Asri-unix.659
net.chess
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure@SRI-UNIX
Sat Jan 30 12:20:34 1982
Mrs. Korchnoi
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By JOHN F. BURNS
c. 1982 N.Y. Times News Service
LENINGRAD, U.S.S.R. - Until a new world championship proves
otherwise, Bella Korchnoi's husband can claim to be the world's
second-best chess player.
But that distinction - and the fact that Viktor Korchnoi has become
one of the feistiest individuals among Soviet exiles - has brought
Mrs. Korchnoi's life here to the dread twilight land known to all who
seek and are refused permission to emigrate to the West.
Two months ago Korchnoi lost the world championship for the second
time to Anatoly Karpov, the 30-year-old grandmaster. Soviet
propaganda depicted Karpov as a crusader battling the forces of
Satan. Karpov's relatively easy victory over the man he described as
his ''foe,'' by six games to two, unleashed a barrage of triumphal
paeans in the Soviet press and earned Karpov a telegram from Leonid
I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, celebrating the ''genuinely Soviet
character'' of the victor.
Apart from Karpov's cool skill at the chessboard, what earned him
the Kremlin's approbation was his effusive loyalty to the Soviet
system, manifested in a cable that he fired off to Brezhnev after
Korchnoi resigned in the decisive 18th game.
''Your instructions have been fulfilled!'' he said. ''In the
difficult conditions of the struggle for the chess crown I and all
members of the Soviet delegation sensed your daily support, the
concern and attention of our deeply beloved homeland, for which we
offer heartfelt thanks and filial gratitude to the Central Committee
of the Soviet Communist Party and to you personally, Leonid Ilyich.''
It was classic Karpov, and the champion came home to medal
ceremonies in the Kremlin and adoring television documentaries that
chronicled his resolve in the face of the ''malicious attacks'' and
''insults'' of Korchnoi. Meanwhile, Mrs. Korchnoi packed her bags and
headed off to Kurgan, a remote Siberian railway town 1,000 miles east
of Moscow, where her son Igor, aged 22, is serving a 30-month
sentence in a labor camp for refusing military service.
The seven-week championship, played in the northern Italian town of
Merano, was perhaps Mrs. Korchnoi's worst time since her husband
defected at a tournament in the Netherlands in 1976. It was not only
that her husband lost in Merano, playing some of his least inspired
chess since he won his first of four Soviet titles in 1960. For a
woman who says of her husband, ''His life is chess, and our life here
is also his chess,'' that was bad enough. But the loss was compounded
by the fact that Mrs. Korchnoi, through no fault of her own, became
caught up in the nastiness that has surrounded the Korchnoi-Karpov
rivalry since they first battled for the world crown in 1974.
When the two men faced each other at Baguio in the Phillipines five
years ago, Mrs. Korchnoi was largely left out of the fracas. But she
became a factor in the latest match when the International Chess
Federation, through its president, Fridrik Olaffson, demanded that
the Kremlin permit Mrs. Korchnoi and her son to emigrate as a
condition for the championship to go ahead as planned. The match was
delayed, but rescheduled after Olaffson reported having been told by
Soviet chess officials that the emigration applications would be
favorably considered.
As it turned out, Mrs. Korchnoi did not hear - and still has not
heard - anything about a permit to leave. Instead, word reaching her
from Merano was that Viktor Baturinsky, the Soviet chess official who
headed Karpov's camp, had told representatives of the international
body that Olaffson had ''misunderstood'' what he had been told on the
emigration issue, and that the Soviet chess federation was in no
position to intervene in such matters. In Moscow in December, on her
way back from Siberia, Mrs. Korchnoi was told that her application
could not even be considered until her son completed his labor term,
scheduled for May.
Mrs. Korchnoi's anxieties during the match were compounded by an
essay of personal vilification that appeared in the Soviet sports
newspaper, Sovetsky Sport, on the eve of the match, accusing Korchnoi
of a ''hypocritical nature'' and ''unscrupulousness.''
The newspaper launched into a purported exposure of his private life
that went beyond the broad limits that Soviet propagandists generally
set for themselves in such affairs. Citing an unnamed Western
newspaper, the Soviet article said they were ''relishing'' the
details of an adulterous relationship between Korchnoi and a Dutch
woman, Petra Leewerick, who was said by Sovetsky Sport to have ''an
adventurous past.''
(MORE)
nyt-01-30-82 0939est
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NYT LENINGRAD: adventurous past.''
The Soviet newspaper cited the purported relationship with Miss
Leewerick as evidence that Korchnoi's appeals for his family's right
to emigrate were false. In fact, it said, the 50-year-old defector
was finished with his wife, and was using her as a ''pretext to
slander our country.''
Mrs. Korchnoi herself came in for an oblique ethnic slur when the
article said that her husband had explained his disaffection by
referring to her ''Caucasian temperament,'' an allusion to the fact
that she is Armenian. The article also asserted that ''no duly made
papers'' seeking his family's emigration had ever been entered and
that Soviet authorities therefore had ''no legal grounds'' for
letting Mrs. Korchnoi and her son go. In fact, Mrs. Korchnoi said in
a discussion in her apartment here, she was refused permission to
leave five times before her son went to labor camp, without any
official ever citing a deficiency in her husband's paperwork.
Mrs. Korchnoi had nothing to say about the article in Sovetsky
Sport. But she did say that people in her area in Leningrad, most of
whom followed the Merano match closely through the exhaustive
coverage by Soviet information outlets, had been ''very, very kind''
after the attack, with store managers and others going out of their
way to help her.
Not everyone was so forbearing. Mrs. Korchnoi, a vivacious woman who
has taught herself to speak excellent English, said she was followed,
apparently by agents of the state security police, whenever she
stepped out of her apartment during the Merano contest.
The difficulties may be even greater for Igor, who was on the run
from the authorities for a year before being arrested in Moscow on
the draft evasion charge. According to his mother, he chose not to be
inducted because he could not see how anyone seeking to leave a
country could in good faith swear allegiance to it, as military
recruits are required to do. Mrs. Korchnoi did not mention it, but
another reason for would-be emigrants refusing military service is
that there have been cases where the authorities have denied exit
permits to people who have done military service on the ground that
they had acquired military secrets.
At the Kurgan camp, where he is allowed to see his mother twice a
year for up to three days at a time, Igor has come in for his share
of harassment over his father. Mrs. Korchnoi said that during her
December visit her son told her that he had been the butt of jokes
during the Merano match. She said that did not appear to have
bothered him so much as the fact that his father lost. ''He looks
after himself,'' she said.
Back in Leningrad, Mrs. Korchnoi has settled into a life of waiting
- and hoping that with the pressures of Merano past, the Kremlin will
quietly let her and Igor go.
Mrs. Korchnoi concedes that some of the family's troubles have been
compounded by what she calls her husband's ''red-blooded nature,''
meaning his tendency to lash out at real or perceived enemies,
particularly in the Kremlin. But she has recently written a letter to
Brezhnev, her fourth, renewing her appeal for visas. Although none of
the previous letters were answered, she argued in her latest message
that Karpov's victory in Merano had created a ''new situation,'' with
Soviet prestige reaffirmed and the world spotlight now turned to
other things. In the circumstances, she asked the Soviet leader to
show ''great humanity'' by ordering her son's early release so that
the two of them could be reunited with Korchnoi.
''If they'd only let us go, this whole silly business would be at an
end,'' she said. ''For us - and for them.''
nyt-01-30-82 0947est
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