Asri-unix.659 net.chess utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure@SRI-UNIX Sat Jan 30 12:20:34 1982 Mrs. Korchnoi n008 0639 30 Jan 82 BC-S0V-CHESS 2takes 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 ********** n009 0647 30 Jan 82 BC-S0V-CHESS 1stadd 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 ********** ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.