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The lion and the tiger
DAVID EDMONDS 18th November 2009 — Issue 165
Armenia excels at chess. Its top player now has a shot at becoming world champion. How did this tiny country become a giant at the game?
Levon Aronian likes to sleep late. But at 11am on a weekday in August this year, his dreams were disturbed by what sounded like people chanting his name. In a semi-conscious state he got up, looked out of the window and saw a large group of people outside where he was staying. “You must win for Armenia!” shouted the crowd. They were there because in his native country, Levon Aronian is a megastar. He is 27 years old, charming, handsome, wealthy and the best in his nation at chess. And his countrymen take chess very seriously. The patriotic zeal focused on him during the August tournament was more intense than usual. If Aronian did well, he might one day become world champion.
Armenia is a tiny, poor country in the Caucasus, with a population of just over 3m. It has a long history of bloodshed and oppression; when it appears in the news it is usually because of its entanglement in some labyrinthine regional feud. And it excels at the ancient, cerebral game of chess. In the international Chess Olympiad, held every two years, Armenia took bronze in 2002 and 2004, then gold in 2006 and 2008, eclipsing traditional powerhouses such as Russia, the US, Germany and England. National celebrations followed the most recent victory, along with a set of commemorative stamps. Armenia has 27 grandmasters (GMs), the elite rank awarded to around 1,200 of the world’s best players. With more grandmasters than China and many more per capita than Russia, this little nation is a chess superpower. But why?
This summer I visited Jermuk to try to find out. Jermuk is a resort town 100 miles from the capital, Yerevan, and for two weeks in August its largest sanatorium was home to 14 of the world’s most brilliant men. They were there for a tournament organised by FIDE, the world chess federation.
The 14 players consisted of a Frenchman, a Bulgarian, an Uzbek, three Ukrainians, an American, a Hungarian, three Russians, an Israeli and two Armenians, including Aronian. The arbiter was Belgian, and the guest of honour—a chess legend called Svetozar Gligoric, a deaf, frail and octogenarian GM who padded around in a tracksuit—was Serbian. The sanatorium, a vast grey stone edifice, was once frequented by senior communist apparatchiks, who came for the hot springs. Like much of Armenia, it is stuck between the Soviet era and modernisation. The rooms have been upgraded, but the menu hasn’t. Every day there was pork, creamy mashed potato and buckets of buckwheat. To cater to the guests’ medical requirements, a phalanx of doctors in navy-blue tunics was on hand. One room was dedicated to gastroscopy, another housed the proctologist. The ominously titled “treating doctor” had a separate area which I dared not enter.
The players were mostly in their twenties, with a few in their thirties and one or two “old men” who had turned 40. They were civil to each other but close friendships are tricky. As top grandmasters, their lives are intertwined; they compete in the same tournaments across the globe. Between games the players ran into each other in the dining hall, by the pool or in the sauna. But most ate alone, or huddled with their second—a kind of coach-cum-sparring partner who helps them prepare. At 3pm each day, the clocks were started: ahead lay up to six-and-a-half hours of exhausting intellectual combat.
It’s nervy stuff, not least because this was a crucial contest, the fifth of six tournaments that constitute the grand prix. Aronian won two of the previous tournaments, and if he came first or second here he would win the grand prix. There was a cash prize, but more importantly the winner would claim a spot in a knockout round of just eight players, leading to the chance to take on the world champion, currently India’s Viswanathan Anand. So Aronian stood within 13 games of a shot at the ultimate prize in chess.
With the games in progress, I headed outside the sanatorium and, in the thin mountain air, listened to groups of boys and old men passionately debate the moves. They offered me 64 different explanations for why Armenians are world-beaters at chess. Armenia’s heritage as a cog in the Soviet chess machine plays a part, although that alone can’t explain why it outstrips other former eastern bloc nations. Some of them emphasised education—Armenian literacy rates are higher than in the US or Britain. A few others pointed to Armenia’s tradition of creativity in many fields, including music and painting. Armenia is poor and chess is cheap, one man told me. Then—and this is a favourite rationalisation—there’s the individualistic nature of the game. Armenians take perverse gratification in their incompetence at team games. (Weight-lifting is the only other sport at which Armenia excels.) The British ambassador, whom I later met in Yerevan, pressed a more physical, less abstract explanation upon me. Armenia is so mountainous that there’s no room for football pitches and athletics fields—but chess needs only space for a small board.
