BLAMING THE DEFECTORS

How many families do you think Korchnoi wanted? Why do
you think he ditched his family in the first place? -- Jurgen

Jurgen checks in. Defectors are now those who
"ditch" their families. And it is true: those who
escape totalitarian regimes, another would be GM Lev
Alburt, often make the choice of seeking freedom at
the expense of slaves left behind.

Karpov becomes at worst a neutral figure --
though some here like David Kane admire him --
as he toadied to a regime that murdered, if one
accepts the figures of noted demographer Murray
Feshbach, 100 million of its own citizens.

Korchnoi? He becomes a guy who ditches his family.

When Igor and Anna Gouzenko defected, they had
to know that their families likely would be eliminated by
Stalin. Those who spoke up in the great literature of
honor -- Jerzy Gliksman in "Tell the West;"Vladimir
Tchernavin in "I Speak for the Silent" Elizaveta
Lermolo in "Face of a Victim" and so many others --
sentenced relatives to death in the concentration camp
regime they left behind.

In the case of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he smuggled a
manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago to a woman who
was arrested, tortured, revealed the location of the
manuscript she was hiding, and then committed suicide.
In a sense Solzhenitsyn had some responsibility for
her sad end.

But some of us are aware who the bad guys were
-- the Cheka, OGPU, KGB torturers and bosses, not
those who "ditched" their families.

Yours, Larry Parr



Jürgen R. wrote:
[...]

Korchnoi became the target of Soviet wrath when he defected in 1976.
First they tried to disqualify him from a title shot on the grounds
that he was stateless, but FIDE had the courage to declare that
challengers represented themselves as individuals, not their nations.
FIDE nonetheless bowed to Soviet pressure by forcing Korchnoi to
accept a rematch clause that FIDE had stricken in 1963.

The clock will soon have stricken 12 for chess journalists
without a command of the irregular verb forms.

Then the Soviet Union refused to release Korchnoi?s family

How many families do you think Korchnoi wanted? Why do you think
he ditched his family in the first place?

[...]