In general there is something puzzling about the fact that the most renowned figures in chess - Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca and Fischer - were born in America.

Dictators are not strategists in the way I normally use that term. All the dictator cares about is survival. That means constantly worrying about the tactical response, "What do I do today, tonight, tomorrow morning, to stay alive?" Vladimir Putin doesn't care what happens a year or five years from now. He just cares about staying in the game. That is all he needs to survive.

It is quite clear, however, that there won't be any real changes with the current clan structure having seized power in the course of the Karabakh conflict.

So many dictators trying to blackmail the free world because they have no way to compete on ideas, innovation or creativity. The Cold War was two competing visions of the future. I was always anti-communist but it was an idea at least, an alternative idea. We do not have a competing vision for the future because the ideals of these dictators are in the past. They are time travellers. They need confrontation and destruction to survive. The problem is, many people in the free world are sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

When [Vladimir] Putin, a former lieutenant-colonel in the KGB, became Russia's president on December 31, 1999 - eight years after the failed coup attempt against (then Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev, and eight years after the people had torn down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the hated founder of the KGB, in Moscow - it was admittedly a shock. Nevertheless, I decided to give Putin a chance. He seemed dynamic and capable of learning. But I had to bury my hopes after just a few months. He proved to be an autocrat - and, because the West let him do as he pleased, he became a dictator.

In my opinion, using different kinds of epithets and adjectives in connection with the word democracy is a sign of mere hypocrisy, to put it mildly. Either there's democracy, or there isn't.

If we keep an optimistic view about the future, we definitely have to look for our place. Not to be redundant. And that means we have to emphasize what makes us unique.