FW: [SEELANGS] commentary to student safety in St Petersburg

[Sarah Hurst]

I thought this article by Genna Sosonko might be relevant to the discussion,
I translated it recently for the magazine New in Chess. I will divide it
into two parts because it's too long for one posting.

Heart of a soothsayer: Chess-lover and successful businessman Sergey
Nikolaev feared a violent death, but could do nothing to prevent it

In the reputable British newspapers you can find extensive obituaries of
completely unknown people almost every day. They are interesting only for
being unusual, different from others, sometimes even eccentric. Although the
stories about these people are printed on the funeral announcement pages,
death is somewhere far away from them, and there is no mood of mourning at
all. Why write words of grief and sadness when they were such exceptional
people? These are almost entertaining articles with the mood - see what
personalities lived among us. Surprising, quirky, original. Sergey
Nikolaevich Nikolaev was one such person. He died in Moscow in 2007, the
victim of a rampaging gang of young neo-Nazis who killed him because he
didn't look Russian enough. All his life he was treated as a stranger in his
own country, but he overcame that to flourish as one of post-Communist
Russia's first businessmen, and he never seriously considered leaving,
although he was acutely aware of the dangers. 
He was born in Yakutsk  in 1961. The territory of the republic is gigantic,
its population is about a million. The climate and terrain are as harsh as
can be. The lifespan is the lowest in Russia, with high levels of
unemployment and alcoholism. In the Soviet era there were restaurants in
Yakutsk that didn't allow Yakuts in, and on public transport a person
speaking Yakut might hear, "Hey, you scum! Speak a civilised language!" 
Seryezha didn't speak Yakut, at home they always spoke only Russian. They
lived in an earth house next to a cemetery. When he grew up he joked, I was
born in a cemetery. 
There were five brothers in his family, and he was the youngest. One of the
brothers was a policeman, and Seryezha remembered his stories from his
childhood - how they beat a confession out of someone, how they forced
someone to sign a statement. Or how they put a man in prison and forgot
about him, and that man's still in prison and no one knows how long he'll be
there for. All these stories impressed themselves on his consciousness, and
back then he already knew that you could do anything to a person. 
He said that he was of shamanic, heathen descent, and something of that had
been passed on to him. As the youngest, from childhood he managed the family
budget, he knew the value of money, calculating everything down to the last
kopeck. As a grown-up accomplished man he said of chess players, "Some of
them stay babies until they retire, but I, I was already an old man by the
age of seven."
Chess was played in his family. His father played, his brothers played. One
is still a chess coach today. When they brought 64 home, the brothers fought
over the magazine, and the youngest got it last. Sometimes little Seryezha
would go outside in temperatures of minus 50 and wait for the postman so
that he'd be the first to get news from another world - the magical text
with chess pieces on diagrams. 
He studied in a group and at 12 he reached the first category. In summer
1976, when Karpov came to Yakutsk, he beat the world champion in a
simultaneous display. Commotion: photographs, journalists. The radio: say a
few words. The boy startled everyone - he remained completely calm, even
indifferent. Even then he could keep his emotions under control. He became a
candidate master. He graduated from school. He went to Leningrad to enroll
in a higher educational institute. 
People who knew him in those days speak of a young, sociable man, friendly
and companionable. They recall walks on Nevsky Prospekt, Vasilievsky Island
and the Petrograd district. And endless conversations, conversations: since
in those days time wasn't yet money. He constantly played in Petersburg
tournaments. He strived for perfection. But he wasn't a fanatic, he said
that chess was very complex, that he got very tired from working so hard at
it. 
After graduating from the commerce institute he returned to Yakutia. The
young specialist became deputy head of a department in the republic's
Ministry of Trade. He continued playing and became a master. In '84 he won
the national Spartak championship, a strong master tournament. He was
champion of Yakutia three times. The republic's team, for which he
invariably played top board, placed highly in Russian events. He said,
"Don't think, this match is important, I have to win no matter what. Imagine
that you're playing in an individual tournament. Don't worry about the
others, each of you plays your own game."
Both old and young listened to him. 