Yet to truly understand Armenia’s success requires a deeper look into the country’s past, and in particular one moment, a generation ago, in which this most highbrow game first began to embody the spirit of a subjugated people.
***
There have been two Tigran the Greats in Armenia’s history. The first Tigran the Great, an Armenian king born in 140BC, was an aggressive risk-taker and a tactical wizard. He launched ambitious military offensives and under his rule Armenia briefly became the most powerful state east of Rome. According to Niccolo Machiavelli, an overreliance on cavalry was his undoing: his knights were so burdened with armour that when they fell off their horses they could barely rise again to fight.
Two millennia later came the second Tigran the Great, Tigran Petrosian (1929-84). Also known as “Iron Tigran,” he has a prominent position in the chess pantheon and was world champion for six years from 1963. In 1972, when the mercurial American Bobby Fischer was trouncing his opponents en route to his legendary world championship match against Boris Spassky, Petrosian was the only man to win a game against him, although he too succumbed after. Fischer said he could sense the exact moment that Petrosian’s ego crumbled.
The Jermuk tournament in which Aronian was competing was named after Iron Tigran. Petrosian is an unlikely national hero: he was born not in Armenia, but in Tbilisi, capital of neighbouring Georgia. He was, however, ethnically Armenian, and as he rose in prominence Armenians adopted him as their own. To most western observers he was just another Soviet from a Kremlin-run conveyor belt that, since Stalin, had promoted the game to demonstrate communist superiority over the west. But to Armenians he was one of them. For many, national identity meant more than communist ideology; for others it was a weapon to be wielded against this ideology. In any event, chess and national pride became fused in 1963, as Petrosian took on the Russian Mikhail Botvinnik.
The match took place in Moscow, but crowds gathered in Yerevan’s central square where a giant board had been set up. The moves were relayed by telex and discussed by the throng as if they were war communiqués. The aficionados knew what sort of chess to expect. Grandmasters, just like artists and musicians, have an instantly recognisable style. “Levon” means “lion” in Armenian and Aronian’s chess is appropriately bold and adventurous. But Tigran means “tiger” in Russian and it would be hard to imagine a more unsuitable fit with Petrosian’s defensive play. He avoided risk and aimed to pre-empt any attack, plug any weakness. He would often lull opponents into overreaching and then exploit the smallest advantage. Bobby Fischer said Petrosian could “smell” danger 20 moves in advance. Yet for all its caution, his play was lethally effective. Aram Hajian, an Armenian-American who works with the Armenian chess academy, says that just as every American of a certain age can recall where they were when Kennedy was shot, so every Armenian can remember where they were when Petrosian vanquished Botvinnik in that same year, 1963. The Armenian won by a convincing 12.5-9.5: Botvinnik’s stamina flagged as his opponent masterfully shuffled and reshuffled his pieces.
Chess became the nation’s favourite pastime soon afterwards. Even the colours became fashionable: photographs of the time show women dressed in black-and-white shoes and dresses. A statue of Petrosian, with his victor’s wreath, would later be erected outside Yerevan’s magnificent four-storey chess club. One amateur player, also called Petrosian, had a dream after his namesake’s victory that if he had a son he should also call him Tigran. And this younger, unrelated Tigran Petrosian became a member of Armenia’s recent gold-medal winning chess team. Indeed, as Iron Tigran became famous, and especially after 1963, “Tigrans” proliferated. The current prime minister is a Tigran, as is his finance minister. A decade ago filmmaker Tigran Xmalian made Black & White, a film that uses chess as an allegory for Armenian 20th century politics. It contains footage of Petrosian—an unassuming looking chap with thick, slicked black hair—hunched over the board in positions of concentration: hands flat over his ears, cupping his cheeks with his palms, stroking his jaw. Before one game a man rushes forward and throws some soil beneath Petrosian’s feet—Armenian soil. For once, says Tigran Xmalian, we Armenians were celebrating, not crying.
Petrosian’s triumph led to an outpouring of nationalism and affected the way that Armenians related both to their Russian neighbours and to the darkest episode in their history. That episode began on 24th April 1915, when Armenian leaders were rounded up and murdered in Constantinople (now Istanbul). It was the start of what the Armenians call their genocide. Many Turks dismiss the term, maintaining that the killings are inflated in number and were never official policy. But most reputable historians disagree. Caucasus specialist Tom de Waal dislikes the semantic quibbling: “For me it’s enough to say that in 1915 there were lots of Armenians in eastern Anatolia. Several years later there were none.” Up to 1.5m people were butchered in their homes or died as they were deported. But it was only in 1965 that the Kremlin, facing large public demonstrations in Yerevan, finally authorised the construction of a national memorial. Today this bleak complex, consisting of a dozen tapered concrete slabs symbolising each devastated province, stands in the peaceful hills overshadowing Yerevan.
