"Presidential campaign is a whole process. You need to talk to some people, need to bribe someone..." — Former Russian Chess Federation Executive Mark Glukhovsky

Mark Glukhovsky

Former Executive Director of RCF

“At some point, in Hong Kong, Arkady Dvorkovich came up to me and said: ‘We have a campaign, things are not going very well, we need help. Do you want to be the campaign manager? We invite you.’

I worked with him on the FIDE presidential campaign in 2018. And the campaign is a whole process. It needs to be managed. There are 200 delegates, different ones, from all over the world. You need to talk to some people, need to send a program to some, need to bribe someone, some person needs to be united with someone else. Imagine, all countries from Norway to Angola.

In Uzbekistan, for example, he just made a strong move. Well, of course, there’s the formal part, like: ‘Here’s my team, vote for us, and so on.’ But then suddenly there’s some Uzbek guy…

Why is this Uzbek there? What is he doing there at all? Some deputy of the Olympic Committee of Uzbekistan, some big shot. I googled later, and it turns out he is the president’s son-in-law. This, so to speak, changes things.

And five days before that, the Prime Minister of Uzbekistan swore allegiance to Arkady and said: ‘We support you guaranteed’ and so on. And then, when you understand that the man has his son-in-law on the team, maybe it doesn’t matter at all.

The Uzbek vote itself doesn’t mean anything at all. Moreover, I, by some indirect signs, I’m not new to this business, I didn’t count them as our vote from the start. Because Uzbeks… They are such guys who keep their own counsel, they can swear allegiance as much as they want and so on.”