English Chess Forum

It wasn't like that in Soviet times, the Turks wouldn't dare try anything on back then. The thing I found a little distasteful about the new Azerbaijan is the degree of reverence they paid to their founder even though he couldn't speak a single word of Azeri and was a KGB operative for most of his life.

MJMcCready wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 05, 2020 5:12 pm

The thing I found a little distasteful about the new Azerbaijan is the degree of reverence they paid to their founder even though he couldn't speak a single word of Azeri and was a KGB operative for most of his life.

There's a Kasparov connection.

This article comes from 1995 not many years after he left Baku for Moscow and several years before Putin.

https://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/m ... parov.html

Not quite sure who that article is written for as Gorbachev himself describes the incident referred to as the biggest mistake of his political career. It doesn't mention how the Russians look down on the outer-lying states and deeply resented those living there as being considered Russian. It doesn't mention that Kasparov is, on the whole, unwelcome in his home town. That's mainly due to his mother's ethnicity but also that he tended to describe himself as Soviet/Russian. When I lived there and talked about great past players, the unspoken rule was his name should never be mentioned and whenever I did they quickly moved the topic on and were more than happy to ask me if I knew how Rajubov beat him with the French Defence when they first played.

As mentioned, when you spoke to the older generations, that tension with Amernians was never there. It's just the generation who grew up in the nation of Azerbaijan who fall for all that nonsense.