I started playing chess when I was five years old. I learned the moves from my mother, then worked with my father - and later trainers. My style became very technical. I sacrificed a lot of things. I was always hunting for the king, for the mate. I'd forget about my other pieces.

This traditionally happens in Russia and in every other undemocratic country as well - the quest for a scapegoat won't be long, either. The easiest way to find a scapegoat is to ascribe that role to former governments.

Ratings are king and the money keeps flowing, and partisanship is so strong today that people rely on a few sources absolutely instead of thinking critically. So even being a cheerleader for a gameshow-host president with no respect for the rule of law or America's reputation in the world may not be a career-ending move.

The only game [Vladimir] Putin can play is to establish a lifelong dictatorship in the country, at first de facto and finally also de jure. In this case, [Dmitri] Medvedev is an interim figure bound to assist Putin in his plan to guarantee a smooth transition to a new term in office.

Enormous self-belief, intuition, the ability to take a risk at a critical moment and go in for a very dangerous play with counter-chances for the opponent - it is precisely these qualities that distinguish great players.

For young players, their minds are not overloaded. I am 54 with four kids and I do many other things. Even if I stopped everything else, spent months working just on chess, for a long match against most of the top players, a classical match, six hours, say, I don't stand a chance. I have a better chance in shorter matches. Rapid is 25 minutes, or blitz events where you have five minutes to make a move, or bullet games, where it is one minute. For blitz, five-minutes chess, I would be top ten, top five. But longer games, no chance.

I'm not trying to give any definite answer. What I'm trying to prove is that we have enough gaps, enough discrepancies, enough simple falsifications to conclude that probably this history was an invention of a later time.