During the final years of Ottoman rule there was much talk about a solution to “the Armenian question.” The Ottoman Turks thought the Armenians were money-grubbers. They were accused of being enemies within. Under communism, Armenians were known for their business acumen and the nation provided many of the Soviet Union’s best engineers, mathematicians and scientists. “Armenians were the brainy boys with glasses in the front of the class,” says de Waal.
These, of course, are stereotypes usually attributed to another minority. The parallels between xxxs and Armenians are striking. Both have well-knit diasporas—there are more than three times as many ethnic Armenians living outside the country as inside and remittances are key to sustaining the economy. Both have strong lobby groups in Washington. Both take inordinate pride in the achievements of their ethnic group—singer Cher and tennis player Andre Agassi are two Americans that Armenians claim as their own. Both have histories marked by identity-shaping tragedies. And both Israel and Armenia are small nations and chess giants.
Further, Armenia’s regional politics often look as intractable as Israel’s. Armenia has a closed border with Turkey and with Turkey’s close ally Azerbaijan. The borders were closed because of the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan overwhelmingly populated by Armenians and over which the two nations fought a war in the early 1990s.
Modern Armenia had only a brief period of independence at the end of the first world war before being absorbed into the Soviet Union. Since its rebirth in 1991, says Aram Hajian, it has been in search of an identity. “Armenia is an ancient nation but it is newly reborn. Many people know it’s the first nation to adopt Christianity, 1,700 years ago, but in more modern times it’s not clear how Armenia wishes to present itself to the world. And presenting itself as the king of the intellectual game is not such a bad image to portray.” There will be an added piquancy to the 2012 chess Olympiad, to be held in Istanbul. If Armenia takes part it should thrash its oldest adversary, as Turkey has only two grandmasters.
***
”
DAVID EDMONDS 18th November 2009 — Issue 165
Armenia excels at chess. Its top player now has a shot at becoming world champion. How did this tiny country become a giant at the game?
Levon Aronian likes to sleep late. But at 11am on a weekday in August this year, his dreams were disturbed by what sounded like people chanting his name. In a semi-conscious state he got up, looked out of the window and saw a large group of people outside where he was staying. “You must win for Armenia!” shouted the crowd. They were there because in his native country, Levon Aronian is a megastar. He is 27 years old, charming, handsome, wealthy and the best in his nation at chess. And his countrymen take chess very seriously. The patriotic zeal focused on him during the August tournament was more intense than usual. If Aronian did well, he might one day become world champion.
Armenia is a tiny, poor country in the Caucasus, with a population of just over 3m. It has a long history of bloodshed and oppression; when it appears in the news it is usually because of its entanglement in some labyrinthine regional feud. And it excels at the ancient, cerebral game of chess. In the international Chess Olympiad, held every two years, Armenia took bronze in 2002 and 2004, then gold in 2006 and 2008, eclipsing traditional powerhouses such as Russia, the US, Germany and England. National celebrations followed the most recent victory, along with a set of commemorative stamps. Armenia has 27 grandmasters (GMs), the elite rank awarded to around 1,200 of the world’s best players. With more grandmasters than China and many more per capita than Russia, this little nation is a chess superpower. But why?
This summer I visited Jermuk to try to find out. Jermuk is a resort town 100 miles from the capital, Yerevan, and for two weeks in August its largest sanatorium was home to 14 of the world’s most brilliant men. They were there for a tournament organised by FIDE, the world chess federation.
The 14 players consisted of a Frenchman, a Bulgarian, an Uzbek, three Ukrainians, an American, a Hungarian, three Russians, an Israeli and two Armenians, including Aronian. The arbiter was Belgian, and the guest of honour—a chess legend called Svetozar Gligoric, a deaf, frail and octogenarian GM who padded around in a tracksuit—was Serbian. The sanatorium, a vast grey stone edifice, was once frequented by senior communist apparatchiks, who came for the hot springs. Like much of Armenia, it is stuck between the Soviet era and modernisation. The rooms have been upgraded, but the menu hasn’t. Every day there was pork, creamy mashed potato and buckets of buckwheat. To cater to the guests’ medical requirements, a phalanx of doctors in navy-blue tunics was on hand. One room was dedicated to gastroscopy, another housed the proctologist. The ominously titled “treating doctor” had a separate area which I dared not enter.
