Checkmating Putin is chess king’s gambit
By Alex Rodriguez
Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent
Published July 5, 2005
KOSTROMA, Russia — Garry Kasparov had nothing left to conquer. For
two decades he reigned over international chess with the swagger of a
Cossack and a memory that took on supercomputers. His peers vanquished
and his patience worn thin by the politics of his game, the fiery,
unpredictable chess legend yearned for a new arena.
This year he found one. Announcing his retirement from professional
chess in March, Kasparov threw himself headlong into Russian politics,
undaunted by its tripwires or its steely overseer, President Vladimir
Putin.
In fact, Kasparov has made clear he sees Putin as his new archrival.
Kasparov is virtually alone in Russian politics in calling for the
dismantling of Putin’s regime, and in the use of large-scale street
rallies to try to get the job done.
Russian political analysts view Kasparov’s endeavor as quixotic and
ultimately doomed. Polls suggest most Russians are unaware of
Kasparov’s career move. Nearly two-thirds say they never would elect
him president.
Kasparov is not accustomed to being the underdog, but it doesn’t
appear to faze him either. State-controlled television has ignored him
since he announced his switch from chess to politics, so he has begun
seeding grass-roots backing in Russia’s provinces.
In mid-June he took his message of democracy and regime change to
Kostroma, a small provincial capital along the banks of the Volga
River. Last week he appeared in the volatile North Caucasus republic
of Dagestan, recently besieged by a wave of bombings and violence
spilling over from the 10-year separatist conflict in neighboring
Chechnya.
“I’m not so stupid as to evaluate our chances with great enthusiasm,”
Kasparov said at his downtown Moscow office. “But at same time, I can
feel that the monolith of [Kremlin] power is no longer that solid.
Every action, every move by Putin and his associates to strengthen
their grip on power . . . inevitably reduces their power base, because
it always hurts someone else’s interests.”
Kasparov’s colleagues and friends worry that it may be Kasparov who
gets hurt. The first rule Russian politicians learn is that in Russian
politics, there are no rules. Nine members of parliament have been
killed since 1994. Most observers believe former Russian oil magnate
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sentenced recently to 9 years in prison
because he dared to fund campaigns of Kremlin opponents.
“We’re all terrified for him,” said Frederic Friedel, a close friend
of Kasparov’s and an editor at ChessBase.com. “I tried to give him
sound advice: I told him, `Be careful–for God’s sake, be careful!'”
Kasparov, 42, no longer is world champion–he lost that title in his
2000 match with countryman Vladimir Kramnik in London. Nevertheless,
he is widely regarded as the greatest chess player ever and has been
ranked No. 1 in the world by the World Chess Federation since 1984.
His style of play was legendary. He rarely settled for draws, instead
aggressively pursuing his opponents with daring attacks. Most players
strive to betray as little emotion as possible, but Kasparov grinned,
chuckled, huffed and winced through matches.
“A lot of players lost to him because they felt his intensity,”
Friedel said. “[Russian chess professional] Vladislav Tkachev once
said to me, `Kasparov was shorter than me, but when I played him, he
towered over me.'”
Viktor Korchnoi, a longtime rival of Kasparov’s who defected from the
Soviet Union in 1976 and lives in Switzerland, defeated Kasparov only
once, losing 11 times.
“He has tremendous knowledge, more than any other modern grandmaster,”
Korchnoi said. “And he invests into any given chess game a huge amount
of energy, more than anyone else can.”
Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, Kasparov learned chess at the age of 5 by
watching his parents play. When he turned 17, he became a grandmaster.
Five years later, he shocked the world by defeating countryman Anatoly
Karpov to become the youngest world champion ever, after an epic match
that took 14 months to complete.
Kasparov went on to defeat Karpov on three other occasions. His career
low point came in 1997, when he lost to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer,
a defeat Kasparov blamed on human assistance he believed the computer
had received
For the latter part of his chess career, Kasparov largely confined his
politics to squabbles with the World Chess Federation, which refused
to recognize him as world champion because he had co-founded a rival
chess group. Through the 1990s he flitted in and out liberal politics
in Russia, never sustaining any commitment.
However, the collapse of Russia’s liberal movement during the December
2003 parliamentary elections renewed his interest. In the election
aftermath, a new liberal coalition called Committee 2008 named him
chairman. Soon afterward, when negotiations for another world
championship match faltered, Kasparov sensed it was time to quit.
Calling it quits
He announced his decision to retire from professional chess in March
after a match in Linares, Spain. In Russia, where chess is played
everywhere from park benches to grade schools and chess champions are
revered as national heroes, Kasparov’s departure cut deep. His fans
there were crushed.
“They have no one to root for now,” said Alexander Bach, executive
director of the Russian Chess Federation.
Though many in the chess world believe Kasparov’s departure robs the
game of its anchor, Kasparov insists it will survive without him.
“What happens in the chess world is the result of many players and
officials not just one person,” he said.
With his energy focused exclusively on Russian politics, Kasparov is
applying the same all-out, no-holds-barred philosophy he used on the
chessboard. He routinely labels Putin’s regime “a dictatorship.” In
January he called the president a “fascist,” and in a recent Wall
Street Journal commentary he likened Putin to the Roman emperor Caligula.
Kasparov is convinced Putin will either try to change Russia’s
constitution to allow for a third successive term or install a
surrogate whom he can direct from behind the scenes. He won’t rule out
running for the presidency in 2008, but he said his current focus is
Putin’s ouster from power.
Kasparov has discussed alliances with other Russian liberal democrats,
but those talks have stalled because, as Kasparov said, other liberal
politicians are unwilling to go as far in denouncing Putin as he is.
“The big roadblock with Kasparov is that he considers Putin’s regime
to not be legitimate,” said Boris Nadezhdin, a leading Russian liberal
and member of the Union of Right Forces party. “That gives us too
little room for negotiations. We still think that we should negotiate
with the regime.”
For now, Kasparov is content with grass-roots support for the kind of
street protests that led to bloodless revolutions in Georgia and
Ukraine. His whistle-stop tour across Russia has taken him from St.
Petersburg to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, from Kostroma, 186
miles northeast of Moscow, to the Caspian Sea port of Makhachkala.
Kremlin on his trail
In Kostroma, Kasparov shuttled from event to event in a small bus,
meeting with a local Communist Party leader who heads the province’s
parliament, the city’s mayor and host of local politicians and
journalists. He called the visit a success, though there were signs
the Kremlin was keeping tabs.
During a round-table session with politicians and journalists, a local
newspaper covering Kasparov’s visit received a call from federal
authorities: Confine your coverage to a small blurb. The Kremlin also
had tried to persuade the Communist Party official to cancel his
meeting with Kasparov, Kasparov said.
“Obviously they have a variety of options, and some of them are
nasty,” Kasparov said. “But it doesn’t matter, because I believe I
have to do this. If I believe that Putin is anathema to my country,
then I cannot afford to calculate risk.”
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