Reforming FIDE, Part 4: Into The Darkness

To begin on a relatively upbeat note (we’re going to need it), it should be pointed out that Arkady Dvorkovich is clearly the most able president that FIDE has had in the past 40 years. But then, given that his predecessors were the notoriously duplicitous and cerebrally-challenged duo of Florencio Campomanes (1982–1995) and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (1995–2018), that’s hardly much, in itself, to brag about—not dissimilar to being the captain of the Mongolian open ocean racing team. 

More worrying still, being “able” is not always an unequivocally positive professional attribute. When applied to doctors or mathematicians, say, demonstrating a high degree of domain-relevant competence is straightforwardly desirable, but when applied to those who have been consistent enablers of one of the most repressive autocratic regimes on the planet that is currently responsible for massive amounts of needless death and destruction and is airily threatening to engulf the planet in global thermonuclear war, it is quite another kettle of fish entirely. 

Which is, most unfortunately, precisely where we find ourselves today. It is not that Dvorkovich is one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, you understand—he is not. As Assistant to the President of the Russian Federation from 2008–2012 and Deputy Prime Minister from 2012–2018, Dvorkovich has long been a particularly close confidante of Dmitry Medvedev.

Medvedev, you may recall, was the Russian President from 2008–2012 and Prime Minister from 2012–2018, and at one point was considered as a potential “liberal challenger” to Putin’s autocratic machinations by naive Western analysts desperate to pin their hopes somewhere, beguiled by Medvedev’s public declarations of how he was determined to tackle government corruption (Medvedev was later comprehensively exposed as a major participant in such corruption schemes by Alexei Navalny in a 2017 video—see below). 

Independent of all of that (as difficult as it might be to pass swiftly on from well-researched accusations of massive embezzlement and fraud) it quickly became clear that Medvedev was nothing more than a spineless enabler of Vladimir Putin, obligingly stepping aside to allow Putin to officially reclaim the presidency in 2012 before duly resigning as Prime Minister in 2020 in order to let Putin alter the Russian Constitution so as to effectively rule indefinitely.   

These days, Medvedev is Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council and spends his time publicly articulating how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents a sacred conflict with Satan (the Ukrainians, it is worth clarifying here given the context, whom Medvedev has characterized as “crazy Nazi drug addicts”, represent the satanic forces here) and suggesting that the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, should ritually disembowel himself for his blatant subservience to American interests.  A very different form of liberalism, then.

Dvorkovich, clearly, is not Medvedev. But equally clearly, he was one of his closest political allies for decades and correspondingly served in some of the highest offices of the land as part of Medvedev’s inner circle. Which means that either he was an active participant in the many nefarious activities that Medvedev was so obviously involved in, or he was, somehow, wholly oblivious to everything going on around him—either way, hardly a ringing endorsement for someone to front an international chess organization whose self-proclaimed motto is how we are all one big happy family (unless, of course, by “one big happy family” you are referring to the Sicilian mafia).  

Now, let’s turn to Dvorkovich’s actions themselves. The one thing that becomes abundantly clear about Mr Dvorkovich after studying his behavior in some detail is that his greatest quality is his ability to avoid articulating any coherent position on anything. Now I appreciate that in many places this is precisely the sort of skill that qualifies one for a glittering political career—this is certainly the case for my native country of Canada, for example. But there is a vital difference.  

The last time I checked Canada was not consistently censured by the likes of Amnesty International for vigorously suppressing free speech, murdering journalists, imprisoning and poisoning political dissidents or wantonly invading sovereign nations and committing war crimes. A bland Canadian politician is simply a redundant description of what anyone wandering around Ottawa is bound to encounter on a regular basis, but a nondescript enabler of a regime that is determined to systematically annihilate its critics by whatever means necessary is something else entirely: a paradigmatic representative of what Hannah Arendt so trenchantly described as “the banality of evil.”

Here’s an example to illustrate what I’m talking about. In a March 2022 interview with a journalist for the American magazine Mother Jones, Dvorkovich let slip the admissions, “Wars are the worst things one might face in life,” and “My thoughts are with Ukrainian civilians.”

