Just when I was thinking that here was someone who controlled a piece of greatness and wasn’t going to dole it out unless he could turn a profit, Page’s musical voice stopped me in my tracks. “Why don’t you have a word or two with him now, while he is standing around?” At that moment, Kasparov had finished his conversation with Olga Capablanca and was approaching us, looking haggard at the end of his long day, signaling Page that he was ready to leave.
It was difficult for me to introduce myself. Where to begin after so many years of thinking about chess world champions, and wondering particularly what Garry Kasparov might have to say about Bobby Fischer and whether he regretted having devoted his childhood to the game—questions that were at the center of my life. But mainly, I felt afraid of him. During the past half-dozen years, I had derived so much happiness thinking about the chess greatness of my son, planning for the day when he would become world champion. For me, much of the fun of Joshua’s chess life had to do with my preposterous daydreams, and maybe that wouldn’t work so well after knowing the real thing.
“Do you recall that two years ago you gave a simultaneous exhibition in the South Bronx?” A clumsy beginning. Of course he remembered, he remembered everything. Kasparov tensed with impatience or perhaps with the anticipation of another person he didn’t know asking for something: an autograph, an interview, a chunk of his time for a worthy cause. “My son was the eleven-year-old who drew against you.”
“Your son is Josh?” he said, suddenly interested. “You should have come right over.” I was dumbstruck. How could he have recalled my son’s name from a twenty-second conversation and a handshake two years before?
We left the party together and spoke for perhaps fifteen minutes. What struck me most during our first meeting was the powerful draw of his concentration. For the most part, I asked him questions about Kamsky, the fifteen-year-old defector from the Soviet Union whom he had beaten in two games a few hours before. Kamsky’s life was entirely dominated by his father’s dream for him to become world chess champion. This remarkably gifted teenager was not allowed to go to school, so that he could study chess twelve hours a day, and his progress had been so stunning that many predicted he would someday be a challenger for the title.
I asked, “Does a father have a right to ask his young son to study all the time, to give his childhood to chess?”
“It is a kind of risk,” he said. “Later you regret the lost childhood. I have regrets. But when I was very young I knew that chess would be my profession. I felt that there was no choice and my mother said okay. I needed chess like a drug.”
Kasparov’s face was flushed with emotion. “You must ask your kid,” he said, wiping aside the pretense that my primary interest was journalistic, a story I was writing about this other boy. “It’s up to Josh. If he feels very strongly about it, he will do it. For some, chess is stronger than the sense of childhood.”
The following spring I traveled with the champion to research an article for The New York Times Magazine, and Garry and I became friends. During the ensuing months there were many dinners, walks, car, plane and train rides together, scores of late-night conversations, some of them emotional and for me thrilling. As we toweled off in front of the red cliffs which border the South Beach of Martha’s Vineyard, just ten days before the beginning of Karpov-Kasparov V, I remembered that twenty years before I had entertained the fantasy of being friends with Bobby Fischer.
“On the white side, I feel I’m in very good shape,” Kasparov reflected. We had just come out of the frigid water after half an hour of riding the waves, switching off on his boogie board. The surf was up this morning, and Kasparov had attacked the breakers with a persistent seriousness.
“I only wish I could have spent another month training. I would have done more preparation with the black pieces.”
“Too bad you didn’t begin training in Moscow last January after Baku.” At the mention of his home in Azerbaijan, Garry looked as though I had struck him. His face grew dark and I could imagine his train of thought: Why are you talking to me about chess training? I have lost my home. Friends are dead or lost somewhere—I don’t know where they are. Why did you bring up Azerbaijan? Are you trying to ruin me? Kasparov pulled at his nose with his thumb and forefinger, as he does sometimes when he plays a chess position which is menacing and unclear. His prior good mood and optimism about the match were hard to recall. He looked out at the ocean, but I knew that he wasn’t seeing it. I said something or other, and he didn’t reply. We walked for about half an hour, back to the huge rented house set on a bluff above the water, without saying a word.
The world champion’s moods are very loud and entirely dominating. I have frequently seen his happiness cheer a crowded room. When he is alive with energy and ideas, I feel inspired to argue, listen or laugh with him. But his despair can make a friend feel entirely helpless and chaotic. When Kasparov is angry and brooding, the air around him seems thinner. Sometimes he turns his face away and won’t look at me, as if I had sinned, hideously sinned. At such moments, I would prefer to be anywhere else.
2
CHESS TRAINING AND GENOCIDE
Because Kasparov is a strikingly candid person, when he exercises reserve about an issue the effect is teasing. For the first year that I knew Garry, he wouldn’t speak to me about his last days in Baku, and I knew only fragments about this harrowing time. Whenever I raised questions about the loss of his home, he became angry or silent or directed the conversation elsewhere. Then one afternoon in New York, months after Karpov-Kasparov V, he grimaced at my question, which over time had grown into something of a dare, a long oh-what-the-hell expression, and then he told the story with remarkable detail and craft. It was apparent that the events in Azerbaijan in late December, 1989, and early January, 1990, had darkly colored Kasparov’s championship year. I have placed this recollection at the beginning of this narrative, long before he told it to me, so that the reader can feel something of Kasparov’s state of mind as he trained and then played against Karpov.
