Oct 23, 2005 2:10 pm US/Central
Gorbachev Promotes Peace Through Chess
Ex-Soviet Leader Visits Kansas School
LINDSBORG, Kan. (AP) ―
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Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (File)
The school band in this small Kansas town is practicing the Russian national anthem. Detectives are conducting security checks. And preparations are being made for a parade—a chess parade.
It's all for former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who will visit the home of the Karpov Chess School this weekend to launch a worldwide campaign of promoting peace through chess.
"Lindsborg has grown in reputation and has a bigger chess presence than many other larger cities," said organizer Wes Fisk. The town also hosts many international chess tournaments.
Seven-time world chess champion Anatoly Karpov—namesake of the school—invited his friend, Gorbachev, to visit Lindsborg to start the Chess for Peace campaign.
Chess for Peace will include a series of Internet matches throughout the world. The winners will be invited to Lindsborg in June for a weeklong festival.
To honor Gorbachev—who will lecture Friday at Kansas State University—Lindsborg will have a chess parade, a scholastic chess tournament and a match between Karpov and former world chess champion Susan Polgar. There will also be a formal dinner and keynote address by Gorbachev at Bethany College.
Kathy Richardson, owner of Small World Gallery in Lindsborg, said people are thinking of questions they'd like to ask the Nobel Peace Prize winner credited with engineering a series of reforms in the Soviet Union that led to the fall of communism.
Richardson wants to ask: "Can you remember the exact moment when you knew you had to be the leader of the major change in your country? Was there a moment, meeting, evening, one place that made you think: 'Yeah, we've got to do this'?"
Gorbachev is the town's most prominent visitor since 1976, when King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden visited the predominantly Swedish community of just over 3,000 people.
"We had the guts to invite someone like this and put on a show. And to do it, it takes the whole town," said Becky Anderson, a coffee shop owner.
(© 2005 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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