Ludmilla Vladimirovna Rudenko

Ludmilla Vladimirovna Rudenko (born July 27, 1904, Lubny, Ukraine—died March 4, 1986) was a Ukrainian chess player who was the women’s world champion (1950–53).

Rudenko was trained as an economic planner in Odessa. Although she began playing chess as a child, Rudenko did not compete in tournaments before she moved to Moscow in 1925 to work for an economic planning committee of the Soviet Union. In 1929 Rudenko moved to Leningrad, where she continued her career as an economic planner for the Soviet government, married the cybernetic pioneer Lev Davidovich Goldstein, and bore one son (Vladimir Goldstein; 1931). In World War II, during the Siege of Leningrad, she organized the evacuation of the children of factory workers, a feat that she considered her most important accomplishment. Rudenko’s first exposure on the world stage occurred with her participation in a 1946 radio chess match between the Soviet Union and Great Britain, in which she defeated Rowena Bruce in both their games to help her team win the match.

The first widely acknowledged women’s world chess champion, Vera Menchik-Stevenson of England, died in 1944, leaving the title vacant. The chess governing body, FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs), organized a tournament in Moscow to determine a new champion in the winter of 1949–50. (This was organized in conjunction with a men’s tournament to determine Alexander Alekhine’s successor, since he also had died, in 1946, while holding the world champion title.) Rudenko won the women’s tournament with a score of 9 wins, 5 draws, and 1 loss. She was then awarded the International Master (IM) title by FIDE that year. Rudenko held the world title until 1953, when she lost a chess match (the traditional method of contesting the men’s title) to Elizaveta Bykova of Russia, by a score of 5 wins, 2 draws, and 7 losses. In 1976, along with several older players, Rudenko was awarded the newly created title of Woman Grandmaster (WGM).