|
|
| |
DANCES WITH
BEARS
When oligarchs are beaten
at Go
By John Helmer
MOSCOW - The most
famous game of Japanese Go ever chronicled was the last
match of the 64-year-old master, Shusai, and his young
challenger, Kitani Minoru of the Seventh Rank. This
began in June 1938, and ended 237 moves and six months
later, on December 4. The master was defeated.
To understand how a run of apparently random
moves on the Go board became a sequence of fatal
mistakes, it is necessary to study the chart of the
game, as well as the contemporary commentaries, as
retold in a story by the great novelist Yasunari
Kawabata, who first reported the match in more than 60
instalments for a Tokyo newspaper.
Go is a board
game, first invented in China, then refined over several
thousand years by the Japanese. It is not at all like
chess, except in the most general sense that the object
of the game is to establish on the 361 points of the
board a position that is not only invulnerable to attack
by your opponent, but that enables you to surround and
capture his pieces, known as stones. The game is so
complex that the unwitting player will sometimes not
realize when he is surrounded, his stones about to be
annihilated. Among the great players, considerable
expertise is required to determine the score.
The game was second nature to Viet Cong and the
North Vietnamese generals, who applied its principles to
plot the downfall and defeat of the United States army
in Vietnam between 1963 and 1973. I doubt though that
the game is taught much these days at the general staff
college in Russia. Russian commanders, like the Germans
and Americans, believe in the chess-like defense and
offense of massive threat, overwhelming force.
But if you are to realize how many mistakes
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the chief executive officer of oil
giant Yukos, has already made in his game with the
Kremlin, it will be useful to keep your eye on the Go
board. That Khodorkovsky himself appears to think that
his tactics will enable him to keep the territory he has
marked out as his property reflects a chess-induced
belief that the game he is playing is the same as the
one by his opponents. That Khodorkovsky is a naive and
inexperienced player is something that naturally
attracts sympathy. But as the old masters have always
known, money can never buy experience. Belief in the
overwhelming force of money is a mistake that
Khodorkovsky made, even before he sat down at the game's
board.
Once play commenced, Khodorkovsky made
six errors, the evidence for which he has disclosed
himself.
Mistake 1: Khodorkovsky calls on
US ambassador Alexander Vershbow to inform him that his
partner and Yukos co-shareholder, Platon Lebedev, is
about to be arrested by federal prosecutors.
Mistake 2: Lebedev is arrested and
imprisoned on charges of a quarter-billion dollar fraud
and embezzlement on July 2, in connection with
accusations of fraud during the 1994 government sale of
a fertilizer plant. Shortly afterwards, Khodorkovsky
attends a reception to mark Independence Day at the US
embassy, where he tells all who will listen that
Lebedev's arrest is a political attack. By that, I
suppose he means to imply that he prefers to play games
that are strictly commercial in character. That's
another way of saying that if the preponderance of money
doesn't assure control of the game, Khodorkovsky doesn't
want to play. But since Khodorkovsky has also let it be
known that his money is being spent for political
purposes, his second move appears contradictory in
character. Either that, or he is trying to say that he
only likes to play games he is sure to win. Of course,
that's most unsporting.
Mistake 3:
Khodorkovsky's American retainers (among whom former US
secretary of state Henry Kissinger has been identified
as on the payroll) lobby the US State Department to
intervene with a demonstration of support for
Khodorkovsky. An official statement is released
accordingly.
Mistake 4: Khodorkovsky
attempts to mobilize his stones, rallying fellow
oligarchs to his defense. He proposes that the Russian
Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs send President
Vladimir Putin a letter, and follow up with a
face-to-face meeting. Writing pieces of paper has always
seemed a feeble method of operational deterrence, at
least since British prime minister Neville Chamberlain
tried it with Chancellor Adolf Hitler at about the same
time as the great Go match in Japan. It is doubly
unfortunate for Khodorkovsky, because the other
industrialists are unable to agree on what the letter to
Putin should say.
Mistake 5: Khodorkovsky
threatens that unless his partner is released from
prison, Yukos may stop lifting crude oil or pumping
refined products into some of the regions of Russia.
This turns the unfortunate Lebedev into a hostage for a
lot of other stones on the board that Khodorkovsky has
yet to control.
Mistake 6: The
oligarch-controlled Russian media publish the rumor that
a wave of asset cash-outs may be under way, as
Khodorkovsky's fellow oligarchs threaten to give up
their stones, and abandon their positions.
In
the 1938 match, the challenger and the master opened
ceremonially, the former (playing black) at the top
right-hand corner of the board; the latter (playing
white) at the bottom right-hand corner. It wasn't until
moves three and four that the game began in earnest.
As Go is a territorial game, with almost no
limit of time, space or pieces to play, each of your
moves is a test of the intention of your rival to
contest space, or to outflank. When the stakes are high,
the lack of limits inevitably pushes the players to
great patience, and the game to great lengths. A show of
impatience in the early stages usually dooms the player
to a short game, and to defeat.
