King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

by Paul Hoffman

  Pascal paused and then started berating himself. “Chess players suck. I suck. I totally suck. You were in the Ivy League. How can you possibly be around me? I’m a dumb idiot. I should just give up.”

  I really liked Pascal. His very existence—a national champion who struggled to reconcile his love of the game with his dislike of chess politics and chess players, a sensitive man who vomited when he swindled his opponent in the French League and ran a temperature when he played his girlfriend—disabused me of the notion that top players had to be coldhearted assassins who had Spock-like control of their emotions. I decided there was nothing wrong with me for not wanting to make a nine-year-old at the Marshall cry.

  10

  PRAYING FOR THE PSEUDO TROMPOWSKY

  “[The aliens] took me from my apartment and we went aboard their ship. We flew to some kind of star. They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist.”

  —KIRSAN ILYUMZHINOV, PRESIDENT OF FIDE,

  the World Chess Federation

  “I prefer to beat men.”

  —ANTOANETA STEFANOVA,

  2004 Women’s World Champion

  THE NEXT DAY, OUR LAST FULL DAY IN TRIPOLI, I WOULD FINALLY get the chance to play chess, too. At 11:00 A.M. we were awakened by the phone: it was Berik Balgabaev, the assistant to His Excellency Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. The FIDE president, he said, was ready to see me. I was pleasantly surprised that the meeting was happening. I hurriedly dressed, grabbed my chess set, and turned to Pascal for last-minute encouragement.

  “No one knows if he’s any good,” he said, “so stick to your regular game. Play your usual King’s Gambit and you’ll be OK. Downplay, please, that you’re a journalist.”

  “You mean tell him I’m your second?” I said. “Yeah, that’s really kept me safe.”

  “Well, maybe it’ll work better with him.”

  “It doesn’t alarm me that he may have ordered a reporter killed. I’m not trying to expose his finances. I just want to understand his wild chess philosophy.”

  Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, forty-two, was a mythic figure in Russia and the chess world, a head of state who claimed to communicate telepathically with his people and a globe-trotting evangelist who promoted chess as a universal antidote to war. Ilyumzhinov, a political prodigy, and a chess one, too—if you believe his account of his childhood play—had been the leader of Kalmykia since 1993 and FIDE since 1995.

  The arid sheepherding region he rules, two hundred miles north of Chechnya, is one of the most impoverished areas of the world, with wages on state-run farms as low as $10 a month. Kalmykia is the size of Ireland, and many of its three hundred thousand inhabitants do not have electricity or running water, and fuel their stoves with sheep excrement. Ilyumzhinov himself lives well, tooling around Elista in one of seven Rolls-Royces or a Hummer and spending a fortune on chess. He is a multimillionaire by some accounts, a billionaire by others. In 1998, he built Chess City, a large glass-walled palace with accompanying cottages arranged like an Olympic village. Chess City is separated by a barbed-wire fence and armed guards from surrounding Elista, which is plastered with billboards of Ilyumzhinov pushing pawns, kissing babies, kicking a soccer ball, greeting the pope, and embracing the Dalai Lama. Kalmyk schoolchildren are encouraged to draw pictures of Ilyumzhinov in art class. At chess tournaments, he gives the players watches, ties, and tins of caviar all festooned with his likeness. Pascal has a kitschy T-shirt with Ilyumzhinov’s portrait on the front along with the words “Kirsan is FIDE” and “FIDE is Kirsan.” In creating a cult of personality, Ilyumzhinov has been as proficient as Muammar Gadhafi.

  The chess world is full of dreamers—players who claim to be rated two hundred points higher than they are, players who believe that they could be world champion or break into the top ten if only they devoted more time to their obsession, players who get smashed in key games yet insist they were winning all along until their opponents got lucky. Many players persevere in their delusions even in the face of accumulating evidence that they are not as good as they think. Ilyumzhinov, although no longer a tournament competitor, is in many ways the consummate chess dreamer and schemer, someone who advances grandiose plans for the game while overlooking obvious problems with his ideas and ignoring his many detractors. But unlike other chess hustlers who live in a world of fantasy, Ilyumzhinov has the wherewithal—the money, the power, the connections—to turn his impractical dreams into reality.

