Years Without Time - Chess, Dissidents, and Survival in Soviet Moscow
Continuing the retelling of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0). Boris Gulko describes the long, empty years of being stuck in the Soviet Union. Years when time stopped. And the strange games the KGB played off the chessboard.
A Stolen Gold Medal
Right after their hunger strike failed, the Gulkos got a small break. They could still play in tournaments. Anya entered the 43rd USSR Women’s Championship in Tallinn. Boris went as her coach.
Anya’s key game against Nana Ioseliani should have decided the tournament. Ioseliani ran out of time on move 38. By the rules, that is a loss. Simple.
But Ioseliani remembered Anya’s political status and complained to Moscow. An order came down to restart the game from move 38. It was signed by two grandmasters running the Chess Directorate and Federation. They knew the rules perfectly well. They broke them anyway.
Gulko makes an important point. The initiative for this dirty move came from the chess officials themselves, not the KGB. These were educated people. They served the state by switching off their conscience.
Anya refused to replay a finished game. Her win became a loss. She lost the championship by one point.
At a federation meeting, two grandmasters stared at the floor while officials shouted nonsense. Later they were told the federation would not discuss the protest until they explained why they were protesting. Classic Soviet logic.
Petty KGB Tricks
The KGB could not come down hard on the Gulkos for their demonstrations. So they got petty.
While Boris and Anya were in Tallinn, someone opened all the windows in their Moscow apartment. In December. Icy wind blew through the rooms. A bird flew in. Their three-year-old son David caught it under the stove and released it from the balcony.
The next time, the apartment was flooded. Faucets were closed, so someone had used buckets. Then two thugs showed up demanding 70 rubles to “not make trouble.” Gulko screamed “Get out of here, provocators!” and they ran. Paying them would have given the KGB a bribery charge for his file.
I grew up in the post-Soviet space. The KGB was not always a terrifying machine of surgical precision. Sometimes it was just thugs with buckets of water. Petty, stupid, and mean.
The Deputy Minister’s Visit
In the summer of 1983, a deputy head of the State Sports Committee and a KGB agent who called himself “Ivanov” showed up at the apartment. Gulko notes the agent could just as well have said “Petrov.” That is the secret police for you.
The deputy minister was polite. He could not let them leave. But he offered to give them normal work. Boris’s friend Postovsky, who was visiting, hid on the balcony. When he tried to leave, a policeman questioned him. Postovsky gave the name of a dead chess federation member who had died a month earlier. The next day, the KGB called and demanded he come to Lubyanka for a written explanation.
After this visit, a camera appeared at the Gulkos’ door. Guests were photographed and sent away. The family was locked in for the entire day.
Karpov’s Brilliant Scheme Against Kasparov
In 1983, Kasparov was supposed to play Kortschnoi in Los Angeles. The Soviet authorities asked him to skip it. Gulko says this was actually Karpov’s scheme. Karpov invited the 20-year-old Kasparov home and they discussed it “one on one.” Kasparov was promised the federation would protect him. He did not go. Lost by default.
Then he went to a Central Committee official about those promises. The official told him: “You’re still young. You can wait three more years.”
Gulko tried to help. He passed Kasparov’s phone number to a New York Times correspondent. If Kasparov had just said he was willing to play, the scheme would have collapsed. His grandmother answered the phone instead.
Then Andropov promoted Heydar Aliyev from Baku to the number two position in government. Suddenly Kasparov had protection. The match was rearranged. Kortschnoi agreed to play despite having won by default.
And here is the detail that directly affected the Gulkos. Kortschnoi was making a list of demands. The American grandmaster Dima Gurevich called and asked if the Gulko family was on the list. “You’re right,” Kortschnoi said, “I completely forgot. But now that I have named my conditions, it’s not proper for me to alter them.” Those good manners cost the Gulkos two and a half more years in the USSR.
The Birth of Kasparov the Rebel
The first Karpov-Kasparov match in 1984 was supposed to last until someone won six games. After 27 games, Karpov led 5-0. It looked over. Then Kasparov held on. Twenty-one more games. Score: 5-3. Karpov was exhausted. His political machine stepped in. FIDE president Campomanes cancelled the match. Fresh start at 0-0.
Kasparov stood up from the back of the hall. “I protest.”
This was Kasparov refusing to let the Soviet system control him. The boy who had changed his Jewish father’s name and joined the Communist Party at 19 was gone. The rebel was born.
Moscow’s Last Dissidents
The refusenik community was split. Some said: we want to leave, so we should not get involved in Soviet internal affairs. Others, including Gulko, said: we are forced to live here, so we should join the dissidents.
By 1982, the KGB had crushed most of the dissident movement. Gulko makes a sharp observation. He says this destruction was Russia’s greatest misfortune. When communism fell, Czechoslovakia had Vaclav Havel and Poland had Lech Walesa. Russia had a former party boss. And eventually the KGB itself came to power through Vladimir Putin.
The dissidents left in Moscow were mostly elderly women. The KGB was apparently too ashamed to throw them in prison. Gulko met Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s wife, at a political trial. He traveled to provincial cities with human rights activists to arrange lawyers for dissidents.
He describes the Barats family, non-Jewish refuseniks. Vasily was a General Staff officer. Galya taught Communist Party history at Moscow State University. In 1977 they asked to leave the party and the country. They became an emigration committee of two. Later, their room became the Moscow center of the Pentecostal emigration movement.
The Pentecostals had a prophecy: after Brezhnev, two rulers would briefly reign, then a third, good ruler would come, and “everything will be over.” If that meant the collapse of the USSR, the prophecy came true.
Fred Waitzkin Comes to Moscow
During the first Karpov-Kasparov match, an American reporter wanted to meet Gulko but would not come to the apartment because it was bugged. They met on a frozen Moscow street instead. The reporter was Fred Waitzkin, in town with his eight-year-old son Joshua and coach Bruce Pandolfini. Yes, that Joshua Waitzkin, the prodigy from Searching for Bobby Fischer.
Since there was literally nowhere to go in Moscow, they ended up at the apartment anyway. Waitzkin sent his article out through the American embassy’s diplomatic mail.
Three weeks later, Gulko was summoned by a deputy sports minister. “It has become known to us that you met with an American reporter. And we are not pleased.”
Then came the threat: “If you keep acting that way, we will send you very far away.”
“That’s what I’m trying to accomplish,” Gulko replied, “to get very far away from you.”
“But we’ll send you in a different direction.”
The official got the last word. But Gulko got the better story.
Hope
In March 1985, Chernenko died and Gorbachev took over. Gulko notes the change: after three “half-corpses” running the country, here was someone alive. In November 1985, Kasparov took the world championship title from Karpov. The tentacles that Karpov had used to squeeze Soviet chess began to weaken.
For the first time in years, hope appeared.
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