If Khodorkovsky
knew his history, he should have had second thoughts
about engaging Kissinger, because the latter famously
failed to win at Go, and just as famously lost the
Vietnam War. But Kissinger is more than a loser; by the
self-proclaimed standards according to which the
Washington administration judges others, he could
qualify even as a war criminal. Impatient even in the
ceremonial opening stage of the game, Khodorkovsky thus
showed his opponent that he is counting on defending
Russian assets with American losers. This is
inexplicable.
As an ambassador, Vershbow was
just the messenger: the message was delivered by the
State Department's announcement which Khodorkovsky had
paid for. Khodorkovsky thereby converted a game for
assets that were not in question - Lebedev is charged
with stealing a fertilizer company, not Yukos the oil
company - into a game for Khodorkovsky's survival as an
American - dare we use the chess term? - pawn. In the
Japanese schools that teach Go to aspiring masters, they
say, ever so politely, never listen to a loser, or you
will be doomed to repeat his mistakes. Concentration of
force failed Kissinger in Vietnam, just as it is failing
the US army in Iraq today. But a threat of force,
without the substance - what is that?
In his
first errors, Khodorkovsky offered himself up as
Lebedev's hostage, and then threatened to use force,
while at the same time inviting his bluff to be called.
He became a prisoner himself, spread so thinly over the
board that he invited the very thrust he and ambassador
Vershbow couldn't muster. The Kremlin display of arms
during the 17-hour search of Yukos premises and archives
on July 11 was the inevitable result. The combination of
move and counter-move demonstrates that Khodorkovsky's
territory is space which he lacks the ability to hold.
Young Go players often cannot stand the strain
of deliberation. In the annals of the Japanese game,
there are cases of brilliant young men who went insane.
It is reported that the challenger in the 1938 match
went to a clairvoyant and asked for advice on how to
win. The proper method, he was told, is to lose all
awareness of self, while awaiting an adversary's play.
Shedding the desire to win is the key, attaining
selflessness the only way. It is understandable that a
young fellow like Khodorkovsky might not have heard this
advice. But in just six opening moves, he has
demonstrated such callow vanity, he has all but
convinced his opponent that defeat will be easy. If
Khodorkovsky is to survive the mid-game, with a chance
of playing the end-game, he will have to study, not the
board, but himself.
But the Kremlin, playing
white in this game, knows it commands the advantages of
both time and space. "I am, of course, opposed to
arm-twisting and jail cells," Putin replied when the
Khodorkovsky alliance presented itself for the
face-to-face meeting last Friday. But then, he added,
arm-twisting is exactly what Khodorkovsky and the other
oligarchs are doing to lobby the Duma and the other
institutions of government. As for prison, Putin went
on, "I don't think this is the method to deal with
economic crimes, but at the same time we need to punish
economic violations."
What Khodorkovsky, Lebedev
and Vershbow all know is that the president was
referring to the lengthy process by which Lebedev had
been invited to address the dossier of his crimes, and
to negotiate his amends. If he hadn't refused, he would
not have been arrested. So what Putin was saying was
that the other methods had been tried, and they had
failed. "A society split into small groups with their
own narrow interests cannot concentrate on implementing
major national projects", Putin went on. And to make
certain Khodorkovsky was attending carefully, he told
him what the end-game would be like. Unanimity isn't
winning, Putin said. "But we will have to agree on all
the main ways and work on a common position if we want
to develop our country." To a man who had run to a
foreign embassy, and appealed for the intervention of a
foreign government, who has been negotiating with
foreign companies to sell a strategic stake of his
company, Putin was saying: forget it, or you will lose.
Sometimes in the late stages of the great games
of Go, a situation arises called the Ko. It is one of
the big differences between chess and Go. Roughly
speaking, Ko is when two players take and retake each
other's stones, and can continue doing this for an
eternity, without making a significant difference to the
larger disposition of their forces. To put a stop to
this, and allow the game to reach an outcome, the player
whose stone is first taken must play elsewhere on the
board, before being allowed to return to the scene.
Khodorkovsky has enough resources to imagine
that he can play the Kremlin into and out of the Ko
situation. But whether he's right about that we shall
see, although only after the next round of moves is
played. By moving his US pieces so prematurely, so
hastily, however, Khodorkovsky hasn't left himself much
space on the board. Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco have
already turned down buyout opportunities they were
presented with by Mikhail Fridman and the Tyumen Oil
Company. The American oil companies must now reconsider
whether Khodorkovsky and Yukos carry the same level of
risk. In the mid-game, as Khodorkovsky tries to persuade
them otherwise, and convince the Kremlin that he has
succeeded, Putin's play should haunt him. Has
Khodorkovsky already demonstrated that the territory
Putin called "our country" is just a board game to him?
If that is so, Khodorkovsky has lost.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact
content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
