Red letter day: how Russian chess defied Putin
To my astonishment, not to mention extreme admiration, forty-four of Russia’s leading chess Grandmasters, including last year’s world title challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi and the top female player Alexandra Kosteniuk (pictured above), have written an open letter to President Putin denouncing his war against Ukraine. These bold paragons of the chess community are thereby risking not just their personal freedom, but their lives.
As Friedrich Schiller initially wrote in his Ode to Freedom (before it was censored to the from “freedom” to the much less impactful “joy”): “Freiheit schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium….” (Freedom, beautiful divine spark, Daughter from Elysium…)
Doubtless it was Freedom that first attracted Beethoven for his stupendous 9th symphony chorale, but that great genius, too, had to bow to the censorship of the day. Here is the English text of that momentous Epistle to the Evil lurking in the Kremlin, a place which Dr Samuel Johnson might have described as the last refuge of a scoundrel:
“We believe that chess, like sports in general, should bring people together. The most difficult and prestigious international tournaments were held in our country at the highest level even in the midst of a pandemic.
“Chess teaches responsibility for one’s actions; every step counts, and a mistake can lead to a fatal point of no return. And if this has always been about sports, now people’s lives, basic rights and freedoms, human dignity, the present and future of our countries are at stake.
“In these tragic days, we think of all the people who found themselves in the centre of this terrible conflict. We share the pain with our Ukrainian colleagues and call for peace.”
Chess players in Russia enjoy three distinct advantages. Firstly the international scope of the game exposes them to a wide spectrum of information, otherwise not available to the man on Gogolevsky Boulevard. Secondly, chess players are engaged in a constant and unremitting quest for the truth in any given situation. As Emanuel Lasker, world chess champion from 1894-1921 boldly asserted: “Lies and hypocrisy do not last long on the chessboard.” Finally, even, indeed especially, in the days of the unlamented Soviet Union, chess offered a fertile and almost unique opportunity for independent thought, in the face of mass state control of what could be thought or expressed.
This insight helps to explain why the Soviet Union was so overwhelmingly successful at chess. From 1948 to 1972 the USSR dominated the World Championship, and even thereafter still provided the majority of the world’s elite Grandmasters. This has much to do with the gigantic material resources that the USSR ploughed into achieving victory in virtually every international sport. In the collective mind of the Soviet regime, chess was not merely a sport; it also conferred intellectual respectability. It should never be forgotten that the Russian Revolution had made the USSR very much a Pariah state; a feat which the current incumbent of Czar Ivan the Terrible’s throne seems dead set on emulating.
Hence, from the Soviet viewpoint of craving international prestige, the game was worth substantial financial investment, in order to seize the World Championship and, by systematic nurturing of young players, consolidate and retain it.
There is, however, as intimated above, a deeper reason. The Soviet state was notable for its lack of opportunity for free thought. Any book, article, pamphlet, idea, piece of music or even poem might be considered ideologically unsound. The consequence for the writer, composer or thinker who offended Communist or Stalinist state orthodoxy ranged from ostracism to imprisonment in Arctic Circle labour camps and the ultimate sanction: summary execution. Similar fates potentially await the brave 44 who have now dared to confront Putin’s wrath.
In 1987, Joseph Brodsky, the dissident Soviet writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Earlier he had argued that “the surest defence against evil is extreme individualism and originality of thinking.”
As I have explained before in these columns, here lies the true reason, aside from any state sponsorship, for the extraordinary popularity of chess in Soviet Russia. Chess offers a wide field for individual thought, in which the state has no remit to interfere. The irony is that, what I would describe as the ultimate right wing, self reliant, libertarian game, should become the most powerful icon of the world’s most powerful communist state.