These seemingly innocuous remarks duly produced a firestorm of protests by Russian ultranationalists, who promptly labeled the hitherto steadfastly colorless Mr Dvorkovich as a pernicious “fifth columnist” determined to sell out Mother Russia to evil Westerners. This, in turn, prompted the shape-shifting Dvorkovich to frantically try to balance things out by formally posting comments on the website of the Skolkovo Foundation that he was then chairman of, expressing his disgust at the “harsh and senseless” sanctions imposed on Russia by foreign governments and his glowing pride at the valor and glorious courage of Russian soldiers. 

But by then it was too late: Dvorkovich had evidently angered sufficient numbers of key people in the Kremlin to such an extent that he was forced to resign his Skolkovo chairmanship, doubtless leading him to conclude that henceforth he must rigorously ensure that he could never be accused of having any opinions about anything, ever.  

And for those who maintain that none of this, however unsavory, has anything formally to do with Dvorkovich’s role as FIDE President, I strongly disagree. 

THE SERGEY KARJAKIN CASE

Let’s begin with the case of Sergey Karjakin, who had qualified for the 2022 Candidates Tournament but was prohibited from competing after having been summarily banned by FIDE’s Ethics Committee (which, by the way, should henceforth be the standard dictionary reference for “oxymoron”) for posting a series of tweets supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Now, at this point I think it should be clear that I am simply enraged by the murderous act of aggression that is the Russian invasion of Ukraine and am 100% opposed to the claims of Mr Karjakin (at least those small bits that I have bothered to submit to Google translate).  

Which makes it all the more uncomfortable to have to admit that I am in complete agreement with Mr Karjakin’s conclusion that FIDE’s treatment of his case is evidence that “the basic principle that sport is out of politics has been trampled.” (see here, for example).

What actually happened? Well, in their formal decision, FIDE officials declared, “The statements by Sergey Karjakin on the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine has led to a considerable number of reactions on social media and elsewhere, to a large extent negative, towards the opinion expressed by Sergey Karjakin,” before going on to emphasize that these statements were particularly destructive to the broader image of chess because they were in the public domain.  

This is a hugely problematic type of intellectual position to take, and yet further evidence that there is something deeply lacking on the ratiocination front in FIDE-land. Because the final verdict against Mr Karjakin is not that he is telling slanderous lies, or contravening the established limits of hate speech, or casting the public image of chess into disrepute by expressing pernicious and hugely damaging sentiments that are manifestly false and show a blatant disregard to fundamental principles of human rights (all of which I strongly suspect to be the case, but then I naturally haven’t bothered to wade through his Twitter tirade to any great extent to confirm my suspicions), but instead that his statements have, “led to a considerable number of reactions on social media and elsewhere” that were “to a large extent negative”. 

In other words, the official charge against Mr Karjakin which resulted in him being rejected from participating in one of the most significant events of his professional career is that he was saying something unpopular. This is simply an insane way to conduct any form of official ethics policy and goes a considerable distance towards ensuring that FIDE will remain mired as the most laughably stupid and incoherent of all international sporting organizations on earth, which is certainly no mean feat given the competition. 

What say you to all of this, Mr President? What is your view of the Karjakin situation?  

“I didn’t push for any decision, but the fact that we redirected it to the Ethics Commission means that we felt that something is wrong. Let’s put it this way. It doesn’t mean we are against the right to freedom of speech. We do have that both globally and in any society…in most societies, I would say. But there are some limits that are set by the freedom of other people. I just thought that Sergey could be a bit more careful. You can have an opinion…I think most people are in favor of their own country. It’s normal. I love Russia personally. Nobody can take that away from me. But of course you should understand the feelings of other people and try to be careful.” (full Chess24 interview here)

The one conclusion that should be apparent to everyone from these comments is that Mr Dvorkovich, never the most forthcoming or ideas-driven fellow, has learned his recent lesson well and is rigorously limiting all of his public statements to a string of incoherent and lightly contradictory non-sequiturs—just enough to be thoroughly meaningless, but not enough to prompt people to bother going to the mental effort of sorting out what he’s actually saying. 

