Chess is a contradictory game. It is supposed to have no colors and is usually practiced in rigorous black and white, but it has always had political connotations. The most diverse governments have tried to appropriate the stars of the board. Franco’s Spain tried to profit from the image of his child prodigy, Arturo Pomar, although he later abandoned it to his fate. In Russia and the Soviet Union, politicization goes back a long way. According to the Russian historian Isaak Linder, chess arrived in Russia even before the Iberian Peninsula, around the 10th century. As in the West, for a time it was frowned upon. In the Middle Ages the Orthodox Church considered it sinful, along with dice and other more or less random games. Ivan the Terrible, a compulsive gambler, is said to have died during a game in 1584. But it was Vladimir Lenin who decided at the beginning of the 20th century that the chessboard would serve to establish the moral and intellectual superiority of revolutionary Russia. A little over a decade ago, a painting by Emma Lowenstramm , Hitler’s art teacher, was discovered in which he appeared playing a game against Lenin in Vienna in 1909. Its authenticity is suspected, but it is known that the Russian leader it promoted the proliferation of the so-called Palaces of Pioneers, where chess was a key subject. Thousands were created throughout the USSR. Related News standard No Anatoli Karpov, legendary chess grandmaster, in an induced coma after a mysterious fall Federico Marín Bellón The daughter of the legendary world champion has confirmed the state of her father In Soviet chess schools, in addition to gambits and traps, ‘moral purity’ and ‘devotion to the socialist model’ were taught, in the face of Western decadence. Anatoli Karpov, now hospitalized after a mysterious fall, was one of the best and most faithful students. Before he became world champion in 1975, he was already the regime’s favourite, as had Mikhail Botvinnik before him, who won the world championship in 1948 and did not fully abandon it until 1963. In 1972, Bobby’s victory Fischer, American, was a blow. Boris Spassky, the defeated, went from hero to near-traitor and ended up leaving his native country in 1976, although a decade ago he returned to Moscow in an escape worthy of a spy movie. Anatoli Karpov, in his office in the Duma or Chamber of Deputies, in 2013 Efe The one chosen to recover the crown was Karpov. In the ’70s, those things weren’t just decided on the board. If the Politburo ordered its best grandmasters to support their man, there was nothing to discuss. At the same time, the chosen representative was under almost unbearable pressure. There is a very significant scene in the film ‘Champion of the world’, which could not be released in Spain last summer as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. We are in the Philippines, in 1978, and the Russian grandmaster is threatened by his Sports Minister, when everyone begins to fear that a defeat is possible. The enemy is Viktor Korchnoi, dissident and official traitor; ending it is a matter of state. Far from wrinkling, Anatoli dares to reply: “And you think that by threatening me I have a better chance of winning?” It should be noted that Karpov supervised the script, a very flattering portrait of his figure, but it is not unthinkable that at least the first half of the story was real. The ‘son of change’ Unlike Spassky, Karpov did not lose his hero status and remained the unofficial representative of the old guard when he had to defend his title against Garry Kasparov, twelve years his junior. The great master born in Baku, self-proclaimed ‘son of change’, fiercely defended the opening ideas of Mikhail Gorbachev and his ‘perestroika’, still discussed within an empire that was collapsing. When Kasparov dethroned Karpov, many thought he was the straw that broke down the last walls. An epic fight between two giants of the board did not end there, who played almost 150 official games and spent more than 700 hours face to face. The final result favors, by very little, Kasparov, who nevertheless scored the most decisive points. Karpov, in 2015, attends Vladimir Putin’s annual speech in the Kremlin Efe With the USSR dissolved, the rise of Vladimir Putin once again turned the tables. The ‘Ogre of Baku’ left competitive chess and became an opponent of the regime. He truly believed that he could win at the polls, until in 2007 he was imprisoned, a week before the elections, and he began to fear for his life. To Karpov’s credit, it is worth remembering that he tried to visit his old rival and sent her a chess magazine to make his hours more bearable. At Putin’s party Garry was released and, once he woke up from his dream, he went to live in New York before it was too late. In an interview with ABC in 2016, he confessed his defeat: «I beat Karpov on the board, with some rules. In Putin’s Russia there are no rules, except that he does what he wants. My chess background helps very little in Russia. In chess there are fixed rules and unpredictable results, just the opposite of what we have in Russia.” Meanwhile, Karpov made a political career on the only possible side, in Putin’s United Russia party. His friends say that despite everything he is a convinced pacifist, although as a Duma deputy he was one of the signatories of the annexation of several Ukrainian territories. That has prevented him from leaving Russia and returning to Spain, as he had planned. He is now injured, after an unclear fall, which some attribute to the snow, others to alcohol and there is no shortage of people who speak of a beating in the street. Rumors are skyrocketing and some kind of political action cannot be ruled out, for defending the regime or who knows if for daring to raise any doubts. Russian obscurantism remains as legendary as Anatoli’s ability to slowly grip his rivals. Others calculate better, but old Karpov’s positional understanding and style have never been surpassed.
