Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  “January thirteenth was a beautiful day. There was a rainbow hanging over the sea. I will never forget it. This was the day the pogrom started. Rumors reached the camp that Armenian apartments in the city had been taken by mobs of killers. Was it true? It was difficult to accept these reports. Genocide? It must be a mistake. This was the twentieth century. We heard the news report from Moscow which described some minor dispute between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. We spoke to our friends in the police and KGB, and they assured us that everything would be fine. There was no danger. Friends of mine in Moscow wanted me to return, but I decided to stay a while.

  “Gorbachev was in Vilnius, Lithuania, talking about the new federation, how Soviets had wonderful times ahead, there would be new freedoms. What a charade. Gorbachev knew what was happening. I will believe to the end of my life that he was responsible.

  “We received phone calls from the city, describing unimaginable horrors. Azerbaijanis were systematically burning the apartments of Armenians. Bands of men would come to a large apartment house and break down the doors of Armenian apartments. They knew exactly which apartments to come to. Neighbors watched while flats were robbed and then burned. Armenian girls were raped and burned to death. It was Sumgait all over again. Women offering their bodies to save their families. Armenian men, women and children were bludgeoned in the courtyard, while their neighbors watched in horror. An Azeri friend came to the camp and told me of one Armenian woman who was raped and then dropped from the window of her eighth-floor apartment. This happened very close to the big square in Baku. Soviet troops were guarding the square, watching. They observed this murder and did nothing.

  “Many Azerbaijanis tried to save their neighbors by hiding them from the murderers. Some did nothing. If you watch the police and the army stand by idly while murder is being committed, what would you do?

  “Shakarov, my old friend, was in despair. His mother, brother, and elderly uncle and aunt lived in the center of the city. They were the only Armenians in a complex of two hundred apartments. They would be the target. He tried to reach them on the phone and the line was dead. He was certain that they were murdered. All day he lay on the bed crying.

  “We heard from the city that the pogromists had taken the apartment of my aunt. Fortunately, she and her husband had left the apartment. They were living with my grandmother in an apartment rented by a relative who had married an Azeri man. His name was on the door, and this gave them a little safety. But the pogrom was all around them and they were terrified. My grandmother was seventy-eight and had lived her entire life in Baku. She had buried her husband here. She didn’t want to leave. She said, ‘Even if they take me, I don’t want to go.’

  “By now, of course, I knew I must leave, and I was trying to figure out how to save my family and friends. I chartered a plane from Moscow. The phone was ringing day and night. People I knew from the city were asking, ‘Save us. Please save us.’ Azeri friends were smuggling Armenians to the camp. Soon we had forty people living with us. Sleeping, crying everywhere. Everyone scared to death. It was very dangerous for the director of the sanitarium. Probably he would not have allowed us to do this, except that he had the same problem. His son had married an Armenian girl and he was thinking how to bring them from the city. Finally, I managed to get my grandmother to come to the camp. I lied to her. I said that later on we would return to town.

  “We found out that Shakarov’s family had managed to survive by a stroke of luck. When their door was beaten down by the killers, they happened to see a fax machine, which Shakarov mainly used for getting information for me from different chess tournaments. But for some reason the crowd decided that they had broken into the apartment of American spies. About that time, two of my friends from the KGB arrived, and one of them was very clever. He said, ‘Yes, yes, they are American spies. We are arresting them.’ My friends rescued Shakarov’s family from the killers. They took them to a small refugee camp and later to our training camp. But they had lost all their possessions—money, passports, everything in their lives. Soon after, these KGB guys and many others like them left the city. The situation was completely out of control. Baku was in the hands of the pogromists.

  “The night of January fifteenth was the most difficult time. I was playing cards with Kadzhar, my driver Kolia Garaev, and another chess professional who worked with me. Our two police guards sat beside us watching the game. About half past midnight, we got a phone call that killers were coming in buses to our district from the city. The pogromists had heard that the police were protecting some Armenians. I imagined them coming to us along the road I had traveled hundreds of times, the sea on one side, oil wells on the other. We kept playing cards. Everyone seemed to be pretending that this was not happening. But of course no one could sleep.

  “Some time during the night, I asked the major, ‘If they break in here, will you shoot?’ He didn’t answer, and so I dealt the cards to Kadzhar, we played a while longer. Then, I asked him again, ‘If they come, will you shoot?’

  “‘You know, I have a family. I have three daughters,’ he said quietly. He didn’t look up at me.

  “After a while, I said, ‘Will you give me your gun?’ He thought for a while, and then he answered, ‘If they come, you have to hit me on the side of the head. Make it look like you took it from me.’ It was like a scene in a gangster movie. He was a good guy and it was nice that he said he would give me the gun. Who knows if he really would have done it?

  “The crowd never reached the sanitarium. The explanation is quite interesting. The area north of the city is controlled by a kind of mafia who do a huge volume of illegal business in flowers and sturgeon eggs. This ‘fish mafia,’ as I call them, is powerful and well-armed. They have their own code of honor. They did not want the murder of Armenians taking place in their area. When they heard that the killers were on their way, they sent out patrols. The mob was intercepted, and when they saw guns they turned back. Of course the army could have done the same as the fish mafia, but it didn’t serve their purpose.

