Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  When Kasparov recalled Karpov’s machinations away from the board, his manner became tight, his mind Byzantine and flexible, as though he were trying to shadow Karpov through a complex variation, trying to fathom his infinitely tricky opponent even while he spoke. “Dirty tricks are not as likely now,” he mused during a conversation in June, “but nothing is clear. The state is losing power. If I could be patient and wait until it is dead, I would feel completely safe. Of course something could happen, because I am an important problem for the state and Karpov has always had strong connections with the KGB. The question is, will he use them? Karpov is quite clever and he knows that his long-term interest is in the West, not with a dying communist regime. Of course, it might be useful for him to employ the KGB in some manner for the match, but if it is revealed, his reputation would be destroyed here forever.

  “Right now in the Soviet Union, he has supporters among our Russian fascists and anti-Semites. But their support makes him uneasy. If they make a big campaign using anti-Semitic ideas in articles favoring him, he would immediately read about it in the American press. He knows this. Karpov would like to attack me in the Soviet press, but it is uncomfortable for him, because I am known by everyone as the anticommunist. Many people who have spent their lives connected with the communist regime are now afraid to be touched by the contamination. Karpov’s attacks against me must be indirect, so as to not bring a shadow to him and to his new image in the West. He has had to change his image, even his personality, to prepare for the future.

  “It is important to understand that these dirty tricks played by Karpov in the past were based upon the Soviet life. A man could not live a normal life without having good relations with the apparat. You couldn’t travel, leave the country without permission. In America you don’t understand such things. When he was world champion, Karpov had enormous power. He was the country’s leading sportsman and the symbol of the communist system. He had full state support. It was dangerous to say no to Karpov. He had the power to make a man’s life much better or much worse. When I discuss my history with Karpov, I know that some people say, ‘They hate one another,’ which is a way of not listening. People quickly forget. When he was the world champion, Karpov used the state to crush Korchnoi, Gulko, Nikitan and many others. Everyone who didn’t behave. Before our matches, Karpov’s people tried to bribe my trainers. Or someone was sent to my camp to spread the rumor that one of my trainers had been bribed. The problem with these stories is that they sound so outrageous, people don’t want to believe them.”

  “He can’t prove these things,” said Anatoly Karpov, one night over dinner. “He’s just talking. If I lived in the United States, I think I would invite him into the courts.” Karpov dismissed Kasparov’s allegations of dirty tricks in previous matches with congenial distaste and suggested that Kasparov made up such stories to gain sympathy and to annoy him before the next match. “He tries to get an extra bonus. He is trying to exploit everything which is not true. His normal behavior is that when he tells something, he tells fifty percent truth and to this he adds a lot of legends.”

  Karpov had delicate features, a fair complexion and straight, dark blond hair. As we ate Chinese food, he seemed vastly different from the sickly-thin, stressed-out thirty-three-year-old I had observed in Moscow during the first match with Kasparov. The thirty-nine-year-old former world champion sitting before me was relaxed and growing thick around the middle. He was pleased to be in New York, optimistic about the coming match and generally sanguine about life’s prospects. When I asked if he was a millionaire (for years there has been speculation about his wealth), he folded his hands on his chest and smiled like a middle-aged capitalist who is proud of his years of material success. “I am a wealthy man,” he answered. As we spoke about embarrassing subjects (Have you ever tried to bribe Kasparov’s assistants? “No.” Have you ever taken drugs to sustain yourself through matches? “Of course not.”), his manner remained kindly and intimate. He seemed like a man entirely at peace with himself.

  “After losing the world championship, life didn’t change too much for me,” he said in his high-pitched voice. “Probably this is because I love playing chess. I played tournaments when I was world champion, and I play tournaments now when I’m fighting for the championship again. I feel almost the same. I have put on weight because of age, but also it is necessary for me to put on weight because there is so much tension during a championship and normally I lose ten percent of my weight. At the end, I expect to be thin.”