  Chess City, a $50 million cathedral to the game he loves, was one of those plans. Against the advice of his aides, he opened the city prematurely, in a flush of exuberance, for the 1998 Chess Olympiad. Some fifteen hundred competitors arrived from around the world to find that the tournament had to be delayed three days—and the number of rounds shortened from the traditional fourteen to thirteen—because the playing hall and living quarters were not completed. “When I showed up,” Joel Lautier recalled, “the palace had no roof. There were gaping holes next to the stairs. It was very dangerous, particularly for a chess tournament where all these players were walking around thinking up chess variations and not paying attention to where they were stepping.” The playing hall lacked ventilation and was unbearably stuffy. “Several players lost consciousness,” Lautier said, “including FIDE Vice-President Zurab Azmaiparashvili. He just passed out in the middle of his game with Timman.” Elista residents were forced to part with their refrigerators, televisions, and kitchenware so that the cottages were furnished when the players arrived. But the furnishings could not conceal construction problems. “The roof of one of the players’ cottages became dislodged,” Lautier said, “and flew off in the middle of the tournament.”

  Ilyumzhinov had wanted Bobby Fischer to live in Chess City, which he promised would be ruled by a king and a queen. He tracked Fischer down in Hungary and gave him $100,000 of his own money to compensate him for a pirated version of his classic My 60 Most Memorable Games, which had been a hot seller in Russia. “With relish Ilyumzhinov tells the story of Fischer stuffing the money into his coat pocket,” wrote one grandmaster, “and the money then falling out of his pocket and onto the street, and both of them chasing the banknotes, which were being blown in every direction, down the windy streets of Budapest.” Every week Ilyumzhinov would send Fischer a kilo of Kalmyk caviar but could not woo him to Chess City.

  In the weeks before the 1998 Olympiad, one of Ilyumzhinov’s few vocal critics, Larisa Yudina, the editor of the banned opposition newspaper Sovietskaya Kalmykia Segodnya, was preparing an exposé of his finances and Chess City. Ilyumzhinov had managed to establish Kalmykia as a corporate haven, like Delaware or Liechtenstein, for companies that registered there. But the price of registration was a steep contribution to a special presidential fund from which money was allegedly funneled to Chess City. While meeting an anonymous source who offered to expose the fund, Yudina was beaten, strangled, and fatally stabbed. Russian President Boris Yeltsin called the killing a “political assassination” and ordered the Moscow police to take over the investigation.

  In response, Ilyumzhinov had the hubris to go on television and declare his candidacy for the Russian presidency, although in the end he did not run. Two of his former aides were charged with Yudina’s murder, and Kremlin auditors found that tens of millions of rubles from Moscow that were intended for the “provision of drinking water for the population of Kalmykia” had been improperly diverted to Chess City. A prosecutor who was carrying a file on additional financial improprieties had a fiery car accident; he walked away, but the file was incinerated along with the car. Ilyumzhinov denied any involvement in Yudina’s death. He was widely believed to have orchestrated the slaying. Even if Moscow had proof, Ilyumzhinov would escape indictment because presidents of Russian republics are immune from criminal prosecution.

  Greater Russia and Kalmykia have been at odds for more than three hundred years. The people who settled the North Caspian steppe in the early seventeenth century were noma
ds from the Djungaria region of northwest Mongolia who practiced Tibetan Buddhism. Peter I enlisted them to protect the eastern frontier of the Russian Empire, but Catherine the Great did not want a Buddhist colony in her kingdom and expelled most of the settlers. Those who remained were called Kalmyks, from the Turkish word for “remnant.” After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks destroyed more than one hundred Buddhist temples in the region and forced Kalmyk schoolchildren to learn Russian. The Kalmyks defiantly constructed new places of worship and in World War II joined German forces in opposing Russia. In 1944, Stalin waged genocide on the Kalmyks by deporting the entire population of 150,000 to Siberia and torching their temples. It was not until 1957 that 70,000 survivors and descendants were allowed to return.

