Remembrance
“Even today I count him as one of my best and most valued friends. He introduced my wife Chae and me (through a months-long campaign of trickery, actually) and Larry and I exchanged long holiday letters in which we tried to out-brag each other about our families. He usually won, I think.”
—Former Editor Frank Elley, on his matchmaker
even at some volume. “He was passionately behind the effort. If he didn’t agree with me, Larry could shout, slam doors—it was all part of the process,” Yarim-Agaev said.
How important was Parr in this role? Alburt, the only grand- master who planned and executed a defection from the Soviet Union (Korchnoi’s defection was on the road and ad lib) and who worked on many levels to help bring down Soviet totalitarian- ism, said that Larry “through his work with Glasnostmagazine, would easily make any reasonable list of the 100 Americans who most contributed to the fall of the old Soviet Union.” Hyperbole from an old friend, perhaps? Yarim-Agaev reaffirmed the assess- ment. “Yes. Parr could be called the midwife of the independent, free press in Russia. He was crucial to helping such a press in the Soviet Union to emerge and to stabilize. There was no such press before that time. Was Larry important? Absolutely!”
A Malaysian Christmas: Larry Parr the proud family man with his wife Samboon, his daughter Christiana, and his son Ian.
Parr Versus the U.S.S.R.
Parr went on to a job that quite literally helped bring down the oppressive communist regime in the USSR—a position bespoke for his strong anti-communist beliefs and considerable talents. GM Lev Alburt introduced him to Yuri Yarim-Agaev, one of the leading dissidents and human rights activists in Russia. Harassed and detained by the KGB for his campaign against political persecution, Yarim-Agaev, now of Stanford’s Hoover Institu- tion, was in 1980 forced to emigrate to the U.S. Later he founded the “Center for Democracy in the USSR” and hired Parr as edi- tor in chief of the organization’s centerpiece publication, Glasnost News & Review, with the goal of supporting the independent press, then strictly banned in the USSR. Another goal was to inform a wide American audience of the suppression taking place in the Soviet Union. At the same time, republishing material in the U.S. from dissident newsletters in the USSR made it more difficult for the Soviets to persecute the independent publish- ers who became more well-known in the West, winning honorary memberships in journalistic organizations and other awards here. During this heady time in his life, Parr met frequently with important Russian dissidents and co-authored articles with Garry Kasparov for The Wall Street Journal.
“Although officially I was the boss, Larry did all the work of edi- tor, plus a lot of the work of the publisher,” Yarim-Agaev said. Working his typical seventy- to eighty-hour weeks, Larry pro- duced a commercial-quality publication. He even arranged for it to be broadly distributed in bookstores. Yarim-Agaev remem- bers receiving a letter from a reader that made him realize Larry had somehow gotten Glasnost into a small-town Texas grocery store! But as always, Larry was never reluctant to “speak truth to power,” or at least speak what he believed to be the truth,
46 Chess Life — July 2011
It was during this same period that Parr joined forces with GM Lev Alburt, Nigel Eddis, and others to press for reforms in USCF governance rules, foremost among them “One Member One Vote,” which was eventually enacted in 2001.
With the breakup of the USSR in 1992, Parr looked for new employment, and eventually received an offer from billionaire businessman and chess patron Dato Tan Chin Nam to move to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. For seven years he provided content, in the form of his “The Chess Beat” column for the Dato-Tan- sponsored World Chess Network, at the time one of the world’s largest internet-playing sites. Although he often talked of mov- ing back to the U.S. over the years, Larry was clearly in his element in the Malaysian capital, ghostwriting autobiographies of wealthy Malay, attending embassy functions with his beau- tiful wife Samboon and representing Dato Tan at the many chess tournaments the patron sponsors.
Always Chess
Wherever Larry was in the world and whatever he was doing, chess, which he learned late in high school, was a big part of his life. He became an accomplished player, once winning a 70- player Swiss in West Germany and defeating Kevin Spraggett in a tournament game, as well as GM Ray Keene in a simul- taneous exhibition.
Parr was, in the words of three-time U.S. Champion Alburt, who co-wrote two popular books with Parr, “The best chess editor in English.” Larry’s urbane annotations were full of wit and ref- erences to the world of ideas he lived in. Take the following introduction from a series on blunders he entitled “Heart of Darkness,” in which he examines Robert Fischer’s infamous 55th-move gaffe against Rene Letelier at Mar del Plata in 1959 (the board position is not the point here, but you can find it eas- ily if you’re interested):
Remembrance of Blunders Past Chess players seldom forget their blunders. If Nietzsche once
uschess.org
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