Boris Gulko is a Soviet-born American International Grandmaster in Chess. He was born on February 9, 1947, in Erfurt, Germany to Russian parents. Gulko is the only person to have won both the United States Chess Championship and the USSR Chess Championship.
Gulko won the Chess Championship of the USSR in 1977, became an International Grandmaster in 1976, and won the Championship of Moscow in 1979.
In 1979, he applied for an exit visa to leave the USSR for Israel and was refused. Gulko and his wife then began a series of protests against the Soviet government for not allowing them to immigrate to Israel. Gulko and his wife were allowed to leave the USSR and immigrate to the United States in 1986, after a personal appeal from U.S. President Ronald Reagan to the General Secretary of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev.
After moving to the U.S., Gulko won the U.S. Chess Championship in 1994 and 1999. He also represented the U.S. in six Chess Olympiads between 1988 and 2004.
Currently, Gulko lives in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. He has contributed to a number of chess publications and has taught at the famous chess program at the Dalton School in New York City, New Jersey State University, and Yale University.