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Garry Kasparov’s deadly game
Daniel Johnson

Garry Kasparov
HOW LIFE IMITATES CHESS
256pp. Heinemann. £20.
978 0 434 01410 1

Does life really imitate chess, as the title of Garry Kasparov’s
entertaining new book would have it? Indeed, the truth would appear to
be just the opposite. The game was once a staple of the sermons and
moralities of medieval and Renaissance literature, the most celebrated
of which was The Game and Playe of the Chesse by Jacobus de Cessolis –
one of the first books to be printed in English by Caxton. We still
tend to treat chess as an allegory: witness the first scene of the
second Bond film. From Russia With Love opens with a chess tournament,
in which the Russian grandmaster Kronsteen triumphs over the board and
then moves seamlessly into plotting global domination. But How Life
Imitates Chess belongs to a different category. Kasparov claims that
chess can teach us how to make better decisions and so be more
successful. His is, in other words, a self-help book, and it is not
free of the tiresome jargon typical of the genre: "We can flout the
laws of thermodynamics to create energy and quality through positive
transformation".

What lifts this book high above the run of such confidence-boosters is
the extraordinary personality of its author. Kasparov is not only the
greatest chess player the world has ever seen, he is also the leader
of the opposition and the last hope of democracy in Russia. He has
been brave enough to defy the man he refers to contemptuously as "a
mere lieutenant-colonel in the KGB" with nothing more than his wits to
live by. So the game Kasparov is now playing with President Putin is
for his life. This fact gives his thoughts about chess and life an
extra edge. Scattered throughout How Life Imitates Chess are
autobiographical anecdotes that build up a portrait of a man who has
hovered between insider and outsider throughout his career.

When he was growing up in Baku, his parents’ circle "largely consisted
of Jewish professors and intellectuals who constantly questioned the
official view, not only the blatant propaganda of the Soviet
government". The young Garry Weinstein (as he then was) listened to
Radio Liberty and Voice of America, then argued the toss with his
Communist grandfather. He was seven when his father died, and he
adopted his Armenian mother Klara’s name after his chess teacher, the
former world champion Mikhail Botvinik, "added that it wouldn’t hurt
my chances of success in the USSR not to be named Weinstein". With
anti-Semitism being exploited by the neo-Stalinist Putin regime,
Kasparov’s Jewish background is again in the foreground. This explains
the need to prove his patriotic credentials: "I spent twenty-five
years representing the colours of my country and I believe I am
continuing to do so". He explains that his decision to retire from
professional chess in 2005 – still the highest-rated player after two
decades – was "largely based on what I saw as the need to join the
resistance to the catastrophic expansion of authoritarian state power
in my home country".

Kasparov explains that the regime imposed by Putin is "not martial law
exactly, call it ‘martial law lite’". The lack of transparency and
accountability allows the state to grow indefinitely: "Any criticism
of state officials can be termed ‘extremism’, a term separated from
terrorism by only a comma in Putin’s law book". These political
observations are scattered randomly throughout the book: "everything
that I have written here" is explained by the decision to exchange
supremacy in chess for the risk of politics. Kasparov argues that he
was forced to leave his "comfort zone" of chess by the need to "be
where I thought I was most wanted and needed", above all by the
thought of posterity.

"I don’t want my nine-year-old son to worry about Russian military
service in an illegal war such as Chechnya or to fear the repression
of a dictatorship", he declares, though he concedes that this decision
is seen by many as foolhardy: "After all, having his father attacked
or jailed won’t be of much benefit to my son". But Kasparov merely
shrugs off all thoughts of assassination or incarceration: "There are
some things that simply must be done . . . this is a fight that must
be fought". So what does Kasparov himself stand for? "There are
millions like me in Russia who want a free press, the rule of law,
social justice and free and fair elections . . . . To achieve these
ends my colleagues and I have formed a broad non-ideological coalition
of true opposition groups and activists. I am working inside Russia
and abroad to bring attention to the decimation of Russia’s democratic
institutions." But how can chess help Kasparov to achieve his aim? One
of the best features of the book are his insights into how he learned
to play against his great rival Anatoly Karpov; they played five world
championship matches, amounting to 144 games, between 1984 and
1990. Karpov "was strongly connected with the Soviet power structure
. . . . Our contrasting fire and ice chess styles also reflected our
‘collaborator versus rebel’ reputations away from the board". During
their first, inconclusive match, Kasparov forced himself to imitate
his opponent’s python-like style. When the match was stopped by the
World Chess Federation president Florencio Campomanes at the behest of
the Soviet authorities after forty-eight games, the exhausted Karpov
eagerly "accepted" the decision, while the twenty-one-year-old
Kasparov reluctantly "abided" by it. But the younger man had enjoyed a
five-month master class at the champion’s expense. Kasparov won the
return and did not relinquish the title for fifteen years.

To deploy the same strategy against Putin, Kasparov will have to force
himself to create a highly disciplined political movement, able to
draw on deep reserves of patriotic sentiment and the promise of a
restoration of Russia to great power status. Given the state’s control
of resources – and the catastrophic demographic structure, the outlook
for Russia is grim. Kasparov will not find it easy simultaneously to
woo the electorate, tell the truth and stay alive.

After the long list of unsolved murders – those of Anna Politkovskaya
and Alexander Litvinenko are merely the most notorious – Garry
Kasparov has every reason to be intimidated. Yet this coded manifesto
of a book is only the latest sign that his courage at the chessboard
has not deserted him in the political arena.

Daniel Johnson has been a senior Editor and colunist on The Times and
the Telegraph, and has written widely about German literature and
culture. He is writing a book on the Cold War and chess, and a history
of German thought.