  “The next day, I drove to the city. I wanted to see my flat and maybe take a few things. I drove in one car with Kadzhar and an Azeri friend, and a special Azeri police car drove in front of us, supposedly providing protection. But as soon as we began driving, they sped ahead of us, way out of sight. They didn’t want to be connected to us. If we had been attacked, they wouldn’t have known.

  “Kadzhar wanted to go to his apartment to get some clothes, but when we reached his neighborhood we saw that most of the Armenian apartments had been taken. We decided not to stop. My apartment was one of the few that hadn’t been broken into. It has a very strong steel door, and there were marks, they had tried to pry it open. I told my friends that I wanted to collect a few of my most memorable things. They said, there’s no need, you’ll come back here when things settle down, but I knew I would never come back. So I took a few pictures of my mother and father, some of my chess notebooks from when I was a kid, a couple of my favorite works of literature, a chess set, a few prizes. We were there for an hour. It was a very nervous hour.

  “The next day, January seventeenth, the plane arrived. The plan was for a bus to take my mother, family and friends from the sanitarium. But I was worried that something might happen along the road, so I went ahead to check. Near the airport there were troops and tanks, and after we passed I could see that the tanks had rolled onto the road and stopped. Nothing could pass by them.

  “The airport was all chaos and panic. Everyone who had an Armenian member of their family, a mother, a father, was trying to send them away, but all the planes were filled. Nobody knew what to do. Hundreds of Armenians were waiting for a ticket to go anywhere. They were sitting in a hangar, waiting. At the same time, Azerbaijani nationalist groups were trying to send their fighters to other districts to battle against Armenians. Everything was out of control. Our chartered plane was on the ground, a small plane with sixty-eight seats, hidden among larger ones. But the crew would
n’t fly us out. They were afraid. We got another crew. I convinced them to take us with money. Lots of money.

  “I talked to a KGB man at the airport and told him that the bus with my family and friends was coming. I asked if he could help get them past the blockade on the road. He said, ‘Sorry, it’s your problem.’ What to do? If the bus had been stopped, probably they would have been attacked by the mob. Who knows what would have happened? My mother and grandmother. All of my friends. It’s better not to guess.

  “Then the driver of our car remembered that there is a very old and broken road which leads to the airport. It is almost never used. You must open a gate to pass. I called the sanitarium and told them to bring the bus this way.

  “The weather was very bad. It was cold and windy. It was about seven o’clock when they arrived. We were still waiting for some other people. Soon nine members of my family came from town in a small bus. Somehow they got through. It was pitiful. Two of them were very old. These confused and frightened old people were trying to take care of their granddaughter, a little girl born with Down’s syndrome. The driver of their bus was an Azerbaijani. A very brave man. If the bus had been stopped he might have died with his passengers.

  “There had been many phone calls to the camp, and my mother was trying to figure out where people she knew might be hiding. Every time we called someone’s flat, there was no answer or the line was dead. We had some free seats on the plane. Who to take? A terrible decision. Later some Armenian nationalists criticized me for taking my driver instead of someone else. It’s bullshit. My driver is Armenian. He lost his flat. There are so many terrible stories. My driver often talked to me about his best friend, who was a dentist. Kolia had been staying in this friend’s home before I arrived to begin my training. The man had a large house and was quite wealthy—maybe he did some shady business, but he was a good guy. He was a perfect target for the pogromists. They came to his house and he called to them from his window, ‘Come on in. I will shoot.’ He had automatic weapons. When they saw this, they left him alone. The next morning the police came to this man’s house and arrested him for illegal use of weapons. Can you imagine? Police, KGB, pogromists—they were in it together. I called the chief of police and asked the man to bring my driver’s friend to the camp. The chief said, ‘Yes, yes,’ but didn’t do it. A few days later they let him go and he came to the airport to try to get out. He was getting on a plane when two policeman dragged him away. The next day his body was discovered.

  “We had eight free seats on the plane. Which people to chose? I asked my driver to go to the hangar and select eight of the weakest. My friends and relatives, more than sixty people, rushed to climb up a wobbly little ladder that was there for the crew. No one could bear to wait for the normal boarding ladder. Three hours after we took off for Moscow, the Baku airport was closed.

  “When we arrived in Moscow it was very cold. We brought people to hotels, to the Armenian embassy. Some stayed with me. These people were uprooted, lost souls. They had lost their past. Shakarov’s aunt—she was one of the ones that my KGB friends had saved from the pogromists—became sick and died ten days later. She died of trauma. In Moscow they wouldn’t allow us to bury her because she had no documents. Everything had been stolen by the pogromists. Finally, I was able to get permission.

  “I approached the editors of one of the biggest newspapers and said that I wanted to give a press conference to report what I had seen. They organized a press conference and many journalists came. Almost nothing was published. One very incomplete article. That was it. This was the time of glasnost, the end of state censorship. One TV journalist promised to do a show with me about the tragedy in Baku. Weeks passed. He came back to me and said, ‘I’m sorry, Garry, it’s impossible.’