The players were mostly in their twenties, with a few in their thirties and one or two “old men” who had turned 40. They were civil to each other but close friendships are tricky. As top grandmasters, their lives are intertwined; they compete in the same tournaments across the globe. Between games the players ran into each other in the dining hall, by the pool or in the sauna. But most ate alone, or huddled with their second—a kind of coach-cum-sparring partner who helps them prepare. At 3pm each day, the clocks were started: ahead lay up to six-and-a-half hours of exhausting intellectual combat.
It’s nervy stuff, not least because this was a crucial contest, the fifth of six tournaments that constitute the grand prix. Aronian won two of the previous tournaments, and if he came first or second here he would win the grand prix. There was a cash prize, but more importantly the winner would claim a spot in a knockout round of just eight players, leading to the chance to take on the world champion, currently India’s Viswanathan Anand. So Aronian stood within 13 games of a shot at the ultimate prize in chess.
With the games in progress, I headed outside the sanatorium and, in the thin mountain air, listened to groups of boys and old men passionately debate the moves. They offered me 64 different explanations for why Armenians are world-beaters at chess. Armenia’s heritage as a cog in the Soviet chess machine plays a part, although that alone can’t explain why it outstrips other former eastern bloc nations. Some of them emphasised education—Armenian literacy rates are higher than in the US or Britain. A few others pointed to Armenia’s tradition of creativity in many fields, including music and painting. Armenia is poor and chess is cheap, one man told me. Then—and this is a favourite rationalisation—there’s the individualistic nature of the game. Armenians take perverse gratification in their incompetence at team games. (Weight-lifting is the only other sport at which Armenia excels.) The British ambassador, whom I later met in Yerevan, pressed a more physical, less abstract explanation upon me. Armenia is so mountainous that there’s no room for football pitches and athletics fields—but chess needs only space for a small board.
Yet to truly understand Armenia’s success requires a deeper look into the country’s past, and in particular one moment, a generation ago, in which this most highbrow game first began to embody the spirit of a subjugated people.
***
There have been two Tigran the Greats in Armenia’s history. The first Tigran the Great, an Armenian king born in 140BC, was an aggressive risk-taker and a tactical wizard. He launched ambitious military offensives and under his rule Armenia briefly became the most powerful state east of Rome. According to Niccolo Machiavelli, an overreliance on cavalry was his undoing: his knights were so burdened with armour that when they fell off their horses they could barely rise again to fight.
Two millennia later came the second Tigran the Great, Tigran Petrosian (1929-84). Also known as “Iron Tigran,” he has a prominent position in the chess pantheon and was world champion for six years from 1963. In 1972, when the mercurial American Bobby Fischer was trouncing his opponents en route to his legendary world championship match against Boris Spassky, Petrosian was the only man to win a game against him, although he too succumbed after. Fischer said he could sense the exact moment that Petrosian’s ego crumbled.
The Jermuk tournament in which Aronian was competing was named after Iron Tigran. Petrosian is an unlikely national hero: he was born not in Armenia, but in Tbilisi, capital of neighbouring Georgia. He was, however, ethnically Armenian, and as he rose in prominence Armenians adopted him as their own. To most western observers he was just another Soviet from a Kremlin-run conveyor belt that, since Stalin, had promoted the game to demonstrate communist superiority over the west. But to Armenians he was one of them. For many, national identity meant more than communist ideology; for others it was a weapon to be wielded against this ideology. In any event, chess and national pride became fused in 1963, as Petrosian took on the Russian Mikhail Botvinnik.
