Moscow Times, Russia
March 16 2005
Kasparov: From Chess Hero to Political Zero?
By Tim Wall
In the sometimes genteel, sometimes weird world of professional
chess, Garry Kasparov has been the nearest thing to God for years:
omnipotent, all-seeing, with a mind like a Pentium processor and the
work rate of Hercules on amphetamines.
Like many more or less dilettante chess players, I have followed
Kasparov’s chess career with undisguised awe and at times outright
envy. While I spent too many years of my youth trying in vain to
climb the greasy pole of English junior chess, Kasparov was
conquering the world in his early 20s. When leading Western
grandmasters were giving up chess for accounting in the face of a
post-Soviet influx of their East European counterparts in the early
1990s, Kasparov was trouncing Britain’s geeky challenger Nigel Short
without breaking a sweat.
In many ways, Kasparov represents the ultimate triumph of Soviet
intellectual achievement. Trained by the father of Soviet chess,
five-time world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, he went on to pioneer the
use of computer programs and databases in analyzing chess, which
revolutionized the game during his two decades at the top.
But in the bleaker climate of Russian politics, the country’s media,
political analysts and even some of his fellow liberals see him more
as a dilettante who does not understand the rules of the game and who
has more than one failed political venture to his name, from the
Democratic Party of Russia, to the Liberal-Conservative Union, and
now to the risky Committee 2008: Free Choice. Critics and even
friends of Kasparov have noted an inability to commit to any one
project for a sustained period. In short, everyone seems to be
telling Kasparov: Don’t dabble with the real world, go back to the
safe confines of the 64 squares on the chessboard and the Wall Street
Journal op-ed page.
But if the politicos and media analysts were determined to show that
a chess player could not understand politics, they merely managed to
demonstrate their aptitude for mangling chess metaphors. The imagery
deployed to describe Kasparov’s decision to quit full-time chess for
something like full-time politics — both in the Russian and foreign
press — has been predictably chess-related, conjuring up all of the
limited metaphors in editors’ half-dozen-word chess lexicon. Some
Western newspapers hailed a “stunning move” that was delivering a
“check” to President Vladimir Putin, while other writers went even
further, predicting imminent “checkmate.”
The Chicago Tribune showed off its knowledge of chess and French by
describing Putin as “en prise,” a chess term that means a piece has
been left vulnerable to immediate capture. Meanwhile, the editors of
Britain’s Guardian newspaper headed an otherwise engaging interview
with the hoary old epithet “Endgame.” Ah, the omnipresent endgame —
as in the Yukos endgame or the endgame in Chechnya, by which the
media implies that it’s all over, even if it winds up taking months,
years or decades. As Kasparov could testify were anyone to ask him,
the endgame in chess is one of the most complicated and
little-understood parts of the game, which can take grandmasters a
lifetime to master.
Kommersant, of course, went one better with its typically caustic
headline, “Kasparov Slammed the Chessboard,” alluding to the world
champion’s famous temper tantrums. These are less frequent than in
his youth, it is true, but Kasparov’s recent epithets for Putin, such
as “fascist” and “Caligula,” can hardly endear him to the Kremlin.
It is a paradox, indeed: While chess is often used to describe
conflicts of great complexity, and chess players are rated the most
clever and logical of intellectuals, most of the time their standing
in the practical world is zilch.
Want a classic example of chess players’ unworldliness? Bobby
Fischer, the American world chess champion who beat the Soviets in
1972, now languishing in a Japanese detention center for breaking
sanctions in war-torn Yugoslavia. His behavior in retirement,
straight after winning the world title, ranks as one of the most
bizarre in sporting history, leading most onlookers to conclude —
with more than a little justification — that he was a total nut
case. The image of chess players as inmates of rook-shaped ivory
towers is further sustained by the bizarre record of the current
president of the international chess federation, the mercurial leader
of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.
So the idea that Kasparov could help bring some sense of direction to
crisis-wracked Russian liberalism does seem far-fetched to many. As
political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky pointed out this week, if
Kasparov has not been able to bring the warring sides of the chess
world together, how can he hope to succeed in building a political
coalition from Russia’s disparate opposition forces?
Kasparov’s unreconstructed free-market-and-democracy views, which he
likened to those of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in a
Wall Street Journal comment Monday, could also require a little
tweaking in presentation if they are to have any effect on Russian
public opinion. And yet, for all its improbability, Kasparov’s
challenge — if not as a potential presidential candidate, then in
his own preferred role as a leading “thinker” — could be far more
successful than Kremlin spin doctors or professional politicians
expect. Stranger things have happened, and stranger characters have
achieved high political office.
Playboy-turned-inheritor of the Bush family legacy, George W. Bush,
now has the run of the White House, and ex-Hollywood action hero
Schwarzenegger is in charge of the world’s fifth-largest economy. And
midlife crises can come in very handy for public figures to reinvent
themselves, too. With his career as a Texas oil executive going down
the drain, George W. turned 40, sobered up, then got himself some
old-time Southern religion and never looked back.
One of Kasparov’s projects over the next year, a book provisionally
called “How Life Imitates Chess,” could give a clue as to how he
plans to apply chess logic to politics. If his preparation for
political combat is anything like that for his chess tournaments,
Kasparov’s opponents should be afraid, if not very afraid. The
stereotype of chess players thinking 20 moves ahead is usually just
that, but it is all too real in Kasparov’s case, as the world’s other
elite grandmasters can testify from their many losses to him where
Kasparov never deviated from home preparation. So instead of working
out powerful opening plays, crushing middlegame attacks and subtle
endgame strategies, Kasparov could be devising economic programs,
working out how to divide his political opponents and probing their
psychological weaknesses.
Do the skills translate? It’s hard to tell, but he certainly could
bring something useful to the debate. Does he need a coach to help
him hone his message? Maybe not so much as Dubya or Arnie did, and
for sure he’ll be a quick learner.
Kasparov was named earlier this month as a possible contender for
president in 2008 by Leonid Nevzlin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s chief
lieutenant still at liberty in Israel, along with former Prime
Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and independent State Duma Deputy Vladimir
Ryzhkov. Although as someone born to Jewish and Armenian parents in
Baku, the chances of Kasparov winning might seem remote. Yet there
have been precedents of non-ethnic Russian leaders, from Catherine
the Great to Stalin.
So after the Georgian and Ukrainian revolutions, could
black-and-white be the new orange?
Tim Wall, night editor at The Moscow Times, is a former editor of
British Chess Magazine. He contributed this essay to The Moscow
Times.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress