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Garry Kasparov, Dissident

Running for president in Russia is a dangerous enterprise.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Thursday, November 1, 2007 12:01 a.m.

One of the current truisms of the news business is that the Internet
has shrunk the world, and that everyone knows everything from the Web
the moment it happens. Yet sometimes, we know nothing. Last month, the
former world chess champion Garry Kasparov announced his candidacy for
the presidency of Russia, to be decided in March. The world shrugged
at the Kasparov candidacy, and went back to surfing the Web.

Is this because we in the wired world already know all there is to
know about what’s up in 21st century Russia? Or in fact are we
clueless about the place Churchill described as the deepest enigma?
Garry Kasparov believes the latter, and so as leader of a grab-bag
coalition called Other Russia, he has undertaken his doomed effort to
succeed Vladimir Putin. He works hard to get his message out in the
West, but he is given relatively short shrift by the professional
skeptics among the Western media and its intellectuals. Yes, he has no
chance, but the inattention is a mistake.

I believe Garry Kasparov should be regarded as Russia’s first
post-Soviet dissident. Starting in the 1960s, deep in the Cold War,
the world essentially put under its protective custody a generation of
anti-Soviet dissidents. Their names became household names–Sakharov,
Sharansky, Bukovsky, Medvedev, Sinyavsky, Kopelev,
others. Solzhenitsyn, too hot to handle, was exiled in 1974.

The primary reason for analogizing Mr. Kasparov to these dissidents is
not for his opposition to the Putin government and his views on
Mr. Putin, though these are worth listening to. The more relevant
reason is that he believes his life is in danger.

In an interview this past weekend for "The Journal Editorial Report"
on Fox cable news, Mr. Kasparov spoke with his characteristic force
and animation about what he believes are the underlying weaknesses of
a Russia that looks to be thriving under Mr. Putin. Mr. Kasparov was
scheduled to fly back to Russia a few days after the interview, and at
the end he was asked if he feared for his safety. One could not help
but notice that his answer came after a brief but obvious hesitation.

"Yes," he said, "I am. I’m afraid, my family’s afraid. It’s our
greatest concern."

Why? Logic argues against killing Mr. Kasparov. The street
demonstrations in Moscow by his group number in the low thousands
(though they attract truncheon attacks by a small army of police
agents). A murder would make him a martyr in Russia, where he is still
revered as a Soviet and Russian hero. As a political threat, he is a
fly on the back of the Putin rhinoceros.

But this is Russia. For all the same reasons one could have said the
same of the Russian journalists killed or mysteriously dead there in
recent years. Their names are also a "dissident" list: Ivan Safronov
of Kommersant, Iskandar Khatloni of Radio Free Europe, Paul Klebnikov
of Forbes Russia, Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya Gazeta. Freedom House
estimates some two dozen journalists have been killed since Mr. Putin
came to power. Earlier this month, in Prague and Washington, Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty held symposiums on the status of Russian
media, tied to the first anniversary of Ms. Politkovskaya’s
murder. Mr. Kasparov was there. Other than the Washington Times, the
symposiums received virtually no press coverage in the West.

Mr. Kasparov is no political dilettante. His first article on the
status of democracy in Russia appeared on this page in August 1991. He
was 28 years old. He came to our offices near the World Trade Center
for lunch, and one has to say that at first it was hard to set aside
that the fellow discoursing over Chinese food on the West’s unseemly
affection for Mikhail Gorbachev possessed the most mammoth chess brain
in history.

We made him a contributing editor to the Journal editorial page, and
in the years since he has written often for these pages on Russia’s
wild ride to its current state. Across 16 years, Mr. Kasparov’s
commitment to democratic liberty in Russia and in its former republics
has been unstinting. At that September 1991 lunch, Mr. Kasparov
proposed an idea then anathema to elite thinking in Washington and the
capitals of Western Europe: The West should announce support for the
independence of the former Soviet republics–the Baltics, Ukraine,
Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and the rest.

One suspects that Vladimir Putin noticed what the young chess champion
was saying in 1991 about the old Soviet empire. The Russian president
has famously said, "The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

Russia today is not what it was. Mr. Kasparov, however, has not
stopped analyzing what it has become. Briefly, he argues that
Mr. Putin’s internal and external politics should be seen almost
wholly as a function of oil prices, the primary source of revenue for
the Russian state and the prop beneath the extended Putin political
family. Mr. Putin’s "unhelpful" policies on Iran and the like,
Mr. Kasparov argues, keep the oil markets boiling–but not boiling
over. Money in the bank, at $94 a barrel. He says Mr. Putin is the
glue that binds this fabulously wealthy family, and if he left
politics in any real sense they would start killing each other.

As to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s argument that the West
needed Mr. Putin inside the G-7 structure so it could "influence" him,
the former chess champion replies: "Occasionally you have to look at
the results of your brilliant theories." Bringing Mr. Putin in as G
No. 8, he says, "jeopardized the whole concept of this club, seven
great industrial democracies."

Arguably these views make Mr. Kasparov a dissident even in the
increasingly cynical, "pragmatic" West. To their credit, the West’s
political elites in the 1970s protected the Soviet Union’s
dreamers. Today Mr. Putin wants Russia to be seen again as
dangerous. It is that. Garry Kasparov deserves protection. He stands
for something important. A word from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would be
a start.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial
page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on
OpinionJournal.com.

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