* * *
“At the end of December 1989, two months after we met at the party in New York, I was in Moscow preparing to leave for Baku to begin my training for Karpov. However, my mother and I received disturbing phone calls from home. My aunts and cousins in Baku said that I shouldn’t come: ethnic tension between Azerbaijanis and Armenians was building, it could be dangerous.
“I decided to go to Baku anyhow. I said to myself, These problems will never affect me. I am a hero there. Bad. Very bad. Sometimes being world champion makes a man lose perspective, as if he is above normal concerns. When I think now of this attitude, it makes me embarrassed.
“I left Moscow happy to be going home, looking forward to seeing my friends. I had spent much of the past year abroad giving speeches and exhibitions. I was mentally tired. I wanted to return to the Baku of my childhood. Maybe I didn’t want to hear the bad news.
“During the past year, relatives of mine had been fired from their jobs, as had most Armenians. They were worried about violence and had decided to leave Baku. I had made arrangements for several to move to Moscow, for my cousin Eugene to transfer universities. But these problems seemed remote: their problems, not mine. I wasn’t in Baku at the end of 1988, when Azerbaijani fanatics were chanting ‘Death to the Armenians’ in the streets. I wasn’t there in 1989 when they destroyed an Armenian church. Of course I had heard accounts of the atrocities in 1988 against Armenians in Sumgait, forty kilometers to the north. But if you are far away, a pogrom is only a word. You must be there to feel it. I simply could not imagine my neighbors trying to harm me. Despite the fact that I am half Armenian by birth, the Azeris accept me as a friend—they take pride in my accomplishments. When I play matches they pray for me. I am part of that city and it is my heritage.
“But to tell the truth, the problems of the region weren’t very much in my mind. In the days before leaving Moscow, I had been embroiled in bitter disagreements within the GMA [the Gr
andmasters Association, the organization he had founded to improve the way of life of professional chess players around the world]. Also, throughout December, I had been attending meetings with intellectuals and political leaders in Moscow who opposed the direction of the Gorbachev government. My friends were cautioning me that I was thinking about everything but chess, and that Karpov would be studying without distraction. It was time to turn my attention to the match.
‘There is a special sanitarium north of Baku that I have used for my training since 1980. I rent a block of rooms. Though a half year might pass between visits, my furniture, books and clothing are always exactly where I left them. I know every cat and dog in the place. There are doctors and therapists on hand for any problem. When I think of it now, this camp seems like a paradise. While I study, I can hear the steady sound of small waves and smell the fresh Caspian Sea, which is close to the buildings. The air is fragrant with olive, mandarin orange and pine trees. I concentrate very well there. When I need to relax in the afternoon, I take long walks along the beach.
“I planned for Baku to be the first of several training sessions for the match. Actually, it would be a pre-training session. Along with my team, I intended to devise a general strategy. We would look at some of the games Karpov had played during the past two years to see how his style had evolved since I last played him, and to get a sense for his vulnerabilities. In general terms, we would talk about which opening systems I should concentrate on for this fifth meeting. My regular crew was assembling at the camp. As always, my mother would be in charge. She has great wisdom and experience. She would establish schedules, maintain discipline and oversee the entire training session. Alexander Shakarov, who lives in Baku, would bring our computers. He has been working with me for fifteen years. Whenever I need to look at a game or an opening variation played years ago, he quickly finds it in our large data base. My friend Kadzhar Petrosean, also from Baku, would oversee many details, do some cooking and also provide a tennis sparring partner for my afternoon workout. The grandmaster Zurab Azmaiparashvili was driving from Georgia, and I was certain he had ideas to discuss with me about Karpov’s recent games. But we never got a chance to talk about them.
“When I arrived, Baku was a city of fear. All the Armenians wanted to leave, but it was hard to understand why. Nothing much was happening.
“My first day at the camp, the official ministry assigned two policeman to protect me, a major and a sergeant. I had never had protection before. These two carried handguns. They said that it would be wise for me to learn to shoot. Normally when I am in training, I run on the beach, swim or play tennis to increase my stamina for long games, but in the early days of this unusual training session I spent my time shooting bottles of sand on the beach. I became quite good at it. There were bad days ahead when I was thankful to have had this training.”
To appreciate Kasparov’s account of the events in Baku during the early days in January, 1990, the reader must understand a little about the history of ethnic violence in the region. In A.D. 301, Armenia became the first nation to accept Christianity. Under Tigran the Great, Armenia became a great power, conquering territories as far south as Palestine. Beginning in the eleventh century, however, Turkic peoples, who were fierce fighters, infiltrated the area, creating the Turkish Ottoman empire. Turks and Armenians lived side by side, but the Armenian ethnic composition of Nagorno-Karabakh, an area larger than Rhode Island in the center of what is now Azerbaijan, remained intact, because the fortresslike mountains were impenetrable to the invaders. In the eighteenth century, Russian armies operating against the Ottomans entered Transcaucasia, a bridge of land connecting Asia and Europe which Russia coveted for military purposes, ending Ottoman domination of the region. Armenia remained under Turkish control, but in the latter part of nineteenth century, fighting broke out between Turks and Armenians, who were impatient with Turkish rule, culminating in the massacre of a million and a half Armenians in 1915. Little notice was taken of it internationally. Kasparov points out with irony that when Hitler was warned in the thirties that genocide of the Jews would cause problems for Germany, Hitler remarked, “Who cares about the Armenian genocide now?”