  When I pressed him on the question of whether life was less interesting without the championship, he smiled a little, as if to say, glad you asked. “I have my peace movement,” he said. “I have been involved in this for many years. For eight years I am president of Soviet Peace Foundation. So now we became more active under new conditions. Also, I am president of the organizing committee for telethon for Chernobyl. I was in the United Nations, Washington, Turkey, Belgium and France trying to collect money for these people.”

  For more than an hour, he described his political life and disaffection with the communist system. “Before, they had crazy plans. Everything was planned, planned badly, but planned. For example, before, you needed approval from immigration authorities to send schoolchildren on a visit. Now we don’t need this approval, so we just make a decision.” Karpov said that he was in favor of a multiparty system. “That way you have more chance to protect democracy and not go back to the previous situation, to dictatorship and cult of personality like Stalin and Brezhnev.” This hardly sounded like the Karpov who had said that the two great loves in his life were chess and Marxism and who had been awarded the Order of Lenin. I mentioned that many chess fans in the West had heard that he had a close personal relationship with Brezhnev. “This is a lie,” he answered, with a shy and engaging smile. “People in the West think this is true due to Kasparov. [He spreads] this type of information.” In his understated manner, Karpov made it clear that he was critical of Gorbachev, whom he considered too much of a communist and too slow to accept change. He faulted Gorbachev for difficulties in the Baltics and for resisting general elections for the presidency, such as we have in the United States. His message was a more moderate version of Kasparov’s. “I always had the idea that people should be free,” he said. He added that as his country seemed to be rocketing toward a new day, he was so busy with his political work that there was hardly enough time to study chess, even with the world championship approaching. “It takes a lot of my time. Much more now than in nineteen eighty-five, because the situation has been changed and we have more possibilities.”

  After listening to Kasparov and others, I had been expecting to meet Swamp Thing for dinner, and instead, Karpov came across as a regular down-to-earth fellow. His political message was similar to Kasparov’s, but his style was very different. Karpov’s rendering of himself was even, low-keyed and friendly. He was open to suggestion. There was no huge anger here, at least none that he showed. No core of angst rippling the surface. No ominous silences. No hurricane of passion. No long-spoken paragraphs of hurt and poetry. Karpov politely inquired about the routine of my life and the chess education of my son. When he spoke of his distaste for Kasparov, he did so in an even-keeled, almost generous manner. “Personally, I can’t accept him. We have different characters.”

  Karpov had trained for the match at home in the Soviet Union. When I inquired about his training regimen and how he planned to exploit Kasparov’s weaknesses, he smiled faintly and shook his head, no. “No, I can’t tell you. Not even in general.”

  “Let’s pretend you were about to play against someone other than Kasparov,” I asked, attempting a sly move against the master of the game. “What kinds of things would you focus on? Would questions of this opponent’s personality give you clues about how to beat him over the board?”

  “If I described to you weaknesses in general, I would reveal my own view. You would learn how I work, how I see other people. I would open myself up
.” As always, Karpov’s manner remained friendly, but his circumspection on the subject of chess preparation and Kasparov’s weaknesses was daunting. He had something in mind and did not want to show even a glimmer of it.

  But addressing the subject of Kasparov, the player, had changed Karpov’s demeanor. His cheeks reddened a little, he tensed as though realizing that the contest of his life was again close at hand. He was most eager to describe Kasparov’s gifts: “Despite his age he is a deep psychologist on the chessboard. He is good at sensing what his opponent is feeling. Because of this, he knows whether to take a risk or not. And sometimes you must take a risk to win. His sense of the initiative is fantastic. [Despite what people say] he controls himself very well. He is quite cool inside.”

