A pawn in Putin’s game? Chess star fights for his nation’s pride
UNITED STATES: He annexed Crimea, sent warplanes into Syria and may even have influenced the course of the American presidential election as part of a careful strategy to restore Russian power and influence.
Yet Vladimir Putin is not resting on his laurels: another battle is under way, in Manhattan, that promises to restore a critical piece of Russian pride and patrimony.
Tomorrow, in a soundproof glass box at the South Street Seaport, New York, a 26-year-old Crimean emigre named Sergey Karjakin will seek to take the World Chess Federation title back to Russia for the first time since 2007.
It will be the finale of a match in which Karjakin has surprised commentators by holding his own against Magnus Carlsen, 26 tomorrow, the handsome, brooding Norwegian who has loomed large over world chess since 2013.
The two men drew the first seven of 12 games but the Russian won the eighth. Mr Carlsen levelled the match with a victory in the tenth game, on Sunday, and they drew once again yesterday in the 11th.
They played against a screen bearing the names of sponsors, and a broader backdrop of geo-political tensions between Russia and the West.
More than a billion people were said to be following the game online, including the Russian president. One of his press secretaries, Dmitri Peskov, has been seen in the crowd in New York.
He told reporters that the Kremlin was receiving regular updates.
Born in Crimea, Karjakin has said that he switched to Russia - long before the annexation - because he had no support in his homeland. In Moscow, by contrast, he was said to have been offered federal properties to use as training quarters.
The government ‘‘gives a lot of things for me to feel comfortable’’, he told the New York Post. ‘‘Putin wished me good luck and asked how my training is going.’’
He said that bringing home the championship was ‘‘really important for me personally and for my country’’.
The paper, which described him as a ‘‘mousey’’ dad from the Moscow suburbs - in contrast to Carlsen, a sometime model and celebrity - claimed that Russian military officers at his matches have sometimes seemed ‘‘embarrassed by [his] jingoism’’.
Bruce Pandolfini, a chess writer and teacher, said interest in the match did not quite compare to the famous championship duel in 1972, when American Bobby Fischer met Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky in Iceland at the height of the Cold War.
Since then ‘‘many of the greats from eastern Europe have come to the West, to America or elsewhere’’, he said. The balance of power in chess, so long held by Russia, had shifted and new centres of influence had arisen.
In this changed landscape, few predicted the sudden rise of Karjakin, who beat two higher-ranked Americans and five other grandmasters at a qualifying tournament earlier this year.
- The Times