Perestroika was dawning. When the opportunity to leave the country appeared,
Nikolaev was one of the first people to start playing in foreign opens. In
Harkany, Hungary, he became an international master, winning the tournament
and overfulfilling the norm by a point and a half. If he was on form, he
could even beat a decent grandmaster, but if he wasn't playing well, he'd
drop to a minus score, and sometimes a very low one. He was incredibly
cunning at the board, he knew what to play and against whom. In the chess
world they called him Cunning Nikolasha or Nikolaev the Yakut. 

He said, you have to have a feel for things, is it your day, and if you have
a gut instinct, follow it, play to the end! He gave Ivanchuk as an example -
if he doesn't have this feeling, he quickly wraps up the game, and in that
case it doesn't matter which colour he's playing. 
Even then Nikolaev concerned himself with issues that weren't only to do
with chess. His colleagues recall that much of what Sergey said back then
seemed unbelievable to them. He might say to a master who had arrived at a
foreign open from some remote Russian town, "You idiot, soon everything will
disappear from the shops, buy potatoes, flour, why are you blathering on to
me about fancy stuff like ratings, aren't you worried about your children?
Your family? What are you thinking, it'll always be like this? There won't
be any more cheap plane tickets soon, life won't just get more expensive,
it'll get much more expensive. Only those who play at the very highest level
can live off chess." They exchanged glances: "What's the Yakut going on
about, it's complete gibberish, but then suddenly they were convinced - he's
exactly right! Everything that Sergey said came to pass." In January 1990
during the traditional festival at Wijk aan Zee a short young man with
slanted eyes and broad cheekbones came up to me and humbly introduced
himself: "Sergey Nikolaev." A few years later we met again, this time in
Amsterdam. We saw each other in Moscow a few times, then we met in Holland
again. 
Sergey had his own opinion about everything and fiercely defended that
opinion. Sometimes what he was talking about inspired disbelief or even a
sneer. Often the people he was talking to would exchange meaningful glances
when he expounded his ideas. I confess that I had similar thoughts, too. I
seldom agreed with him, and some things I would reject or even oppose
strongly, but being with him was never boring for me. 
He felt confined within the boundaries of that system - his mind was always
going over the most varied combinations: how to exchange a flat? How to get
a grant in Yakutia? How to get a permit to live in Moscow? How to see the
necessary people? And he could intertwine the most complicated multiple-move
variations, calculating them in the conditions of that phantasmagoric
government. 
When he got the opportunity, he decided to try doing something himself. He
started with chess, organising a tournament in Podolsk, near Moscow. The
year 1991 was approaching, the Soviet Union was entering the last months of
its existence, and everything was in short supply in the country, but
Nikolaev anticipated every detail. One of the club's employees served tea
and coffee in the canteen, someone supplied pastries from God knows where,
and someone else provided rolls of toilet paper. 
He played in Podolsk, too. Trying to combine playing and everyday worries,
his game collapsed. But the tournament worked, and Nikolaev decided to
continue his chess projects. He thought up some kind of state chess
programme in Yakutia, a chess textbook for the northern peoples, and started
attracting grandmasters and masters to this project. He wanted to put chess
on television.
It didn't work out. Sergey realised then that if he stayed in chess, he'd
always be dependent on sponsors, high-ranking bosses, events beyond his
control. Moreover, having passed 30, he clearly recognised that he himself
couldn't make it in professional chess, that his time had passed. 
"When you're young," he said, "you often get excellent results, but these
are only advances, and those advances have to be repaid later. Your results
must improve. If that doesn't happen, if you hang around in one place, the
smartest thing is to leave." Nikolaev left chess. 
He still had some of his connections from the old days, he got loans on
favourable terms, went into the market and established a private company. He
worked incredibly hard. Worked and studied. He studied everything by
himself, he was what's called a self-made man. He didn't sleep much. He
completely gave up chess then, not even having a set at home. But he
snatched time to read the periodicals, trying to stay in touch with events
in a world that he'd been part of for many years. 
Choosing the direction of his business, he settled on the most neutral, even
at first glance, funny one: buttons. But his aim was also distant: "As long
as the world turns," he said, "a woman will always wear clothes, and buttons
will always be needed." 
