After quitting chess two years ago at 41, Garry Kasparov, the former world champion with the highest international rating of all time, moved on to an entirely different battleground: Russian politics. Since then he has quickly established himself as one of the most outspoken critics of President Vladimir Putin's crackdown on democracy. And Putin, whose second term will be over next year and who is ineligible to take part in the March 2008 election, has grown increasingly intolerant of even the slightest hint of opposition. As election season draws near, Kasparov finds himself in an unusual spot—failing to come up with a winning strategy.
Kasparov is a leader of the Other Russia, a motley coalition of small and ideologically diverse political groups that dares take on Putin's regime. The only common ground its members seem to share is the desire to have a free and fair election in 2008, instead of a Kremlin-orchestrated farce with preordained results. Recently Kasparov has been working hard to unite the Other Russia around what he has called a "unified opposition candidate." The Kremlin has worked just as hard to marginalize them. In April 2007, 9,000 Russian Special Forces troops were deployed to crack down on an antigovernment rally the group had organized in Moscow. Of the few thousand protesters who showed, over 100, including Kasparov, were detained, some of them beaten. "What is difficult for me as the champion to get used to is being treated with such disrespect by the officials," Kasparov said when I met him recently at the spacious Moscow apartment he shares with his mother.
As a successful writer (Bloomsbury is publishing his new book, How Life Imitates Chess, in October) and wealthy celebrity recognized around the world, Kasparov could have chosen a comfortable life almost anywhere. (He has an apartment in Manhattan where his stunning young wife—his third—and their baby live.) By choosing to become a democratic crusader in Russia, Kasparov has picked the one match he can't dominate.
Kasparov, who was born and raised in Azerbaijan, then part of the Soviet Union, became a chess grandmaster at 17 and world champion at 22, the youngest ever. To many in the former Soviet Union, his historic battle against Anatoly Karpov in 1984 to '85 was a breathtaking victory for an indomitable young warrior against the suffocating Soviet system. For the Soviet leadership, Karpov was an ideal champion: He eagerly pledged allegiance to the Communist ideology and thanked the party after his victories. Kasparov, 12 years younger than Karpov, was much less welcome, not least because he was half Jewish and half Armenian, both of which were considered a huge disadvantage for a model Soviet athlete.
Many of his USSR fans, however, hailed Kasparov as a hero and harbinger of long-awaited change: That same year, Mikhail Gorbachev launched perestroika, and the Soviet Union began to fall apart. Kasparov insists the stakes are much higher now. "Playing with Karpov, who was the symbol of the system, was like moving the stone from the road," he said. "It was a symbolic victory. Now it is no longer symbolic. What I believe is at stake is the survival of my country."
