'But I am a Ukrainian'

The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has in the past earned grudging admiration from some quarters for his presumed geopolitical strategic “chess” skills. In particular, his annexation of Crimea, while successfully maintaining lucrative energy sales to western democracies. Now, though, the new heir to Ivan the Terrible has switched to poker, with notably less facility. Chess is primarily a game of skill, while poker contains significant elements of both chance and bluff. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an exercise in extreme risk, certain to backfire in reputational, if not territorial, terms.  

Interestingly, Ukraine was admitted as an independent member of the United Nations in 1945, a polite fiction which permitted the old Soviet Union to wield an extra vote in the councils of Babel. In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev even ceded the Crimea to Ukraine, only to have the more imperially-minded Putin seize back control in 2014. 

In a harsh reaction to that annexation, Garry Kasparov, world chess champion from 1985-2000, published his prophetic book:  Winter is  Coming in 2015, issuing  a dire warning as to the future ambitions of the ersatz Czar in the Kremlin . 

According to Kasparov, the ascension of Vladimir Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB, to the presidency in 1999 was already a strong signal that Russia would be deviating from democracy. Yet in the intervening years, as the USA and the world’s other leading powers continued to appease him, Putin has not only metamorphosed into a dictator, but a clear and present international threat. With his vast resources and nuclear arsenal, Putin is at the epicentre of a worldwide assault on political liberty, freedom of thought and expression, indeed the entire presumed modern world order, which had come into being with the fall of the USSR.   

Kasparov has been a vociferous critic of Putin for over a decade, even leading the pro-democracy opposition in the 2008 presidential election (pictured above), while additionally suffering physical   assault and personal imprisonment for his stance. Yet years of seeing his Cassandra-like prophecies about Putin’s intentions actually come to fruition, have driven the former world chess champion to a more sinister revelation: Putin’s Russia, like Isis or al Qaeda, defines itself in opposition to the free countries of the world, yet unlike those two terrorist factions, Putin’s illiberalism feeds voraciously off the global demand for fossil energy, and is simultaneously armed to the incisors with a powerful nuclear arsenal. 

As Putin has become increasingly powerful, the threat he poses has expanded from local to regional and finally to planetary. In his book of ill omen, Augur in Chief Kasparov shows that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not a conclusion, merely, in the ex-champion’s striking metaphor, a change of seasons, as the Cold War melted into a new spring. But now, after years of complacency and poor judgement, winter is once again upon us.  

Armed with the force of Kasparov’s world-class intellect, his profound conviction, and insights into the murky history of the USSR, Winter Is Coming  reveals Putin for what he is: an existential danger, lurking in plain sight.   As one might expect, after last month’s invasion, Kasparov also published his proposals to deal with the Putin problem. They are, according to my understanding, the solutions of a chess player, intent on delivering checkmate. 

The Kasparov plan to checkmate Putin goes like this:   Support Ukraine militarily, immediately, using everything except boots on the ground. Mobilise all weapons, including intelligence and cyberwarfare. Bankrupt his war machine, freeze and seize Russia’s finances and those of Putin and his gang. Kick Russia out of every international and financial institution, while the international community should recall all ambassadors from Russia. There is no point in talking. The new unified message should be: stop or be isolated completely. “Additionally, ban all elements of Putin’s global propaganda machine, turn them off, shut them down, send them home. Stop helping the dictator spread lies and hate.”

Lastly, Kasparov argues that the global community must boycott Russian oil and gas. Pressure OPEC, increase production, reopen Keystone. You can’t save the planet by cutting back on fossil fuels, if you don’t first save the people on it.

There will be costs and sacrifices, Kasparov warned, but we waited too long, the price is high, and it will only get higher. “It’s time to fight.” Kasparov tweeted his strategy, over five messages, to his almost 700,000 followers on Twitter. The tweets went viral straight away

Ukraine has produced many fine chess players, one of the most notable being Leonid Stein, whom I had the great pleasure of knowing, playing against and eventually writing his biography, after his premature passing in 1973:   Leonid Stein Master of Attack.

A great consumer of vodka, Stein once trumped his own hand whilst epically lubricated, in a rubber of bridge during the Reykjavik chess tournament of 1972, playing with myself, the Czech Grandmaster Vlastimil Hort, and the English Master (of chess, not Bridge) Les Blackstock. It was during this Grandmaster chess competition, in fact at the very moment I was playing against Stein himself, that Bobby Fischer turned up as a spectator. Fischer was engaged on an inspection trip for his forthcoming match of the century (also famously in Reykjavik) against Boris Spassky, later that same year. 

“ Chess, like literature and the arts, often suffers a premature loss. The poems that Keats and Shelley might have written, the music that Mozart and Schubert might have composed, these have their counterparts in the missing games due to the early deaths of such masters as Charousek, Breyer and Reti. Fortunately for us, however, just as the poets and composers managed to pack into their brief life an abundance of poetry and music, so these chess masters produced a wealth of beautiful games!” (Harry Golombek OBE Grandmaster Emeritus)

Leonid Zakarovitch Stein, three times Soviet Champion and victor of two of the strongest tournaments of the last century (Moscow 1967 and Moscow 1971), died of a heart attack on 4th July 1973, at the age of thirty eight. All achievements aside, the tempestuous intensity of his play, the proliferation of his ideas in a sense belong exclusively to the phenomenon of which Harry Golembek has spoken — the artist who does not have time on his side.

Stein died at the very moment when the Soviet team was boarding a coach in Moscow which would have taken them on the first leg of their journey to England, for the 1973 European Team Championship to be held in Bath. I well remember reading the notice of his death and I shall never forget the feeling of complete shock and disbelief which overcame me, that so great and vibrant a personality should have passed away at such a tragically early age.

Leonid Stein was born was born on 12th November, 1934, in Kamyenyetz-Podol’sk, near Lvov (now Lviv), the ancient capital of Eastern Poland and until 1949 of the Polish Ukraine, that vast area stretching eastwards beyond the River Bug towards Kiev (now Kyiv) and onwards west.

Despite his having a high level of technical competence in all phases of the game, Stein can hardly be described as a “universal player”, this being a phrase of Botvinnik ’ s to describe the player “who does all things equally well”. The pragmatic Petrosian, doubtless finding this concept too Messianic in tone, has doubted whether the “universal player” really exists, but the idea may have influenced the Soviet team selection away from Stein e.g. at the Lugano Olympiad of 1968. Of a game won by Stein at the Tel Aviv Olympiad 1964, Grandmaster Alexander Kotov, author of The Soviet School of Chess , and about as close as one could get to being a Soviet Chess commissar, remarked, “ a fine game in the Soviet tradition.” To which Stein ’ s retort was: “But I am a Ukrainian.”

Botvinnik v Stein 1965
Stein v Keres 1967
Keene v Stein 1967/68
Stein v Tal 1961
Stein v Petrosian 1961
Stein v Smyslov 1972
Spassky v Stein 1964

Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from  Blackwell’s .

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