BY ANOOSH CHAKELIAN PUBLISHED 21 MAY, 2014 - 14:36
Last month, the former president of education union the
Association of Teachers and Lecturers Hank Roberts said Britain should make
chess compulsory in all state primary schools. He wants children to learn a
game that is so much more than “kings, queens, rooks etc”.
He complained that the UK was behind many other European countries
in failing to recognise the game as a sport. But the only country in the world
to have compulsory chess lessons is Armenia: a small, post-Soviet state
landlocked in the Caucasus.
Armenia is not a natural leader on the global stage. Its
tensions with neighbouring Turkey are ever-present from the memory of its past
turmoil with the Ottomans during the First World War, and on the other side, it
remains at war with Azerbaijan. Aside from its modern-day mouthpiece, the
Kardashians – a somewhat double-edged nail-file – it has a tough time having
its voice heard in the Caucasus, let alone the world.
Armenia is ranked as a lower middle income country by the
World Bank. It has an average life expectancy of 74 and its poverty rate as a
percentage of the population is 32.4 per cent. Its literacy rate is at 99.6 per
cent and in 2011, it brought in compulsory chess lessons at primary school age.
It is the only country to have done so.
For a country so hopelessly unable to master the world’s
geo-political realities, it is a cradle of strategy, precision and expert
outmanoeuvring. It soars ahead in its aptitude at chess.
“Of the bits I’ve seen of the Armenian model, I was
impressed with how incredibly good their children were at visualising things,”
remarks the Telegraph’s chess columnist and head of charity Chess in Schools
and Communities Malcolm Pein. “I saw, I think it was a class of what we call
here Year Fours, who could literally move pieces around in their head along a
chessboard. A lot of children can do that, but they were incredibly good at
it.”
Through his campaigning for chess in schools, Pein is
aiming for every child in the UK to have 30 hours of chess lessons in their six
years of primary school. He’s not working towards a compulsory programme, which
is somewhat easier to organise in a state with a population of three million
than in the UK, but praises Armenia’s scheme:
“What the Armenians have done is demonstrate
organisationally how it's possible to teach chess to an entire country,” he
says. “Admittedly it's a small country, but they did it in a very, very
systematic way. They got together I think about 300 people and taught them how
to teach chess... that's the main constraint to getting it out there, that not
that many people know how to teach it.”
Armenia triumphed in the most recent Chess Olympiad – a
particularly joyous checkmate for the country, as the contest was held in
Istanbul. It often beats the globally mightier chess superpowers like Russia,
China, the US and Ukraine. It also claimed the crown (or, indeed, the king) in
2006 and 2008 – which is two in a row; the Chess Olympiad is bi-annual. It has
one of the highest numbers of grandmasters per capita in the world.
The country’s obsession with chess transcends all age
groups. You can see this in a 2009 BBC World Service report titled ‘Armenia:
the cleverest nation on earth’, which notes “four generations” turning out to
watch its champion Levon Aronian play a match in the Armenian mountains. It
describes “young kids aged five, six, seven years old and grizzled old men in
sunglasses.”
Dr Armen Sarkissian, the Armenian ambassador to the UK
and briefly Armenian prime minister in the Nineties, gives his experience of
the game’s universal appeal there:
“I have a granddaughter who is two, and one of the toys
she has is a chessboard. It helps so much with concentration, discipline,
ability of tactics and strategy. It’s very important.
“I was a child when my father taught me – I was very good
at chess. I used to beat very old people, who’d get annoyed that a child was
beating them... When I was really young, I remember we had a neighbour, a
retired gentleman, who I played chess with, and running between being fed and
making my next move.”
As a result of the game’s popularity, their chess players
are revered as celebrities. Their current top player, the tousled and
be-stubbled Aronian, is also a bit of a heartthrob. Teenagers want to have
photos taken with him, and he’s been likened to Armenia’s David Beckham.
When grandmaster Tigran Petrosian, World Chess Champion
from 1963-69, took the title for the first time, there were spontaneous
celebrations throughout Armenia and he became a national hero.
“The whole nation was behind it,” recalls Sarkissian.
“There was a huge chessboard showing the game in Opera Square in Yerevan [the
capital], and tens of thousands of people were watching it. Everyone watched
it. It was a national victory.
“There were not many ways of displaying your national
pride in the Soviet Union, but for an Armenian guy to win, there was huge pride
for the whole nation. People on the streets were singing, dancing. It was
natural, not organised by the state.”
Although Armenia became a hothouse for producing chess
champions under the Soviet Union – eager to have its talented comrades triumph
over the West in all endeavours – it has a historical love of chess that goes
way back to the Middle Ages.
“It’s an old game that was popular in Armenia for
centuries,” notes Sarkissian, “then it became very, very popular during the
Soviet era – sixties, seventies, eighties and further.”
Indeed, Garry Kasparov, formerly a Soviet grandmaster,
and considered by many as the world’s best ever chess player, is of Armenian
heritage. His surname was originally Gasparyan – which has the classic common
ending of an Armenian name, which usually end in "ian" or
"yan".
Top Armenian players, now breaking the pattern for
Russian victory on the checkerboard, honed their skills under Soviet rule – a
regime which, among aggressive industrial advancement and paranoid atomisation
of society, decided that it would quite like its loyal comrades to move little
wooden pieces across a board patterned like a Seventies tablecloth in an adroit
manner (take that, you capitalist pigs!).
“I’m proud of Armenia,” concludes Sarkissian. “I hope
that one day I’ll be proud of Armenia on other sectors as well! I want Armenia
to be as prominent in economy, industrial growth, culture and others as it is
in chess. It needs a lot of hard work, devotion and love.”
It is oddly pleasing that a nation so unfortunately
located on the Caucasian chessboard of socio-religious turmoil excels at a game
reliant on superior positioning.
But perhaps this is why it is a pastime so relished by
the country’s population. Having been relegated for so long to being a pawn in
the game of empires from the Ottomans to the Soviets, there must be some
satisfaction in finally capturing the king.
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/05/checkered-history-why-armenia-dominates-chess-world
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