In Moscow he started with underground pedestrian crossings to metro
stations. He hired girls, brought them buttons himself in huge sacks, and
the girls sold them one by one. Well, he wasn't the only one who started
like that back then. Some sold buttons in the crossings to Moscow metro
stations, others, like Abramovich, for example, children's toys. Nikolaev
knew, of course, that other spheres existed, where profits were incomparable
with the button business, but making a profit in those spheres came with an
enormous risk. The risk of losing not only your business, but your life,
too. And for every dozen people who made a success of it, a multitude had to
bow out, back off, make themselves scarce. But he stuck with his buttons,
threads and accessories. He stuck with it and became one of the biggest
suppliers of these products in the country. The sole boss of the leading
companies on the Russian market. 
He spent a good two decades in chess, he knew that world like nobody else,
so it wasn't surprising that it was mostly chess players who worked for his
company. The guys who started with Nikolaev got called "button men", but
that hardly bothered them. Besides, there wasn't enough time to pay
attention to things like that: they had to work at full throttle. He enjoyed
absolute authority in the company, and they respectfully called him Papa. 
The company was formed primarily according to Japanese principles. If he
gave someone a job, this was like a lifetime hire. Of course, the guys
didn't sing the company anthem when they arrived at the office, but everyone
who worked for Sergey had to be absolutely loyal to the company, to live for
its interests much more than they would somewhere else, where, closing the
door behind him at six in the evening, the employee forgets about everything
until the next morning. 
Nikolaev worked without any timetables or schedules, a nine-to-five job
wasn't for him. He ridiculed schemes, business plans and timetables for
development. Paperwork didn't exist for him. Adding up expenses after a
trip, keeping the tickets and the hotel bill - he wasn't interested in any
of that. A person would spend however much they considered necessary, then
give a personal report to him about their expenses, and the case was closed.

International master Igor Belov, who worked with Sergey from the very first
days, recalls, "He generated ideas, constantly generated ideas, often so
brilliant that they bordered on genius. At work that's what he was often
called - the Genius. But I have to admit, far from all of these ideas were
wonderful. I'd say that out of 10 he suggested, five were a long way from
reality, sometimes even absurd, four were excellent, but one - one was
genius!" 
His business acumen was unbelievable. This wasn't just the view of an
experienced sailor, able to predict the weather from the signs, no, this was
some other kind of feeling. What to call it? A gift? A talent? Natural
intuition? You couldn't help thinking about his shamanic roots. When he was
asked how he was able to see everything, he only smiled his enigmatic smile:
"I have the heart of a soothsayer." 
He could read people's faces brilliantly. A completely respectable,
apparently well-off gentleman would come in. It was enough for Sergey to
chat with him for quarter of an hour: "The client is empty like a drum, he's
making plans, but they won't come to anything, only noise and dust." Then
someone completely ordinary-looking, drab, even, would suddenly show up, who
couldn't string two words together. Sergey hardly glanced at him: "We should
give him what he's asking for." He also trained his employees how to look
people over, to assess them, but can you really teach that? 
Reading books by wealthy people about how they successfully lived their
lives, how they managed everything, he was always interested in how they
made their first money, harrumphing: "There are only three things you can
earn honestly - calluses, hernias and debts. I'd also like to know, where
did the firewood come from?  It's a small detail, of course, but they keep
it quiet. Where did it come from?" 
>From childhood he counted only on his own strengths, and his self-confidence
was limitless. He had the gift of persuasion, saying, "I can justify any
point of view. Anything." Business demands tenacity, daring, a lack of
sentimentality, and even cruelty. The successful businessman Sergey
Nikolaevich Nikolaev possessed all these qualities. Under an external
softness and nonchalance was hidden a colossal strength of will and an iron
grip. A person talking to him couldn't read anything on his benign face. He
himself had a very good feeling for that person, understanding his
intentions on the fly, drawing conclusions for himself and directing
negotiations in his own favour. Coming into contact with him, people
probably went away with a pleasant feeling of their own intellectual
superiority. And they were mistaken about that in the worst way. 