  At the chessboard, unlike the flamboyant Kasparov, Karpov strives to improve his position little by little, maneuvering subtly, masking his threats. Karpov avoids weaknesses and waits for his opponent to make mistakes. Mark Taimanov, the great Russian grandmaster and theoretician, said, “He can rearrange the pieces without violating the internal life of the position. It is a hypnotic style that sometimes makes his opponent fall asleep.” Karpov works to neutralize threats and to gain control of certain squares and files, so that with his superior technique he will be able to win in the endgame. “When he is in top form, he is taking away your energy, like a spider,” said Kasparov, who has seen many of his most creative and apparently overwhelming attacks immobilized by Karpov. “It is very difficult to get to him, to catch him, but he is also a very heavy hitter. If you make a mistake, he will put you out.”

  My conversation with Karpov wandered here and there, but the challenger always maneuvered it back to politics. “Many people mix up democracy and anarchy,” he said, alluding to Kasparov’s call for the immediate overthrow of communism. “I hate anarchy.” Perhaps six or eight times during the evening, he referred to himself as a democrat, and stressed that when he had been world champion he had sympathized with refuseniks such as grandmaster Boris Gulko. In a speech at Howard University, Karpov said that he had tried to help Gulko during the early eighties, when the Soviet champion had been held under house arrest. Why, I asked Karpov, if he had been in sympathy with the political views of refuseniks and their desire for freedom, had he refused to shake hands with grandmaster defectors from the Soviet Union, such as Lev Alburt, when he met them at international tournaments? “Only with Korchnoi, I didn’t shake hands because we had personal problems,” he answered. “I always shook hands with them. I shook hands with Alburt.”

  Karpov explained that his poor image in the West had had its inception in Bobby Fischer’s refusal to defend his title against him in 1975, as if somehow Fischer’s madness had been Karpov’s fault. Then, while he had held the world championship title, it was Brezhnev’s time, and the closed nature of Soviet society had prevented him from properly introducing himself to a Western public that more and more thought of him as a communist bad guy. When Kasparov came on the scene, he said, Kasparov had further distorted this negative image for his own ends.

  Could it be that Anatoly Karpov had always been misunderstood? Could he in truth have been a freedom fighter and democrat, trying to do the best he could while constrained by the shackles of an evil regime? There were many such stories in history. The literature of World War II abounds with stories of supposed Nazi sympathizers who worked quietly and effectively to help save Jews. I began to question the many Soviet chess luminaries I met during my visits to Europe and Russia about Karpov’s life and political heart. What about it? I asked, referring to Karpov’s description of himself as a democrat and of his efforts in the early eighties to help refuseniks.

  The initial response of his colleagues was often laughter. When I proposed this scenario to Boris Gulko, his face seemed to be caught for a moment between a smile and a sneer.

  “Only people who don’t know him can believe this nonsense,” said Gulko, who is now one of the top grandmasters in the United States and lives with his wife and son in New Jersey. “Karpov spoke at Howard University and people asked him about relations with me and he said that he helped me when I was a refusenik. It’s bullshit. It is impossible to create a bigger lie, because he took part in making the decision to keep me imprisoned in the Soviet Union.”

  In 1978, when Boris Gulko and his wife, Anna Akhsharumova, a former Soviet woman chess champion, made public their desire to emigrate to Israel, they were stripped of all state support and barred from playing in chess tournaments. For several years, they lived under virtual house arrest, unable to work, entirely dependent on friends for food and the necessities of life. To publicize his plight, Gulko went on two lengthy hunger strikes, and at one point he was badly beaten by KGB thugs. When I visited him in his Moscow apartment in 1983, his hair was pure white and he had the aged face of a sixty-year-old. I was dumbfounded when he told me that he was thirty-seven. “If you don’t eat for forty-two days, you too will look sixty,” he said during our lengthy conversation in his flat, while I worried about the repercussions if our talk was monitored by the KGB. In fact, on the following day, Gulko was pulled into KGB headquarters for a grilling.

