Updated: Aug 09, 2026, 07:59 IST
FIDE’s official motto, Gens una sumus (we are one family), was adopted in 1952, almost three decades after the chess governing body was set up in 1924. On its face, the motto carries the naïve idealism of a mid-twentieth-century world recovering from the horrors of the Second World War.A hopeful attempt to frame a centuries-old game of simulated warfare as an instrument of global peace. Across more than seven decades of geopolitical upheavals, ideological iron curtains and border-redefining wars since 1952, chess has been forced to answer a recurring question: what happens to a family when its member nations tear each other apart?Global sport has followed a very predictable response to geopolitical conflicts. Athletes are routinely cancelled; lifelong pursuits of their craft are cut short by state actions they had no role in.FIDE, chess’s governing body, has let its motto guide its response to such moments. Guided by the simple reasoning that politics should not enter the game, FIDE has allowed dissidents, defectors, protesters and sanctioned players to play under a neutral flag that bears the federation’s logo. To trace this banner’s arc – from Viktor Korchnoi in 1978 to Alireza Firouzja and Ian Nepomniachtchi today – is to see how Gens una sumus has evolved from an idealistic slogan into a guiding principle.
Viktor Korchnoi (FIDE Photo)
The lineage begins with Korchnoi, a man who tested the limits of political exile. In July 1976, after a tournament in Amsterdam, Korchnoi walked into a Dutch police station and requested political asylum, defecting from the Soviet Union. The Soviet state and the Soviet Chess Federation were apoplectic. Moscow demanded that FIDE strike Korchnoi’s name from the grandmaster lists and strip him of his right to challenge for the World Championship.Had FIDE acquiesced, it would have set a precedent, reducing the governing body to an extension of state power. Instead, under the leadership of its president, former World Champion Max Euwe, FIDE stood firm. Korchnoi was granted the right to compete under the FIDE flag.He qualified through the Candidates cycle as a stateless man, playing under the federation’s flag, and beat Tigran Petrosian, Lev Polugaevsky and Boris Spassky to earn his shot at challenging Anatoly Karpov for the World Championship.When Korchnoi sat across from Karpov in the famously tense 1978 World Championship match in the Philippines, he was living in Switzerland. He eventually lost 6-5 to Karpov. FIDE’s unyielding stance through the Korchnoi saga asserted its position that it would clear every hurdle to let chess players play.
Alireza Firouzja and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa (Photo by Michal Walusza_Norway Chess)
Four decades later, the FIDE flag found a new purpose. In December 2019, Firouzja, then a 16-year-old prodigy from Iran, found himself caught in a policy enforced by his home federation: a mandatory boycott requiring Iranian players to forfeit their games whenever they were paired against Israeli opponents.For a generational talent with ambitions of becoming world champion, state-mandated forfeits were a professional death sentence. Facing the prospect of not being able to play in the World Rapid and Blitz Championship in Moscow as Iran withdrew its players to enforce its policy, Firouzja made a courageous break. He registered for the tournament under the FIDE flag.Sitting quietly in Moscow with the neutral FIDE logo next to his name, the teenager marched to a silver medal behind Magnus Carlsen. FIDE’s umbrella enabled Firouzja’s brilliant trajectory to continue uninterrupted by state dogma, bridging his career until he eventually took French citizenship.FIDE faced its most complex test in the shadow of the war in Ukraine. Following the 2022 invasion, global sports authorities moved to isolate Russian and Belarusian athletes. While team events were banned, FIDE provided an expedited pathway for individual players to compete under the neutral FIDE banner.
Ian Nepomniachtchi and D Gukesh
Take the case of Nepomniachtchi. In late 2021, bound by World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) sanctions against Russia, Nepomniachtchi contested his first World Championship match against Carlsen not under the Russian tricolour but under the neutral banner of the ‘Chess Federation of Russia’. Nepomniachtchi lost the 2021 championship to Carlsen.When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Nepomniachtchi was one of 44 elite Russian grandmasters who signed an open letter to the Russian President opposing the war.At his next shot at the World Championship, in 2023 against China’s Ding Liren, Nepomniachtchi played under the blue FIDE flag.To the average person, a player under a neutral flag can look like a man without an identity. The opposite is true. When Nepomniachtchi sat in Astana, Firouzja in Moscow, or Korchnoi in Baguio, the neutral flag did not erase their identity. It protected the players from the geopolitics of their birthplaces.It would be naïve to assume that chess players are immune to political reality. Korchnoi lived through intense paranoia and state surveillance. Firouzja was forced to leave his homeland. Nepomniachtchi competed under the shadow of a devastating war he openly opposed.Gens una sumus is not a promise of an idyllic utopia; it is FIDE’s commitment to every chess player. It is a promise that when the real world fractures, there remains one arena where a person can step forward, shake their opponent’s hand and simply compete as an equal.Under the FIDE flag, stateless does not mean helpless. It means free to play.(Aarav Dengla is India’s 93rd Grandmaster. He is a keen observer and student of world history in general and chess history in particular.)