When he moved to Moscow for good he said there was no way he'd go back to
Yakutia, that being there depressed him. Lacking his charisma and his
talents, Sergey's brothers were nothing like him. Also, they couldn't avoid
the ailment that is very widespread in those regions with terrible cold
temperatures, an extremely harsh climate: an irresistible desire for
alcohol. He only felt an affinity for his niece, remaining friendly with her
and buying her a flat in Moscow and presents. 
He didn't refuse himself anything. Fruit, vegetables - at any time of year,
he got everything fresh. Juices - natural. Mineral water - only the French
Evian, he thought it was particularly beneficial. In recent years he
occasionally allowed himself a glass or two of red wine, but it had to be
only the best. The best. He never drank tap water, buying and drinking only
purified water. He washed his dishes in a special solution, not trusting the
washing-up liquids that were sold in the shops - he thought they left traces
on the dishes. 
At first he avoided having a computer because he thought they gave off
radiation. True, he gradually got used to them, then learned to use them,
but on an amateur level, mainly surfing the web, gathering information and
following news on the chess front. 


He disliked animals, tried to steer clear of them, believing they carried
diseases. He thought that microbes were teeming everywhere, so he wore
gloves. He was obsessed with health, medicine and correct nutrition, and
sometimes this took exaggerated, grotesque forms. 
All his friends were chess players. When they came to Moscow he always
invited them to a restaurant. Usually they went to his favourites - an
Armenian one or an Uzbek one. There he felt at home, advising people to try
some dish or other, as in, "Believe me, Genna, the salads here are
heavenly." Despite the fact that there might have been a dozen of the most
varied kinds on the menu, he made his specific, finding out from the waiter
exactly which country the artichoke was from, and whether the mushrooms were
really wild, as the menu stated. 
Once we ate in the restaurant at the St. Daniel Monastery. Here, again,
there was an element of show for the newly-invited, of course: the monastery
atmosphere worked - monks, icons on the walls, silence. He immediately let
me know that he was a frequent guest here, too. I can confirm it - he didn't
even open the menu. He knew without looking at it: "I recommend the baked
carp, their fish is straight from their own ponds, it's superb." 
Although he said, "Personal life is the most important thing. All the rest
is crap. Personal life comes first," he himself wasn't married. His attitude
towards women was generally rather sceptical, wary, and also he didn't want
to let anyone get too close to him. He believed that having another person
with him constantly would restrict him, that the minuses outweighed the
pluses. He thought that with his health and illnesses, sooner or later he'd
end up in a wheelchair, and he didn't want to be a burden on anyone. And in
general he thought that he wouldn't live long. 
Like other kinds of love, love for chess comes in all forms. Sergey Nikolaev
was interested less in the process of playing itself than in the nature of
success, the psychology of single combat, and in later years also the role
of chess in the enormous free market where everything is bought and sold. 
He never talked specifically about variations, combinations or new ideas in
the opening. He cared about something else - the environment around chess,
the people in chess. He liked to recall the people he knew, he wondered how
X's life was going, how Z was doing, were they still in chess, and if not,
where were they? Sometimes he asked about people who had disappeared from
the public arena almost a quarter of a century before, talking about them as
if he'd seen them yesterday. 
He called his former colleagues, scattered around the cities and villages of
the huge country, and he called old acquaintances who lived outside Russia.
They recall that Sergey, starting a long, long conversation, could sometimes
overstep a boundary, becoming tiresome and even annoying, without noticing
this himself. 
He told me once, "In the West everything is more complicated for you, but at
the same time it's also simpler, because it's more transparent. Here,
though, the rules of the game are different." Sometimes he himself started
thinking about moving to the West, but more in an abstract way. We can only
guess what Sergey Nikolaev would have become outside Russia with his talents
and charisma, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility that here, too, he
could have achieved success. But where would he have found people with whom
he had something in common, whose company he enjoyed, with whom he was
comfortable? People to talk to, people who would listen to him? 