The match took place in Moscow, but crowds gathered in Yerevan’s central square where a giant board had been set up. The moves were relayed by telex and discussed by the throng as if they were war communiqués. The aficionados knew what sort of chess to expect. Grandmasters, just like artists and musicians, have an instantly recognisable style. “Levon” means “lion” in Armenian and Aronian’s chess is appropriately bold and adventurous. But Tigran means “tiger” in Russian and it would be hard to imagine a more unsuitable fit with Petrosian’s defensive play. He avoided risk and aimed to pre-empt any attack, plug any weakness. He would often lull opponents into overreaching and then exploit the smallest advantage. Bobby Fischer said Petrosian could “smell” danger 20 moves in advance. Yet for all its caution, his play was lethally effective. Aram Hajian, an Armenian-American who works with the Armenian chess academy, says that just as every American of a certain age can recall where they were when Kennedy was shot, so every Armenian can remember where they were when Petrosian vanquished Botvinnik in that same year, 1963. The Armenian won by a convincing 12.5-9.5: Botvinnik’s stamina flagged as his opponent masterfully shuffled and reshuffled his pieces.
Chess became the nation’s favourite pastime soon afterwards. Even the colours became fashionable: photographs of the time show women dressed in black-and-white shoes and dresses. A statue of Petrosian, with his victor’s wreath, would later be erected outside Yerevan’s magnificent four-storey chess club. One amateur player, also called Petrosian, had a dream after his namesake’s victory that if he had a son he should also call him Tigran. And this younger, unrelated Tigran Petrosian became a member of Armenia’s recent gold-medal winning chess team. Indeed, as Iron Tigran became famous, and especially after 1963, “Tigrans” proliferated. The current prime minister is a Tigran, as is his finance minister. A decade ago filmmaker Tigran Xmalian made Black & White, a film that uses chess as an allegory for Armenian 20th century politics. It contains footage of Petrosian—an unassuming looking chap with thick, slicked black hair—hunched over the board in positions of concentration: hands flat over his ears, cupping his cheeks with his palms, stroking his jaw. Before one game a man rushes forward and throws some soil beneath Petrosian’s feet—Armenian soil. For once, says Tigran Xmalian, we Armenians were celebrating, not crying.
Petrosian’s triumph led to an outpouring of nationalism and affected the way that Armenians related both to their Russian neighbours and to the darkest episode in their history. That episode began on 24th April 1915, when Armenian leaders were rounded up and murdered in Constantinople (now Istanbul). It was the start of what the Armenians call their genocide. Many Turks dismiss the term, maintaining that the killings are inflated in number and were never official policy. But most reputable historians disagree. Caucasus specialist Tom de Waal dislikes the semantic quibbling: “For me it’s enough to say that in 1915 there were lots of Armenians in eastern Anatolia. Several years later there were none.” Up to 1.5m people were butchered in their homes or died as they were deported. But it was only in 1965 that the Kremlin, facing large public demonstrations in Yerevan, finally authorised the construction of a national memorial. Today this bleak complex, consisting of a dozen tapered concrete slabs symbolising each devastated province, stands in the peaceful hills overshadowing Yerevan.
During the final years of Ottoman rule there was much talk about a solution to “the Armenian question.” The Ottoman Turks thought the Armenians were money-grubbers. They were accused of being enemies within. Under communism, Armenians were known for their business acumen and the nation provided many of the Soviet Union’s best engineers, mathematicians and scientists. “Armenians were the brainy boys with glasses in the front of the class,” says de Waal.
These, of course, are stereotypes usually attributed to another minority. The parallels between xxxs and Armenians are striking. Both have well-knit diasporas—there are more than three times as many ethnic Armenians living outside the country as inside and remittances are key to sustaining the economy. Both have strong lobby groups in Washington. Both take inordinate pride in the achievements of their ethnic group—singer Cher and tennis player Andre Agassi are two Americans that Armenians claim as their own. Both have histories marked by identity-shaping tragedies. And both Israel and Armenia are small nations and chess giants.
Further, Armenia’s regional politics often look as intractable as Israel’s. Armenia has a closed border with Turkey and with Turkey’s close ally Azerbaijan. The borders were closed because of the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan overwhelmingly populated by Armenians and over which the two nations fought a war in the early 1990s.
Modern Armenia had only a brief period of independence at the end of the first world war before being absorbed into the Soviet Union. Since its rebirth in 1991, says Aram Hajian, it has been in search of an identity. “Armenia is an ancient nation but it is newly reborn. Many people know it’s the first nation to adopt Christianity, 1,700 years ago, but in more modern times it’s not clear how Armenia wishes to present itself to the world. And presenting itself as the king of the intellectual game is not such a bad image to portray.” There will be an added piquancy to the 2012 chess Olympiad, to be held in Istanbul. If Armenia takes part it should thrash its oldest adversary, as Turkey has only two grandmasters.
***
”