And to add insult to injury, there is the additional irony that Mr Dvorkovich, as someone who was a high official for almost 20 years in Russia’s Putin-dominated regime, played a not inconsequential role in the production of the steady bombardment of government propaganda (and consistent suppression of contrary factual perspectives) that was explicitly designed to immediately prompt the paranoid “we must unhesitatingly rally behind our glorious leader who is selflessly determined to protect us from our many surrounding predatory enemies” response that the uncritical Mr Karjakin reflexively arrived at. 

And while I hardly claim to know (or care), it’s not difficult to imagine that FIDE’s official condemnation of Mr Karjakin was actually sanctioned by Vladimir Putin in an attempt to convince people that FIDE is not the Kremlin puppet that it actually is, while simultaneously fuelling the knee-jerk “everyone is out to destroy us” indignation that he is so methodically fostering among the Russian citizenry in order to justify whatever egregious human rights violation he is presently contemplating implementing. Such a scenario would certainly not be out of character for either Putin or a timorous facilitating lackey like Dvorkovich. 

THINGS GETTING WORSE

And then, somehow, it gets even worse.  By this point, you will hardly be surprised to learn (indeed, most of you know it already) that Mr Dvorkovich recently won re-election as FIDE President in a landslide, sadly buttressed by the explicit support of the genial but obviously hopelessly naive former world chess champion Viswanathan Anand, a development which prompted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to crow:

“Politics pervades all aspects linked to sports and culture, which is very undesirable and unacceptable to us. But this does not mean that we should not fight.”

Well, no. No, no and no. Politics doesn’t pervade all aspects linked to sports and culture. If I want to follow, or even actively participate in, professional basketball or snooker or sumo wrestling, I will merrily do so completely independently of whatever political leanings I might have. 

Ditto for a random trip to a bookstore, or a movie theater or an art gallery or a monster truck rally. If you live in a civilized place, in a modern place, in a place with free speech and the right to free assembly and an established culture where people who disagree with their current government representatives are allowed to publicly voice their opinions without fear of having their underwear laced with novichok or polonium slipped into their tea, things are rather different, you see. You might want to give that a try and find out for yourself. 

And, while we’re at it, the barbarous military invasion of a sovereign state isn’t “politics”.  It’s something else entirely. 

Given the present context, I imagine that there will be some who will instinctively react to these words by summarily declaring that I am on some sort of anti-Russian crusade. No, yet again. 

It is certainly true that I have long been convinced that Vladimir Putin is a highly dangerous war-mongering despot who is guilty of many heinous crimes and is directly responsible for a great deal of suffering both inside and outside his country, but in a reasonable world such sentiments would be no more appropriate to express on a chess blog than my love of Tchaikovsky’s Trio in A Minor (a Russian work dedicated to the memory of Nikolai Rubinstein, a great Russian musician). Which is all to say that I am hardly, a priori, anti-Russian.  

In fact, as it happens, if forced to head to a desert island with either only American or Russian cultural products to amuse myself with I would surely choose the latter. But—once again—none of that is the slightest bit relevant to what we’re talking about here, which is the longstanding institutionalized corruption of an officially independent international body into the mouthpiece for one country’s political agenda.  

This is utterly inappropriate, entirely independent of whether that one particular country is Russia or the United States or China or Sweden (that it’s inconceivable to imagine that a country like Sweden should be grouped together with the others in this context is a sort of proof of what I’m referring to here).

SOFT POWER, CORRUPTION & CONTROL

To take yet another example, the fact that FIDE, an international organization based in Switzerland, has spent hundreds of thousands of euros on the maintenance of additional offices in Russia is not, in itself, an anti-Russian statement—a German President who supported parallel offices in Germany should provoke precisely the same level of indignation.

FIDE will tell you, by the way, that such offices will be discontinued as of 2023. Which not only doesn’t explain why they existed to begin with, it also overlooks the key point that the “staff salaries” line item will promptly mysteriously swell by a correspondingly equivalent amount upon cancellation of the “FIDE Office in Russia” line item.  I can read a balance sheet, and so should you—see here.

