Evgeni Vasiukov, a Russian chess grandmaster who was among the world’s best players for more than 15 years and won tournaments in five different decades, but whose career was eclipsed by brilliant contemporaries in a Soviet Union stocked with daunting talent, died on Thursday in Moscow. He was 85.

His death was announced on Twitter by the Russian Chess Federation.

On the official ranking lists compiled by the World Chess Federation, Mr. Vasiukov was tied for No. 17 in January 1976. But those rankings have existed only since 1970, which was after his peak. According to Chess Metrics, a widely respected website that has compiled retroactive rankings going back more than 200 years, Mr. Vasiukov was No. 11 in the world between August and October 1962.

Mr. Vasiukov’s good fortune in being from the Soviet Union, where chess was exalted, was also his bad luck. In any other country he probably would have been a star. But in the Soviet Union, which had almost all the world’s best players at the time, he was just one of the pack.

A naturally aggressive and creative player, Mr. Vasiukov was sometimes compared to Mikhail Tal, the former Soviet world champion, who was three years younger. Mr. Vasiukov’s style, like Mr. Tal’s, was ideally suited to blitz chess, in which each player has five minutes to make all his or her moves. Mr. Vasiukov won the Moscow Blitz Championship, arguably the most competitive in the world, eight times.