denounced by Pravda and denied visas for travel abroad. Recently, however, all that has begun to look like a minor prelude to the latest problem Spassky's government has created for him.

Spassky is planning to marry Marina Stcherbatcheff, 30, a lissome brunette Frenchwoman who is a secretary in the French embassy in Moscow. Although the Soviet marriage bureau granted the pair permission to wed on Nov. 11, the Foreign Ministry began pressuring the French to force Marina, daughter of Russian emigres to France, to leave the country by the end of September. Spassky feared that once his fiancee went, she would not be allowed to return for the wedding. Failing in his attempts to have the ceremony moved to an earlier date, Spassky complained, "I feel like I'm playing against an opponent I cannot see at all."

The Soviets claimed that it would be in Marina's own best interests to leave. Reason: she faces possible prosecution for a 1974 traffic accident involving a Soviet citizen who had borrowed her car. Oddly, Soviet authorities seemed to pay no attention to Marina's role in the auto accident until last January, when she began living with Spassky. Says Spassky: "Never before have I been as humiliated as in the past three months, since they started this against Marina." Late last week, however, there were reports that the Kremlin may be relenting and will no longer try to force Marina to leave before the wedding.

If the Kremlin has in fact had second thoughts on the Spassky case, the reason may be a desire to avoid new tensions in Soviet-French relations on the eve of the mid-October visit to Moscow by French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Moscow may also have been embarrassed by the attention the affair was attracting in the West, where it was being viewed as a test of whether the Soviets intend to live up to the "humanitarian" clauses of the Helsinki declaration signed by Soviet Communist Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev last month. One clause of the agreement requires the Soviet Union to "examine favorably and on the basis of humanitarian considerations requests for exit or entry permits" for Soviet citizens and foreigners who want to marry.

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Spassky's problems pale alongside those of Soviet Dissident Painter Edward Zelenin, who wants to emigrate to France. Last week, a few days before the planned opening of an unauthorized showing in Moscow of "unofficial" art, Zelenin was arrested. Much luckier is Martina Navratilova, Czechoslovakia's 18-year-old tennis star; as the U.S. Open Championships at Forest Hills ended last week, she defected to the U.S., explaining that in her Communist-run homeland, she did not enjoy the freedom to play tennis "whenever I want and wherever I want."

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