Alexander Khalifman
Russian chess player
Alexander Valeryevich Khalifman (Russian: Алекса́ндр Вале́рьевич Халифма́н; born 18 January 1966) is a Russian chess player and writer. Awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE in 1990, he was FIDE World Chess Champion in 1999.
Early life
Alexander Khalifman was born in St Petersburg into a Jewish family of engineers. Khalifman's grandfather was the director of the Chaliapin Museum; the other half of the family came from the Baltics. According to family legend, Khalifman's ancestor was one of the commanders of Russian monitor Rusalka.
Tournament career
Khalifman won the 1982 Soviet Union Youth Championship, the 1984 Soviet Union Youth Championship, the 1985 European Under-20 Championship in Groningen, the 1985 and 1987 Moscow championships, 1990 Groningen, 1993 Ter Apel, 1994 Chess Open of Eupen, 1995 Chess Open St. Petersburg, the Russian Championship in 1996, the Saint Petersburg Championship in 1996 and 1997, 1997 Chess Grand Master Tournament St. Petersburg, 1997 Aarhus, 1997 and 1998 Bad Wiessee, 2000 Hoogeveen.
He was a member of the gold medal-winning Russian team at the Chess Olympiads in 1992, 2000 and 2002, and at the 1997 World Team Chess Championship.
Khalifman gained the Grandmaster title in 1990 with one particularly good early result being his first place in the 1990 New York City Open ahead of a host of strong players.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Alexander Khalifman” as russian chess player. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as russian chess player. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q106374. The first chronological checks are 1966, 1990, 1999 and 1982.
A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexander Khalifman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.