  “I managed to get a meeting with Gorbachev and a few of his advisors. I described what I had seen, but Gorbachev wasn’t listening. It was like shouting in a desert. Afterwards I realized that their plan was to punish the nationalists and to show the Lithuanians and others who wanted to break from the central government, ‘Look what happened in Baku—this will happen to you if you persist in your demands.’ This was an example for the Baltic states, but in Moscow people responded, ‘Okay, Azerbaijan. Something happened. But exactly what happened? Some Armenians died. Then they brought troops. It’s very complicated.’

  “I gave speeches that began, Today Baku, tomorrow Vilnius, the day after tomorrow Moscow.’ Unfortunately not too many listened. I could tell people were thinking, ‘The kid is only twenty-seven. And he’s a chess player. What does he know?’

  “I discussed the events in Baku with journalists from the West, well-informed men. We watched videotapes together showing the disaster in Baku. One or two of them said to me, ‘So what? It will not be shown in the West.’ Why not? ‘Because it is no big deal. People in southern California are not concerned about Azerbaijan.’ No big deal.

  “Maybe no big deal, but it changed my life. Two hundred and forty thousand Armenians lived in Baku in 1988. By the end of the pogrom, almost all were gone. I saw it with my eyes—the face of communism is the face of death. After there were no more Armenians left in Baku to protect, government troops came into the city and slaughtered Azeres. They came into the city to preserve the communist government. That was the plan from the beginning. Incite ethnic unrest and then use it as a pretext to destroy anticommunist independence movements.

  “Because of Baku, I decided to start a political life. Maybe it’s one drop, but it’s something I can do. My priorities changed. I saw that there are things more important and less important. When I was in Baku and people were dying, chess seemed trivial. Before this, for as long as I could remember, chess had been the center of my life.

  “When I became world champion I was asked many times, ‘Garry, do you want to leave Baku? It is so little. It is out of the way, provincial. You should live in Moscow. To grow as a person you need to spend time in Western Europe and America.’ I said, ‘No, no. It is my home. Leaving Baku would be an insult to my friends.’ I had this problem. Life solved this problem. Now my wife, my mother and I live in Moscow. I don’t like it there very much. I am a refugee, a wealthy refugee, to be sure. I can afford to stay at the St. James Club when I visit Paris and at the Regency Hotel when I come to New York. But I lost my home. . . .

  “That was the beginning of 1990.”

  3

  A TROUBLEMAKER AND A TROUBLED SOUL

  April, 1990. “If you don’t want to listen, it’s your problem,” said Kasparov. He was in the front passenger seat of a black Mercedes which was speeding north from Paris to Lille near the Belgium border, where he was to play a chess exhibition. I had made the error of asking a few questions which to him seemed tainted by America’s infatuation with Mikhail Gorbachev, and now Kasparov held me in his glare as if I were the primary architect of American foreign policy. “America closes its eyes and says the Baltic states are an internal problem, your business. Send troops. Kill people. We won’t bother you. Fine.” Kasparov’s face was steel-hard and his short sentences were pungent with threat. “But if you continue to give this blind support to Gorbachev you’ll increase the chances of civil war, and don’t be upset if we won’t shake your hand in the future, because this hand will be in the blood.”

  I was far from alone among Americans in thinking that Gorbachev was a modern hero. I suggested that it was difficult to dismiss his accomplishments. He had established an unprecedented environment of liberalism in his country, which had set off a chain reaction of communist downfalls throughout eastern Europe. I also mentioned that he was admired in the United States for liberalizing emigration restrictions for Jews and for bringing free press to the Soviet Union.

  “Listen, we cannot find a common language [exasperated pause]. . . You Americans have a history of loving our dictators. For a while Khrushchev was a hero in your country, and Stalin as well. You want to believe that they are doing a good job. It is true that Gorbachev is doing a good job for t
he West. He takes the troops from Afghanistan. He takes the troops from Eastern Europe. Fine. What does he do with them? He sends them to the Baltics. Is he doing this for peace? Did he slaughter women and children in Azerbaijan for peace?

  “Gorbachev has succeeded in convincing the West that his is the fight of a decent man for a better future. This is a lie. He is the last leader of the communist state, trying to save everything he can. When you in the West make the opponent king, it is betrayal.”

  For a moment he was silent, and I tried to take things in. I had arrived in Paris a couple of hours before, sleepy but eager to interview the world champion about chess and about Anatoly Karpov, whom he would meet in five months for the title. When I had brought up the match at the start of the drive, he had said with a hint of reproach that people in the Soviet Union weren’t interested in chess today, they were concerned with survival—end of chess talk. At the time the world champion was a virtual stranger to me. We had spoken for perhaps fifteen minutes at Olga Capablanca’s party in New York half a year before. I knew, of course, of his interest in politics, but I was unprepared for his passion and anger.

  “Bush can support him—the entire West can support him—but the leader without the support in his own country is dead [disgusted pause].