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By Rich Pelley
The chess grandmaster, 58, on growing up in Baku, Putin’s bloody dictatorship and losing to Deep Blue
My mother was Armenian, my father Jewish. My father died when I was seven and my mother never remarried. She lived the rest of her 50 years for me. It’s the greatest thing that happened to me – I had a mother who dedicated her entire life to her only son.
I grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the deep south of the USSR. Everybody spoke Russian because it was an imperial city. At 10, I was sent to the Young Pioneer Palace in Baku to learn how to play chess. It didn’t take long for me to see the gap between reality and propaganda.
I was the first from my class to take a trip abroad, to France, when I was 13. Travelling was a big deal, even inside the Soviet Union. Travelling to other, capitalist countries was unheard of.
Whether you spell Garry with a G or an H in Russian, you still pronounce it with a strong G. I was named after President Truman – Harry – whom my father admired for taking a strong stand against communism. It was a rare name in Russia, until Harry Potter came along.