A year before his death he wrote a long article with figures, tables and
charts. It was called "The economics of Russian chess. A chronicle of
collapse." In this article he didn't suggest trying to save his drowning
homeland: he realised that the phenomenon of Soviet chess was impossible to
replicate. He just thought that in the new conditions the number of
professionals should be reduced to a proportion that he considered rational:
"We at least need to empirically determine how many grandmasters and masters
are necessary in market conditions. Is it worth spending money preparing
grandmasters for future unemployment?" He deliberately avoided even the
phrase "chess professional", explaining: "the reality of the past few years
has eliminated the economic meaning of this term." 
He wrote that "the need to express myself has arisen after a conversation
with male and female friends who continue to play in tournaments, because
some of them have been thinking about ending their careers for years
already, but they don't have the strength to do it." Acknowledging that his
article wasn't a scientific work, just the everyday musings of a person who
liked chess, he worried: "Will they get it, will it offend anyone, and is
the article really needed at all?" 
The article evoked numerous positive responses. He read these responses with
close attention, and I know that he himself asked some people to write a
response. Despite his apparent indifference to the reaction of those around
him, he was extremely hungry for fame, and the opinion of others and
recognition were in fact very important to him. 
He might say to a young chess player, "Have you thought about the future?
Look at the veterans playing in tournaments, they're like lamp-posts in the
street, every passing dog tries to lift its leg on them! And don't complain
later that you've wasted your time, that I didn't warn you or you didn't
know." 
When he heard young people start boasting about their victories over fading
stars, he always interrupted: "It's not Portisch you've beaten, you've
beaten his namesake. When Portisch was playing chess, you could never even
have been paired against him, and you say you've beaten Portisch." Another
time someone said in his presence that he'd easily beaten Romanishin.
"Romanishin, you say? Do you know how Oleg Romanishin played, what a
fantastic grandmaster he was? You've played a pale shadow of him, a
namesake, and now you're boasting here." 
That's why, probably, when someone recalled in front of him how he'd once
beaten Tal in a blitz game, he always broke in with: "Was that really the
Tal of the sixties? Misha was already half dead." 
He assured young people that the risk was too great, that if it didn't work
out, there would be problems, and not enough time to solve them.
"Conditions, you say? A hotel bed and sandwiches, those are the conditions
you'll get! Give up this rubbish," Nikolaev said to his friend Sergei
Shipov, when he decided to continue his chess career after graduating from
the maths and physics faculty of Moscow State University. 
Shipov became a grandmaster, attained a respectable rating, was Kasparov's
sparring partner and everything apparently turned out well. But when
Nikolaev enquired once about the life of a professional, Shipov replied,
"Oh, you were right, Sergey, it's all coffee and sandwiches." Nikolaev only
pursed his lips: "When he should have been playing chess, he was doing
maths, and when he should have been doing business, he went off into chess."

Nikolaev said, "I've weaned myself off chess." He claimed that a chess
dependency is more destructive than many others; he thought that "weaning"
women off this dependency was a virtually hopeless task, and with men it was
also difficult, but here there were gradations. "Chessis a kind of
disability," he repeated. "You can still do something with candidate
masters, you can train them for a normal profession, candidate masters are
at the third level of disability. Masters are at the second level, here it's
already more difficult, you need to take an individual approach, it's a lot
of work. Grandmasters are in the first class of disabilities! For
grandmasters it's too late to work, this is a hopeless case. There are
exceptions, of course, but they're few and far between." 
Another time we referred to the Three Tenors, who were on a world tour at
the time, receiving millions for a concert, while the musicians in the
orchestras that accompanied them were happy with a few hundred dollars and
didn't complain about their lot. "That's what I'm talking about, and isn't
chess just the same?" Sergey interrupted me. "A few tenors, and the rest?
The musicians will sit like that in the orchestra until they start
collecting their pensions." 
I said that it was impossible to make a movie without wasting a huge amount
of film and impossible to write something worthwhile without crossing out
any text. It's the same with chess, to reach the summit, or even the
foothills, you need time, as not everyone was born a Fischer, a Kasparov or
a Carlsen. That in most cases the chess player moves forward jerkily, like
the hands on a station clock, and he proposed that at almost the first lag
of the minute hand you should start thinking about whether the mechanism is
broken. 
