Career
Romanovsky participated in the Mannheim 1914 chess tournament (the 19th Dictionary of Scientific Biography Congress), began on 20 July and stopped on 1 August 1914 when World War I broke out. He tied for second/fourth in Hauptturnier B. After the declaration of war by the German Empire on the Russian Empire, eleven Russian players (Alekhine, Efim Bogoljubow, Fedor Bogatyrchuk, Alexander Flamberg, Koppelman, Maliutin, Ilya Rabinovich, Romanovsky, Saburov, Selesniev, Weinstein) were interned in Rastatt, Germany. On September 14, 17, and 29, 1914, four of them (Alekhine, Bogatyrchuk, Saburov, and Koppelman) were freed and allowed to return home via Switzerland.
As an internee, he played in three tournaments.
After being released from internment by the Red Cross in spring 1915, due to his poor health (heart illness), he returned to Petrograd. When Romanovsky returned to Russia, he immediately helped raise money to aid the Russian chess players who were still interned in Germany by giving a simultaneous exhibition at the Saint St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute.
1920-1935 After the war, he took second, behind Alekhine, at Moscow 1920 (the first Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics Chess Championship). He tied for first with Grigory Levenfish, Alexander Ilyin-Genevsky and Ilya Rabinovich in the 1925 Leningrad City Chess Championship.
In December 1925, he tied for seventh/eighth in the Moscow 1925 chess tournament.
His best international result was in Leningrad 1934, finishing tied for second place with Nikolai Riumin, behind Mikhail Botvinnik. In 1935, he was the first Soviet chess player to be of Sport. Last years During the worst period of the Siege of Leningrad in winter of 1941-1942, a rescue party reached his home.
They found Romanovsky half-conscious from starvation and cold.
The rest of his family had frozen to death. All the furniture in the house had been used for firewood.
A chess manuscript which had been in preparation by Romanovsky was also lost at this time. He was awarded the International Master title in 1950 and the International Arbiter title in 1951.
In 1954, the Soviets withdrew their application for Romanovsky to receive the Grandmaster title, which had been based on his first place in the 1927 Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics championship.
But because anti-Stalinist Fedor Bogatyrchuk (Bohatirchuk) had shared the title in 1927, and he was no longer recognized in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics as the result of his having defected, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics Chess Federation did not want to give the General Motors title to Bohatirchuk, so they withdrew the application for Romanovsky as well. Before his death, Romanovsky published two books on chess middlegames, which were translated into English in 1990. These are Chess Middlegames: Combinations, and Chess Middlegames: Strategy, both published by American Chess Promotions.