The New York Times
March 10, 2007
The Saturday Profile

Kasparov, Building Opposition to Putin

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By STEVEN LEE MYERS

MOSCOW

GARRY KASPAROV, the former world chess champion, took a pen and notebook and
diagramed the protesters’ march through St. Petersburg on March 3. Like a
general reliving a battle or a player analyzing a winning combination, he
sketched Uprising Square and showed where the police had gathered in
strength, blocking the street leading to the governor’s office.
A tactical mistake! "This is typical for this government," he explained.
"They protect themselves."
As a result, only a few police officers guarded St. Petersburg’s main
commercial street, Nevsky Prospekt. And that was where Mr. Kasparov and
thousands of others – as many as 5,000 by some estimates – poured through a
barricade and marched into the city’s historic center, defying the
government’s ban on the event and the country’s recent history of political
apathy.
The whole thing lasted only two hours, ending with brief clashes with the
police and more than 130 arrests, including those of several opposition
leaders, though not Mr. Kasparov. Still, it was one of the largest protests
against President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
And to Mr. Kasparov, it was a first crack in the authoritarian political
system Mr. Putin has created, one that he has committed himself to
dismantling as presidential elections approach next March.
"We never saw such a protest," he said. "Everybody recognizes it is a new
page."
Mr. Kasparov, 43, is not Mr. Putin’s only critic, but he may be the most
prominent. And he has brought to oppositional politics the same energy and
aggression that characterized his chess, attacking Mr. Putin and the
Kremlin – or the regime, as he repeatedly calls it – with language rarely
spoken so bluntly in Russia.
"This regime is getting out of touch with the real world," he said. "It’s a
deadly combination of money, power and blood – and impunity."
Such attacks have drawn the scrutiny of the authorities, though so far
nothing worse; someone who sounded angry that Mr. Kasparov had given up
chess for politics attacked him with a chessboard in 2005. ("I am lucky," he
said at the time, "that the popular sport in the Soviet Union was chess and
not baseball.")
He now travels with bodyguards. He hired them out of concern for hooligans,
he said, not because other Kremlin critics have been killed, like the
journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in Moscow last October.
"If the state goes after you," he said, "there’s no stopping them."
THIS is not the place Mr. Kasparov expected to be when he resigned from the
world of professional chess two years ago, quitting while still the
highest-ranked player, if no longer the world champion. He is a famous man
and a wealthy one, the author of numerous books on chess and its lessons for
life, who is now leading acts of civil disobedience in an uphill battle to
protest Mr. Putin’s policies.
"I am absolutely objective," he said. "I think we can lose badly, because
the regime is still very powerful, but the only beauty of our situation is
that we don’t have much choice."
Mr. Kasparov is the chairman of the United Civil Front, an organization he
formed in 2005 to promote activism in a country where it has steadily
disappeared, though for reasons that are fiercely debated.
He is also the guiding strategist behind the Other Russia, a collection of
groups from across the political spectrum united by their marginalization by
authorities loyal to Mr. Putin.
The Other Russia has held conferences, including one on the eve of last year’s
meeting of the Group of 8 countries, and staged rallies like the one in St.
Petersburg.
"It was not a protest against a concrete measure," he said. "It was not,
‘give us more money, salaries’ or ‘stop raising prices.’ It was a protest
against the regime."
Mr. Kasparov has always been something of an outsider. He is half Jewish and
half Armenian, born in Baku, the capital of mostly Muslim Azerbaijan. He
moved to Moscow in 1990 when tensions between Armenians and Azeris
intensified.
By then he was already world champion, a title he won in 1985 as a brash
upstart against Anatoly Karpov, the champion considered a favorite of the
Soviet establishment. Mr. Kasparov became a strong advocate of glasnost and
perestroika, Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policies of opening up the Soviet Union
in the 1980s.
When a coup against Mr. Gorbachev failed in August 1991, Mr. Kasparov threw
his support behind Boris N. Yeltsin and the other new democrats. For a time,
he was a leader of the Democratic Party of Russia. He broke from Mr. Yeltsin
to support a challenger, Aleksandr I. Lebed, in the 1996 elections.
One criticism against him has been political fickleness: that he has drifted
from project to project, even as he continued to compete, mostly abroad.
A constant, however, has been his opposition to Mr. Putin. After an initial
grace period, he began to fulminate against the new president, reaching a
broad international audience as a contributor to The Wall Street Journal.
One column, published in January 2001, barely a year after Mr. Putin became
president, was titled, "I Was Wrong About Putin."
"Unfortunately, my forecast, based on an assumption that a young pragmatic
leader would strengthen democracy inside Russia, fight corruption and level
the curves of Mr. Yeltsin’s foreign policy, was wishful thinking," he wrote.
He has not let up since. He rails against Mr. Putin’s foreign policy,
accusing him of intimidating former Soviet republics that should be close
allies, while fostering ties with Iran, North Korea and China. He accuses
Mr. Putin of having neutered the news media, stifled political opponents and
independent businesspeople, and undercut the essential institution of
democracy: free and fair elections.
HIS biggest challenge may be being ignored. The state’s control of
television ensures that his views never reach the public en masse. News
reports of the St. Petersburg march on national channels described the
protesters generally, not Mr. Kasparov specifically, as "all manner of
radicals, from fascists to lefties."
His willingness to include all Kremlin critics in the Other Russia,
including radical ones like the National Bolsheviks, has left him vulnerable
to guilt by association. In December, counterterrorist police officers
raided the United Civil Front’s office, seizing books and printed materials
advertising a protest march a few days later.
A question that hovers over him is whether he will run against the person
who emerges as Mr. Putin’s chosen successor. He demurs, but does not deny
the possibility. He said there were other potential candidates, including
the former prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, adding that the more
pressing issue was building and maintaining a united opposition.
Mr. Kasparov is arguing for political freedoms at a time when Mr. Putin’s
approval rating hovers around a stratospheric 80 percent. The economy,
fueled by high energy prices, is growing. A retail binge is under way,
especially in Moscow and even outside of it.
But he contends that Mr. Putin’s control of all levers of power has obscured
the fundamental weaknesses in the system: the corruption, the vast gap
between rich and poor, the declining standards of health care, education and
living conditions.
"At the end of the day," Mr. Kasparov said, referring to his campaign ahead
of the 2008 election, "it will depend on whether people care. You can’t
invent public protest. It either exists or it doesn’t exist."