  “I will tell you how Karpov helped me,” Gulko said eight years later. “He sent his manager to my apartment. It was about the time that the authorities were going to make the decision about our case, whether they would let us leave for Israel or force us to stay. The manager said to me, ‘Mr. Karpov likes your ideas. He would like to work with you.’ He said that if I would change my mind about emigration, Karpov would become my patron and help me to occupy a normal position in the Soviet Union. I knew that it was a lie. This arrangement would have left me completely dependent on him. I answered Karpov’s manager that I also like my ideas and wouldn’t like to work with Karpov.

  “Karpov is a very great chess player away from the board. At the time, he forced all strong players to work for him. If you refused to help Karpov, he made sure that you did not go abroad. He was the tsar of chess, the Brezhnev of chess. When Karpov was the world champion, it was black days for Soviet chess. Because of his great power, there was born a new kind of chess literature. When they published Karpov’s games and the commentaries to his games, nobody could mention anything about his mistakes. It was very strange. In one game against Korchnoi, Korchnoi missed the opportunity to mate in four. In the commentary, all that was mentioned was that Korchnoi could have played better, but the game was a draw.

  “A few days after the visit from Karpov’s manager, I was invited to come into the KGB office, and a powerful man in the agency repeated the proposal. They thought I would change my mind. It was obvious that Karpov and the KGB were working hand in hand.”

  “Karpov is a total cynic,” said Lev Alburt, who referred to a photograph which appeared in Chess Life in the spring of 1981, showing Karpov refusing to shake Alburt’s hand at the Malta Olympiad about one year after Alburt’s defection from the Soviet Union. Alburt had spent considerable time with Karpov studying chess when they were both promising young players in the Soviet Union. He said that young Anatoly was the ultimate pragmatist, to whom communism was attractive only insofar as it could be used to further his career. “Karpov took life as a game and he played it very well. He considered someone who did not use the communist system to his advantage an idiot. It would be like playing chess without castling because one happened not to like castling. In 1975, he said that the two major events in his life were joining the Communist Party and having a son. But privately he would tell anticommunist jokes like the rest of us.”

  It was disquieting to hear Karpov’s political life and character described by these men who had known him for decades. A journalist develops a nose for duplicity. But I had dined with Karpov twice and each time come away impressed by his sincerity and charm. He had seemed to answer the most difficult questions candidly. He was saddened by his dark reputation in the West and admitted honestly that he didn’t know what to do about it. He asked almost meekly for advice. Could this b
e the same person who had ruthlessly blackmailed the Soviet chess world for a decade? Could he be such a brilliant illusionist? But why had he told me that he had shaken hands with Alburt, that he had been Gulko’s benefactor? Had he thought that I wouldn’t ask them? Or did he have some compelling refutation prepared for their answers? What was the truth? Like a great attorney for the defense, Karpov had created doubt despite overwhelming evidence by the other side. Despite mounds of slimy anecdotal material, Karpov seemed decent and reasonable. It was tempting to compare this puzzling man to the way in which he played the game; if indeed, Karpov’s nature was cleverly veiled, there was a similar elusiveness about his unique chess style. Like a great martial artist, he had the bewildering ability to deflect the power of lethal blows back upon his opponent. He was a defensive genius, who often won by absorbing his opponent’s power, as Kasparov said, like a spider. For decades over the board, he had defended the indefensible, wriggling out of mortal predicaments to come out on top. He had done this, in part, through an ability to appear cool and confident even while under heavy attack. Kasparov had said that Karpov was difficult to hit. How can you hit an opponent if you cannot find him?

  “It is senseless to speak of Karpov’s beliefs, because he has never had any,” said Boris Gulko. “He changes as animals change in the winter and summer. When communism was the ruling ideal in the Soviet Union, Karpov used it to help him. He was a great communist success story, an example of what communism can achieve. When communism began to break down, he moved in other directions. When anti-Semitism seemed to be gaining strength in the country, he tried to use it, not because he is an anti-Semite, but because it could be useful to him. In interviews he said that he is a real Russian, and that Jews like Gulko, Kasparov and Korchnoi don’t like him because he is a strong player. Now when it is clear that communism is finished, Karpov says he is a democrat.”