  Two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ilyumzhinov was elected president of Kalmykia by promising a Buddhist revival and $100 to every citizen. (In a subsequent campaign he offered every shepherd in Kalmykia a free cell phone.) He also said he would legalize polygamy and chop off the hands of criminals. At the age of thirty-one, he became the world’s youngest leader of a sovereign state. He rebuilt the temples, encouraged the teaching of Buddhist principles, and brought back the Kalmyk language so that it was on a par with Russian as one of the republic’s two official languages. He got Moscow to reverse its years of refusal to grant the Dalai Lama a visa. In return, he persuaded his fellow Kalmyks to give up their ambitions to secede from the Russian federation. He tried unsuccessfully to get the Kremlin to shut down the KGB’s Elista office with its staff of five hundred. Whenever his leadership was challenged, he rallied the citizens by reminding them of Stalin’s horrific legacy, which he was working to undo.

  A month before Tripoli, Pascal had gone to Chess City with Irina and Jennifer Shahade, where the two women represented the United States in the Women’s World Championship that had been hastily moved to Elista from war-threatened Armenia. Outside the walls of Chess City, disenchanted Kalmyks furtively slipped leaflets to chess players claiming that children were starving because Ilyumzhinov had diverted money from food and medicine to the game. He was not known to tolerate political dissent, and a few prominent citizens opposed to Chess City were trying his patience by conducting a hunger strike. Pascal, Irina, and Jennifer witnessed for themselves Kalmykia’s standard of living when they were driven an hour across the barren steppe to Yashkuly, a farming village, where they faced schoolchildren in a simultaneous exhibition. Even the mayor of Yashkuly, who entertained the trio in his home, had no electricity and only an outhouse for a bathroom.

  By the time of Tripoli, the chess community had largely forgotten, if it ever knew, Ilyumzhinov’s connection to murder, and the players were largely apathetic about his funding of chess at the expense of his people. The players were upset about things that affected their own pocketbooks, like the fact that the prize fund for the World Championship had been cut from $3 million in 2001–2002 to half that in 2004. Some top players had bowed out of Tripoli because of financial and other personal considerations. A few players, although not enough to organize an effective boycott, objected to Ilyumzhinov’s failure to ensure that Libya admitted Israeli contestants. Some chess professionals were also unhappy with changes he had made to the top tournaments in the hope of popularizing the game. They felt the changes cheapened chess and had not in fact brought in more spectators. Ilyumzhinov had sped up the time control with the aim of getting chess on television without requiring a TV network to clear its programming schedule for a whole afternoon. But the only result, his critics saw, were games that were aesthetically marred because the players had insufficient time to find the best moves in the endgame. And he had “democratized” the World Championship (or “randomized” it, in the eyes of his detractors) by changing the format from long matches among a small elite to short knockout matches among a crowd of 128.

  Ilyumzhinov’s suite in the El Mahary was guarded by a plain-clothed Libyan who announced my arrival. Presidential aide Berik Balgabaev showed me into the living room. The table, with its large spread of smoked salmon, was set for a sumptuous breakfast for eight that had never happened. Ilyumzhinov was casually dressed and greeted me with a toothy smile. “A fellow chess player!” he said, beaming, as he extended his hand. He was a thin man with Asian features, and his handshake was delicate. If we had been meeting back in New York at the Waldorf, I would probably have been struck by how little this man looked like a man who would order a murder—let alone the pugilist he claimed to have been in his youth. But here in Tripoli, where I had been detained and questioned repeatedly by shady characters, I was a bit spooked. I was saddened that the World Chess Championship, which was once an ennobling clash of minds, had become the plaything of a dictator who had no compunctions about holding the competition in a lawless, dangerous place with no chess tradition and virtually no fans. For me, the royal game had fallen into the sewer.