In short, it is not about Russia, or Ukraine or NATO or any of that—it is about the fact that, while none of that should, in a sane world, have the slightest bearing on the internal workings of an international chess federation, in our actual world, it most assuredly does, principally because several notoriously influential and powerful people—well, one in particular, anyway—are particularly keen to use chess as a means of projecting their “soft power”, primarily through controlling the body that controls the world chess championship, and thereby de facto controlling the global reputation of professional chess.

Now, none of what I’m saying here is, to put it very mildly, news. Over the years, a great many experienced journalists, as well as an equal number of well-informed and thoughtful members of the international chess community, have pointed out in considerable detail the hugely inappropriate and deeply damaging influence that Russia has long maintained over FIDE - below are a few examples.

* Is Putin a king maker for the World Chess Federation? (Globe and Mail 2018)
* Saudi loss is Russian gain under ex-Kremlin chess boss (The Guardian 2018)
* How chess became a pawn in Russia's political war games (Wired 2018)
* The Russian diplomatic effort to influence the FIDE election (Chessbase 2018)
* How chess became a pawn in the Kremlin’s power game (Financial Times 2019)
* World chess chief pushes Russian propaganda on Ukraine (The Times 2022)
* The Ex-Kremlin Deputy Who Openly Opposed the War in a Mother Jones Exclusive Has Been Forced to Resign (Mother Jones, 2022)
* Putin is still king at world chess organization (DW 2022)
* Four More Years? ChessTech Beyond the Board (2022)
* Putin defense. How politics split Russia's chess community (Insider 2023)
* Russians move to Asia (Frankfurther Allgemeine 2023)
* A Year Of War For Ukrainian Chess Players (Chess.com 2023)
* Russian World Chess President "I do not represent Russian politics" (Süddeutsche Zeitung 2023)

This, in itself, is rather mystifying: so much, in fact, has been done, so explicitly and pointedly, that you’d think that the case had been incontrovertibly demonstrated once and for all, forcing an embarrassed FIDE to comprehensively reform or die. But nothing like that has happened. Instead, in keeping with our current zeitgeist, the more revelations come out, the more FIDE and their merry band of cronies have discovered that simply retorting “Fake news!” and “Gens una sumus!” over and over again tends to make the accusations fade away from the public consciousness.

CHESS, SPORT, ENTERTAINMENT: POWER TO THE PLAYERS AND FANS

But Magnus Carlsen’s recent decision to not participate in the upcoming world championship has changed all of that, injecting a most salutary shock to the global chess system that gives everyone a chance to rethink everything from first principles and drastically improve matters. Instead of trying to envision how we might, against all odds, somehow manage to pry FIDE away from Vladimir Putin’s evil grasp and install someone who can “wield FIDE’s power responsibly,” we now have a chance to rigorously rethink what sort of “power” it should have in the first place.  

In the modern world, in the contemporary sports and entertainment culture in which we live, those with the power are the entertainers whom people are willing to pay to watch, the public who is paying to be entertained (either directly and/or through advertising), and those who are putting up the resources and infrastructure and expertise to ensure that the best possible entertainment experience is produced for all concerned. 

It is an extremely common and straightforward equation—and one which the international chess federation—even a transparent, non-corrupt international chess federation—should have only the tiniest possible oversight role in, if any. 

Enough darkness, then. Enough despair. It’s time to emphatically move away from the turgid, unscrupulous miasma that is FIDE and turn towards the light, to the players and the fans, where the real “power” lies. It’s time to focus on chess.  

A BIT OF BACKGROUND:  

I am documentary filmmaker and author. I created a recently released 4-part documentary, THROUGH THE MIRROR OF CHESS: A CULTURAL EXPLORATION, about the remarkable impact of chess on culture, art, science and sport. I also wrote a book, CHESSAYS: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WORLD OF CHESS, about all sorts of chess-related issues that I encountered during my time spent as a tourist in the chess world.