GARRY KASPAROV
by Michael Elliot
Time Magazine
May 14, 2007
U. S. Edition
TIME 100; Heroes & Pioneers; Pg. 94 Vol. 169 No. 20
The wizard of chess now battles for Russia’s lonely democrats
Garry Kasparov likes to say he has been in politics all his life. In
the Soviet Union, the nation in which he grew up, chess was a way of
demonstrating the superiority of communism over the decadent West,
and a chess prodigy was inevitably a political figure. Kasparov never
dodged that fate; in 1985 when he took on and eventually defeated
Anatoly Karpov, the darling of the Soviet chess establishment,
his image as a prominent outsider–Kasparov is half Jewish, half
Armenian–was fixed.
Kasparov’s status has been maintained in post-Soviet Russia. His
organization, the Other Russia, a coalition of those opposed to the
rule of President Vladimir Putin, has held a series of demonstrations,
often broken up by the police. For Kasparov, Russia today, dominated
by a combination of huge energy enterprises and former security
apparatchiks (such as Putin), is a betrayal of those who dreamed of
democracy in the early 1990s.
Putin’s foes are fragmented and run from old-fashioned nationalists
to modern liberals; Kasparov, 44, insists he is just a moderator, not
a leader, of the movement. But by giving a voice to those who believe
that Russia can develop in a way different from the authoritarianism
that has always seemed to be its fate, the retired grand master shows
that he has not yet made his last move.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