Even in music, the leading Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich was ridiculed by that well-known music critic, Joseph Stalin, and lived in constant fear of arrest and deportation to a labour camp. Shostakovich related how he used to stay awake at night, greatcoat on, suitcase packed, waiting silently by the door (so as not to disturb his family) for the ominous knock from the KGB. Playing chess allowed Russians to free their minds from the shackles of state dogma. Not even a Soviet commissar would have dared to utter the words, “Comrade, that move is ideologically unsound. You should have moved your Slon not your Fers. Off to Gulag with you.”
One should never forget that Putin was a former high ranking officer in the KGB, an office of state oppression and repression, modelled closely on the Oprichniki of Czar Ivan the Terrible. The members of the latter group numbered an elite of 6,000 and are regarded as the first political police in the history of Russia.
In chess the sole criterion of validity is whether the move is good or bad, whether it wins or loses. By playing chess, ordinary Russians re-conquered for themselves a measure of personal intellectual liberty in their everyday lives, over which the state had no control. In chess they could pursue internal freedom of thought and self-determination of decision.
In 1988 Professor Paul Kennedy published his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which he argued that over-reliance on military strength and state security creates an imbalance with economic viability and can lead to the collapse of even the seemingly most impressive nation or empire. This was widely, but wrongly, interpreted as a dire prediction of the future of the USA. In fact, Kennedy’s book far more accurately prophesied the imminent demise of the USSR. Indeed, within a further four years the USSR, as it had been constituted since the Revolution of 1917, no longer existed.
A critical factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of its communist masters was the regime’s dependence on restricting information and ideas. This was at the precise moment when the economies of the western world, and many in the East Asia, were on the brink of an information explosion, driven by new information based technologies and reliant to an unprecedented degree on intellectual capital, of which Demis Hassabis’ Deep Mind (the program behind AlphaZero) is a proud British symbol.
It is no accident that Putin has banned certain sensitive words in regard to his Ukraine adventure, such as “invasion” and “war.” Harsh penalties await those who use them. Meanwhile all voices and outlets for media and press who might cast doubt on the Ukrainian venture have been shut down. As we all know from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, once language is subverted, tyranny and repression automatically follow. It is but a small, insidious step for a despot to ban some words and then redefine slaughter and destruction as coming to your victims’ assistance, or “denazification”. Meanwhile, deprived of the oxygen of publicity or the antidote of dissenting views, the vast majority of the Russian public uncritically devour the poisonous pabulum of state mendacity.
The now recurring information gap became acute during the 1986 World Chess Championship between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. The match was held in two equal halves, twelve games in London (organised by the present author) twelve in Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then still known. As a standard facility for the International Press Corps, within five minutes of the end of each game the London logistics team printed a complete record of the moves and the times taken by each player, together with key comments by Grandmasters and printed diagrams of critical situations in the game. Not only was this blitz report instantly available: it was also faxed to interested journalists around the world within a further five minutes. Nowadays, even faxes are ancient technology, but in 1986 they were at the cutting edge of global communications.
In Leningrad, meanwhile, the contrast could not have been more marked. Three elderly babushkas typed up the moves as the games progressed. However, there was no photocopier at the Championship site in the Hotel Leningrad. The match Director, Secretary and Press Chief had to sign a document — in triplicate — allowing the press assistant to take a waiting cab to Communist Party Headquarters, several miles away, the location of the sole official photocopier (actually a crude old duplication machine) in the city. Only on the press assistant’s return, after a wait of about 45 minutes, could the assembled international press corps discover what the official moves had been. It became obvious to me at that time that, for the USSR, the game would soon be over.
The USSR has indeed vanished, but has been replaced by a despotism which harks back to the Russia of the 16th century. Czar Ivan the Terrible has been described as both paranoid and prone to terrible rages, one of which resulted in the destruction of the City of Novgorod in 1570. Evil is everywhere under the sun, but not only is evil omnipresent, it replicates and repeats.
I risk nothing by penning philippics such as the above, but I am acutely aware of the irony that my fellow Grandmasters, of whom I write here, are risking life, limb and liberty by doing exactly the same. I salute you all.
Grandmaster 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.