In 1918, when the Turkish empire was being partitioned after World War I, an independent Armenia was created. In 1920, however, the Red Army invaded, and Transcaucasia came under communist domination. In 1923, Stalin drew the borders of the Transcaucasian states, giving the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which was eighty-five percent Armenian, to Armenia, but then reversed his decision later in the year, leaving Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Many believe that he created this and other border disputes with the hidden agenda of keeping the nationalities at each other’s throats. Over the ensuing years, the Soviet government apparently found it useful to incite pogroms to quell nationalistic impulses. When they were not manipulated by the Moscow government, Armenian and Turkic peoples got along quite well. “I can attest to this firsthand,” Kasparov says. “To this day I still count Azeris among my closest friends.”
During the Russian era, many Armenians migrated from Karabakh to Baku and Sumgait because of the oil industry and the opportunities of the modern city. The Armenians did not assimilate with the Muslim populations, but rather became a prosperous, highly educated class, holding large business interests and skilled jobs. Russia regarded Transcaucasia as a “colony.” Many Russians settled there, and it was natural for Armenians to become allies of the Russians, who were also Christian. In Baku, the better-paid jobs were, by and large, held by Russians and Armenians. The Turkic peoples of Baku directed their resentment of Russification towards the Armenians.
“After the First World War, nationalist movements were stifled in the Soviet Union by ironclad communist rule,” Kasparov explained. “That changed with glasnost and perestroika. The Karabakh Armenians were the first to exercise their new freedom. At the end of 1987, Armenians living in the Nagorno-Karabakh called for reunification with Armenia. At first, Moscow seemed sympathetic and then, following outcries from Azerbaijani leaders, the central government reversed itself and jailed Armenian leaders known as the Karabakh Committee. These men were seeking democratic rule as well as the reunification of Armenia. I believe that they were sent to jail by Gorbachev because they were demanding the end of communism in their country. Many in the Russian intelligentsia, including myself, signed a letter to support the dissidents. I might add, one year later, when I visited Baku in March of 1989, I was quietly threatened for supporting them. A group of local communists came and said that unless I repudiated my support, it might not be safe for my grandmother and cousins, who lived year-round in Baku. ‘Don’t you care about your family anymore?’ they asked. ‘Something can happen to them.’
“The tragedy of genocide struck Sumgait, a short distance north of Baku, in February, 1988. Before the slaughter of Armenians by Azerbaijani hooligans began, there were well-organized rallies, headed not by Azerbaijani leaders but by men who spoke perfect Russian and claimed that Armenians were killing Azerbaijanis in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. According to eyewitness accounts, drugs, alcohol and iron bars were handed out to the crowds from trucks. Despite what you might have read about in the West, there was nothing helter-skelter about this violence. It was a well-organized campaign. For three days, Armenians were beaten, raped and murdered throughout the city, their apartments looted and burned. The mobs knew exactly which apartments to come to. All evidence indicates that the pogrom was incited, not by Azerbaijanis, but by the KGB with the knowledge of Gorbachev. While the slaughter went on, Soviet troops stood by and did nothing. Then after the entire Armenian population had been driven from the city, the troops stepped in and slaughtered Azerbaijanis and afterwards declared martial law. Why did the Soviet central government participate in this bloody charade? To stifle a nationalist pro-democratic movement. To maintain control.”
“In the beginning of January, 1990, while we were in the training camp trying to study chess we would hear reports about the mood in Baku,
forty kilometers to the southwest. The central government was paralyzed; there were no services, friends called on the phone to tell us. Buses had stopped running. Newspapers, television and radio stations were seized by nationalists, so that it was impossible to get true information. Planes were still flying from Baku, but they were filled. There were no tickets to buy. Taking a train was dangerous. You had to pass through Azerbaijani territory, and if you were Armenian, maybe you would be dragged off; no one knew.
“Armenians were in a panic. They thought that something terrible was closing in around them. For months there had been a black market business which packed the possessions of Armenians in large containers and shipped them to Moscow. All of a sudden, this business was finished. Armenians feared that this was orchestrated, part of a sinister plot. Two years before, there had been two hundred and forty thousand Armenians living in the city, but after the Sumgait massacres many had left, and now the Armenian population was down to forty thousand. Only the weakest remained, old people, poor people who couldn’t afford to move, pensioners, and members of mixed families, like my mother’s younger sister, who was married to an Azeri. These people were anguished. Should they abandon their possessions and try to flee the city? It is very difficult to leave home with only the clothes on your back. People didn’t know what to do. They were losing their minds.
Mortal Games Page 3