 His fatherland Turkey, which he deeply loves, is nevertheless the chess piece that he has planned to sacrifice or at least risk in his gambit in order to achieve a greater purpose – namely, to "protect humanity from the Russian threat".Anwar, a believer in Evolution rather than Revolution, dislikes both the present Romanov Dynasty ruling Russia and the Russian revolutionaries with whom Varvara sympathizes, and predicts that in future there will arise in Russia a dangerous force "taking in the worst from both the East and the West" - a kind of premonition of Stalin's Soviet Union.Varvara angrily objects to Anwar's condemnation of Russia, stating that it has great literature as exemplified in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.