"My life experience prepared me to identify evil at an early age. Not my life as the chess player. Not even as the youngest world champion in history. No. My relevant experience is where I was born and raised, in what Ronald Reagan accurately called the “evil empire,” the USSR. As a young star in the chess-crazed Soviet Union in the ’70s and ’80s, I had many privileges my compatriots did not. I could travel to the West outside of the Iron Curtain, where it was obvious to me very quickly that they were the free world and we were not, despite what communist propaganda told us."