Levon Aronian, celebrated as one of the greatest players of his generation, is in peak form in 2025. In July he took the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam in Las Vegas; in August he won the Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz, victories that for the first time in years have revived his chances of qualifying for the 2026 Candidates Tournament.
On the score records, these achievements belong to the United States, the country he has represented since 2021. Yet in spirit, they still speak more to Armenia, reopening an old wound: why did he have to leave and what future is left for chess in Armenia?
In a 2022 interview, Aronian pushed back the idea that his departure marked the end of Armenian chess. “I left so that chess in Armenia can live,” he said.
It is easy to dismiss such a line as rhetoric. Though in the age when public opinion overwhelms private ones, the lived experience and struggle of one man often tells us more than the sentiment of a whole nation. And it is precisely from Levon Aronian’s sacrifices that Armenia must now take its lesson.
“There is no greater joy than living in your own country, speaking your own language, seeing your loved ones. For me, leaving was a great sacrifice,” he said in the interview.
A former world No. 2, winner of three Olympiad golds with the Armenian team, two World Cups, and once the fourth-highest rated player in history, he left Armenia because chess itself had been left behind.
After the 2018 revolution, the game lost its place on the national agenda. Neglect by Nikol Pashinyan’s administration hardened into mismanagement and contempt. Then came the 2020 Artsakh war, when official claims of “victory” masked catastrophic losses. That atmosphere of deception and disillusion finally drove him to leave and play under the U.S. flag.
To critics he was a deserter, abandoning his homeland in its darkest hour. To supporters, a pragmatist, preserving what he could of his talent. To himself, he was simply unwilling to stop competing.
Yet the deeper truth is harder to face: Armenia abandoned chess long before Aronian abandoned Armenia.
A Kingdom Without Its King
When it comes to talent, every nation has limitations. Maybe China may claim to be the exception, but no country can excel at everything. That is why nations long for their point of genius. Brazil finds it in football, Canada in hockey, Armenia finds it in chess.
Since Tigran Petrosyan’s reign as world champion in the 1960s, the game has been Armenia’s stage. Gradually, through the Soviet habit of treating chess as a weapon of prestige, to the bold experiment of making it compulsory in schools in 2011, Armenians have treated chess as their biggest treasure.
But, when a single pursuit defines collective pride, the “national game” often becomes something more: a dangerous act of worship.
The signs of that metamorphosis are not hard to find. The nation celebrates its great intellectuals as if they were born to sacrifice themselves—consumed by their field so the country might enjoy the reflected glory. But glory alone does not sustain.
When there are no living examples to follow, the next generation is left to be educated not by models but by a national “worship of chess” — an abstraction without human substance. And if we cannot find moral exemplars among our contemporaries, what exactly do we expect the next generation to reach?
Whether genius is reflected in Tigran Petrosyan, Garry Kasparov or Levon Aronian, it is individuals who drive an evolving culture and the procreation of genius—which is the goal of all cultures. When you undermine their role, you begin to hinder that process.
The Piece That No Longer Counts
For Levon Aronian, leaving was never about comfort, as many still insist. If comfort had been the goal, he could have gone years earlier, at the height of his career, when offers were plentiful. But from childhood he had already learned how to endure: “I’m convinced that if you want to reach a goal, you must sacrifice.”
Hardship had never frightened him. Growing up in 1990s Armenia meant long winters without electricity or heat. His father, a physicist, refused to buy firewood on principle, unwilling to condone deforestation.
It was then that Aronian met his first coach, Melikset Khachiyan, former student of WC Tigran Petrosian. He was a refugee from Baku who had fled anti-Armenian pogroms in 1990. With nowhere to live, Aronian’s mother took him into their home and asked instead to train her son. She was sure Levon would become the next Petrosyan.
Soon after, Aronian left school to devote himself fully to chess. Those choices—his father’s principles, his mother’s vision, his own willingness to abandon normal childhood—shaped not only his career but his character.
Outwardly cheerful, he has always been wise for himself. In interview after interview, Aronian returns to the same theme: the independence he earned in those early years, which allowed him to remain honest—free from politics and patronage.
And when a state grows blind to honesty and principle, demanding loyalty while offering nothing in return, it condemns its talents to joyless unfruitfulness and the nation to the worship of dead statues and phantoms of the past.
What remains for Armenia is not to weep over departure but to learn from it. Only then can Armenia’s greatest treasure live again.
Views expressed in opinion pieces represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views of AUA or the MAMJ program.