Anatoly Karpov, an incomparable chess hero

Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov is the most decorated and acclaimed of the championship chess players produced by the Soviet Union — the world’s largest country until its dissolution in 1991 — where chess was a deeply rooted national passion. A six-time world champion and winner of more than 160 tournaments, Karpov turned 75 on Saturday. He is living with serious health problems and is confined to Russia because, as a member of Vladimir Putin’s party in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, he is on the list of sanctioned individuals barred from traveling to the West. This is despite having spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — although, just days earlier, he had voted in favour of annexing the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Those close to him have been deeply worried ever since. Eight months later, he was found unconscious on the pavement of a street near the State Duma with a severe head wound; there is no strong evidence that it was an attack rather than an accident. Sources close to him say he has not been the same since he left the hospital and has barely any public life.

In a sad irony, EL PAÍS’s last interview with him — in the Spanish city of Vigo in September 2021 — had much to do with healthy brain aging. He appeared in good shape, enjoying fine food and life, full of projects, and still with a prodigious memory and an unbounded love of chess. There are grounds to rank him among the greatest athletes in history — his achievements, impact, and symbolism go far beyond chess — and his life might deserve a film with a far broader scope than The World Champion, which focuses on his duels with dissident Viktor Korchnoi, the most tense game in chess history.

He had a brush with death shortly after birth, grew up sickly near a malfunctioning nuclear plant, restored the national pride that Boris Spassky had lost to the U.S. chess player Bobby Fischer, was decorated in the Kremlin after defeating Viktor Korchnoi, and sustained with Garry Kasparov the greatest rivalry in the history of individual sports. No one has won more tournaments than he has.

His early years were traumatic. While he watched, from his bedroom window, children his age playing in the street, Tolia — the affectionate diminutive for Anatoly — spent many days ill, confined to bed. He took refuge in chess, which he had discovered at the age of four with his father. His mother, Nina Grigorievna, once removed the board and pieces from his room. “But soon I got scared and gave them back. I would see him staring at the ceiling and realized the chess pieces were still jumping around in his head — he was playing without a board,” she explained years later.

His rise to international fame came in 1969, when he became world junior champion. In 1973, he began his climb to the summit, defeating all his rivals in the World Championship Candidates cycle. Only Fischer remained. In 1975, the brilliant U.S. player forfeited the title after falling out with the International Chess Federation (FIDE), and Karpov became champion without moving a pawn. But unlike his predecessors, he played every tournament he could — and won almost all of them for a decade (1975–1985).

Karpov not only restored the national honour lost by Spassky to Fischer — for the Soviet government, chess was the showcase of communism’s intellectual superiority over capitalism — but became a national hero when he defended the title twice, in 1978 and 1981, against the “traitor” Korchnoi.

Before that, he had met Fischer several times in secret, trying to persuade him to play the match millions of fans longed for. The talks went nowhere. And then came Korchnoi, winner of the Candidates Tournament after defecting from the USSR and therefore Karpov’s official challenger in Baguio, Philippines, in 1978. The dissident used the global spotlight to demand, loudly and relentlessly, the release of his wife and son, held in the USSR. Beyond the scandal, the match was thrilling in purely sporting terms. It was played to six wins, with no limit on the number of games. Despite his exhaustion — gaunt, several kilos lighter — Karpov somehow found the strength to land the decisive blow in the final game, after three months of fighting.

The icy Tolia was world champion again, in highly charged political circumstances, as shown by an effusive telegram from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Now a national hero, Karpov kept winning tournament after tournament and renewed his title against Korchnoi again in 1981. Everything suggested he would finally enjoy the happiness of a champion and national idol: married, with a son, a degree in economics, a doctoral thesis on the use of leisure time, three‑time world champion, close to reaching a hundred tournament victories, the undisputed number one, and with no rival of comparable stature in sight.

In reality, that bright horizon did not last long. In distant Azerbaijan, another genius was rising: Garry Kimovich Kasparov, whose meteoric ascent was repeatedly obstructed by the parasitic bureaucrats around Karpov, the Kremlin’s hero. One of them, Nikolai Krogius, delivered a lapidary line: “Why do we need another world champion if we already have one?”

But Kasparov reached the summit, and the five matches between them (1984–1990) have no parallel in sports history: more than 500 hours sitting face‑to‑face on stage, thousands more obsessively thinking about each other under immense political pressure — Karpov symbolizing the old guard, Kasparov the perestroika (renewal) of Mikhail Gorbachev — as well as economic and sporting pressures. Counting only the 144 games they played in world championship matches, the score favours Kasparov by the narrowest of margins: two points.

Kasparov’s reign brought a schism, with two world champions. While in his forties, Karpov still managed to win the official FIDE title three more times (1993, 1995 and 1998), while also engaging in major social causes: UNICEF ambassador for Eastern Europe and president of an association supporting victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. None of this stopped him from playing rapid tournaments, giving exhibitions and lectures, all while serving as a member of the State Duma.

And then came the ill‑fated year of 2022. Those who know him well insist that Karpov’s strong opposition to the invasion of Ukraine is entirely sincere, which raises doubts about whether the sanctions against him are fair. It is also known that the travel ban imposed by international sanctions depressed him. Whether his hospitalization was due to a freak accident or an attack, it likely would not have happened without the invasion, because he used to spend at least half the year travelling. While Kasparov sits high on Putin’s list of enemies, Karpov has already become a victim of the autocrat whose party he still belongs to — however hard that may be to understand.

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