  Berik asked to be excused and Ilyumzhinov replied, “Maybe you should stay for a moment in case Paul wants photos.”

  “I’d like a picture,” I said. “How about he takes it while we play a friendly game of chess?”

  “Very good,” Ilyumzhinov said, “but I don’t have a set.”

  Pascal, too, never had a chessboard with him, because he was able to play in his head or on the computer. But I found it odd that the world’s leading ambassador of the game didn’t routinely carry a set.

  “I brought one,” I said.

  “Excellent. Let’s play here on the sofa.” He sat at one end and I sat at the other. I was so busy studying his face that I unrolled my vinyl chessboard without looking at it and placed it between the two of us on the couch. He grunted contemptuously when he saw that I had made the beginner’s mistake of positioning the board incorrectly with a dark square in the right-hand corner instead of a light square.1 Of course I never would have done that if I’d been watching what I was doing. He picked the board up with his bony hands and rotated it ninety degrees. “There,” he said, “this will make a better photo. You want your readers to think you know how to play the game.”

  I found his comment funny. He was posturing for a psychological advantage by suggesting I didn’t know how to play and at the same time offering me a recipe, no doubt integral to his political success, for deceiving the masses. I was also surprised by his command of English. I had seen him hold press conferences and he always spoke through an interpreter. This obviously gave him more time to compose his answers, and perhaps, if the discussion was being televised in Russia, he looked better to his people if he wasn’t speaking English.

  “You can have White,” he said, continuing the posturing. He was giving me the advantage of moving first because he was convinced that he would beat me anyway.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I moved my king pawn forward two squares and he responded immediately in kind. I advanced my king-bishop pawn two squares—a King’s Gambit it was.2 He smiled broadly and snapped off the pawn. But I thought I sensed in his smile a bit of uncertainty. My giving up a pawn on the second move could be seen as confirming his suspicion that I was a rank beginner. But it also raised the possibility that I was actually a dangerous attacking player who knew something about this ancient opening. “Berik, take some pictures,” he said. I handed Berik my digital camera and he fired away. Then he left the two of us alone.

  Ilyumzhinov’s pregame posturing had stoked my competitive spirit, so I decided to move fast to keep him guessing about my playing strength. On the third move, I copied Fischer and slid my bishop to the fourth rank. Now there was no mistaking the signs of nervousness in his silly grin. My unusual move still did not betray whether I was a patzer violating general opening principles or a studious disciple of the eleventh world champion. Even experienced tournament players would now normally think before replying to my move—that’s how rare it was—but Ilyumzhinov, attuned to the psychological dimensions of the situation, banged out his response. He moved his queen pawn two squares, offering to retu
rn the pawn in order to achieve free and simple development.

  It was my turn to be taken aback. A weak woodpusher would try to hold onto his material advantage. Only a decent player would know that the modern treatment of this nineteenth-century opening was promptly to return the pawn. I had two ways to capture the proffered foot soldier, and I chose the way that was double-edged, taking it with a fellow pawn.

  Now Ilyumzhinov slid his queen to the side of the board, checking my king along the weakened dark-squared diagonal. I had to waste time shifting my king out of check, but I knew I’d soon gain back the tempo by hitting his queen with my knight. After seven moves we reached a dynamic position, just the kind I enjoyed playing, but his body language suggested that he expected to play only a few moves for the camera and not an entire game. Now I was torn. As a player I wanted to beat him, particularly because of his annoying pregame behavior. As a writer and explorer of the chess world, I needed to make sure there was time in his busy schedule for us to talk. Also, I didn’t want to offend him and risk his calling off the interview, if indeed he had expected to play just a few quick ceremonial moves for the photo op. And so I reluctantly offered him a draw.

  “Very good,” he said, bowing slightly. “It is a wonderful thing that you, a journalist from New York, and me, a Buddhist from Kalmykia, both speak the language of the chessboard. We have enriched ourselves as human beings by engaging in this thoughtful, nonviolent competition.”