He insisted that after a couple of unsuccessful tournaments you should
seriously start thinking about whether to continue your career, otherwise
you'll get sucked into playing and there'll be no way back. And the decision
must be taken as early as possible: if there are no results in early youth,
you should give it some distance, switch to something else. 
I tried to object, citing freedom, the absence of a boss and routine
nine-to-five work, before which you still have to get there and then back
home - you blink, and the day's gone by, you don't notice that your whole
life is passing that way, while here you're a free agent, plus there's
travel, you see the world.
"Travel?" Seryezha didn't agree. "But what if you're long past 20 and you've
already seen the world, and what kind of world anyway? The walls of a
third-rate hotel and a tournament hall, or do you think, Genna, that the
players in open tournaments go on tourist excursions around the city before
a round?" 
I recalled the American grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff, whom I played in an
interzonal back in 1976. Leaving the game, Ken graduated from Yale
University, became one of the world's leading economists, a high official
with the International Monetary Fund. In an interview a few years ago Rogoff
said, "Being a chess player is much more like being an artist. It's a
bohemian life," and added with a sigh, "and I could have gone that way."  
Sergey was prepared for this try: "He said that because he's financially
independent now. He's also not young any more, which is why his youth seems
rose-coloured." And he again repeated that the market was saturated, that
life is short, and youth even more so. 
I can't say that all our conversations were arguments, really they were
discussions about the problems of chess, about its future. He lamented that
little was written about the fact that chess players never get Alzheimer's
disease: "And why's that?" Sergey said, "Chess constantly gives the brain
work to do; it's a shame that no research has even been done on this
subject, I'm sure the results would have shown that chess is useful." 
He liked that in Dublin Alexander Baburin wasn't coaching but was doing
educational work, teaching children at a school. "Chess should definitely go
into the educational sphere," Sergey said. "The children will be happy -
it's an interesting, fascinating game - and the parents, too - it's good for
the child's intellectual development, plus chess professionals in the role
of teachers will earn a solid crust of bread." 
He was speaking ironically when he defined chess players' disability levels,
but at the very end it turned out that he had the disability himself - he
didn't get away from chess. After all, he'd said many times that if you get
hooked on chess in childhood, you rarely let go of the wooden pieces. He
didn't let go of them either - he returned to chess. In another capacity,
but he nevertheless returned. Unlike Maecenas, who lived 2,000 years ago, he
wasn't born a rich man, but Nikolaev became a Maecenas. An advisor, a friend
and a patron of many chess players. And not only chess players. 
International master Roman Skomorokhin, who was living in Nizhny Novgorod,
started working for his company in 1997. He recalls, "If I happened to be in
Moscow, I always met up with Sergey, of course. When we went into a shop and
I was buying something, Papa wouldn't even let me get my wallet out. He
always paid for the purchase himself, literally forcing me to get another
pair of shoes, or another two or three shirts. 'Take it,' he'd say, 'Roman,
take it, it suits you.' And it was exactly the same with everything. And if
he promised something, he never forgot about it. This quality is very rare
nowadays, very. Papa never forgot anything." 
He acquired kit and accessories and paid to rent the pitch for the company's
employees, who enthusiastically kicked a football around every Wednesday. He
didn't go to these matches himself, but he thought that if the guys liked
it, if it put them in a good mood, then it was also helpful for the
business. 
Igor Belov: "He did good deeds just because, good deeds for their own sake.
You want to change your car - what kind do you want? To pay for medicine -
no problem, and if you need anything else - please. I'll be indebted to him
until my dying day, and I'm not the only one. It seemed that everyone who
worked for his company was at his funeral. And they were all indebted to
Sergey in some way or other. He helped them all, he did good deeds for them
all. That's why many of them came with their families and many of them
cried. There just isn't anyone else like Sergey, it's impossible to compare
anyone with him." 
He sharply felt the quick passing of time, the frailty of human memory. He
wanted to save the names of people who had dedicated their lives to chess
from oblivion, and he remembered many fantastic coaches, asking about Georgy
Borisenko (1922), he wanted to find his address, knowing that even if the
master now lived outside of Russia, he was completely alone and in great
need. 

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