d_entertainment/games_and_puzzles/chess/article154 3157.ece
The Times
March 24, 2007
Kasparov’s next move
As the world’s greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov was an idol of
the former Soviet Union. Today he has more powerful opponents
Occasionally I get asked who is the most charismatic person I’ve
interviewed, and, for the past 14 years, I’ve given the same answer:
Garry Kasparov. A chess player? People reply. Absolutely, I
say. Chess, like boxing, that other great blood sport, like, indeed,
Russian politics, is about directly destroying your opponent; Kasparov
did that over 64 squares more effectively than anybody else. Up close,
you could see why. Intellectually, physically, the man known as the
Beast of Baku gave new life to the cliché animal magnetism.
Having met him again, I see no reason to demote him. He retired from
professional chess, no longer world champion, but still ranked number
one, in 2005. He is now a writer, politician and ardent opponent of
Russian president Vladimir Putin. We met in Stockholm, where Kasparov
was about to give a talk based on his new book, How Life Imitates
Chess, to 250 businesspeople. "We’ve met before," he said, "in
1993. In Moscow." I can’t deny I was impressed.
His book is more interesting than it sounds, though its title is
rather undermined by the author’s admission that "an aptitude for
chess demonstrates nothing more than an aptitude for chess". Indeed,
coming on 44 as opposed to coming on 30, Garry Kasparov has added, if
not quite humility, then a measure of charm to his other
qualities. Back then, his conversational style was combative in the
extreme. He brooked no disagreement. I remember falling out, for
instance, over the precise dates of the Spanish Inquisition.
I hadn’t been surprised when I had read over the years of his two
divorces, his custody row with his first wife over their daughter, his
recriminations against IBM following his defeat by its Deep Blue
computer in 1997. His enormous self-belief, necessary no doubt to
become world champion at 22 and to stay at the top for 20 years,
tipped into arrogance. And, even allowing for the simplifications of
speaking a language not his own, he’d been macho, a little flashy,
keen, in the way of many of his newly enriched countrymen, to
demonstrate that he’d made it on Western terms.
But Garry Kasparov has grown up. During our day together in Sweden,
his company was as pleasant as the early spring sunshine. His surly
niets had turned into emphatic das, he sought to build a conversation
rather than deliver a monologue, he laughed a lot, and not just at his
own jokes, although one of them, about local giants Ikea, wasn’t
bad. "How are Ikea able to compete so well with Asia? They’ve
outsourced their labour to the customer." Maybe you had to be there:
the Swedes, at least, had a chuckle.
The reason for his good humour is obvious: he isn’t playing chess any
more. Not serious chess, anyway, the sort that saps energy, manners,
perspective. "I play for fun on the net," he admits. Doesn’t he win
really easily? "You can find strong players." Do they know it’s you?
"They can guess, probably." Does he miss the competition? "I have much
larger competition now. I will not go back."
Kasparov’s speech lasted an hour. The strategy/tactics,
calculation/evaluation, trust-your-instincts decision-making spiel
wasn’t bad, as these things go. His erudition is considerable, his
argument peppered with human interest, from Mozart to Edison, Tolstoy
to Verdi, Galileo to Adam Smith, with Count Bernadotte and Alfred
Nobel, or Nobble in Kasparov’s accent, thrown in for local colour. He
regards it as a challenge never to give the same talk twice, weaving
in the facts that on this day, March 14, Albert Einstein was born in
1879, Karl Marx died in 1883 and the Treaty of Ulm was signed in 1647.
He might also have added, but possibly prefers to forget, that on
March 14 in 2004, Vladimir Putin was re-elected for a second term with
almost 80 per cent of the vote. Putin continues to enjoy 80 per cent
approval ratings. Kasparov shrugged when I put this to him. "If a
pollster calls someone in Russia and asks them about Putin, they
should not expect a true answer."
Putin’s reputation has, of course, like Chelsea FC and property prices
in Kensington, benefited hugely from high energy prices. "But," says
Kasparov, "I travel from Vladivostock to Kaliningrad, Murmansk to
Krasnodar and people ask, ‘Why is the country getting richer and we
are getting poorer?’" As for the 2004 poll, "Every election since
Yeltsin’s in 1996 has been rigged."
Kasparov was known as an ultra-aggressive player, and his political
style owes much to his approach to chess. He repeatedly denounces
"Putin’s corrupt regime" from the rostrum in Stockholm, calling it
"disastrous" and his country "devastated". He hasn’t met the
president, he says. "I’ve met enough KGB lieutenant-colonels, one
more, one less, it won’t make any difference." He is a leading player
in a new anti-government coalition called Other Russia, which earlier
this month held a rally in St Petersburg, violently broken up by the
police, but not before Kasparov and others had addressed the
crowd. Other Russia’s manifesto, he says, is, "Free and fair
elections, no censorship, decentralisation, the dismantling of the
current regime." More rallies are scheduled to take place in a
fortnight.
Kasparov’s own pressure group, United Civil Front, has published
investigations into the Beslan school carnage and the Nord-Ost theatre
siege, which ended with hundreds debilitated by a mystery
government-produced gas. He has established a fund for the victims of
terrorism.
Inevitably, before long, our conversation turned to Alexander
Litvinenko, the KGB-officer-turned-Putin-critic who was poisoned in
London last autumn. "When I heard about polonium I had no doubts,"
says Kasparov. "I know the address where you can find the true
killers, it’s the Kremlin. But there are many groups there. I don’t
think it was Putin who ordered it. I don’t think so. But I believe
that those who ordered it, they see Putin probably every day, it’s his
inner circle. Each head of a KGB department can run his own operation
because they’re so rich and so powerful. I don’t want to waste my
intellectual power trying to unveil these spy games."
Spy games is right. In Russia, he is regularly followed, tending to
meet colleagues in cafés, "And then we have about an hour before they
[the police] set up something [surveillance]." His phones are
tapped. Unlike Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who made her name
investigating Russian war crimes in Chechnya, shot dead in Moscow last
October, Kasparov employs armed bodyguards in Russia. "I’m lucky I can
afford it, so direct physical assault probably will not work. State
terrorism is another story." Does he mean poison? "Yes, I try to avoid
situations where this can occur. Such as not flying by Aeroflot. And
if I do, I don’t eat any food. There is a risk of being the victim,
but I have to reduce the chances. But, if they want to get you, you
have to be philosophical. I take it as part of this moral duty that
I’m carrying through."
He isn’t complacent, he says, but "I don’t have any business in
Russia. I pay my taxes." So did Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the billionaire
chairman of the oil company Yukos, now serving a nine-year jail
sentence for, it is widely believed, daring to fund Putin’s
opponents. Yukos, meanwhile, "is under the control of Putin’s guys".
Does he think Putin is personally corrupt? He laughs. "How rich is the
man who can put a billionaire in jail in one day?" There are,
officially, 61 dollar billionaires in Russia, the infamous oligarchs,
more than Germany, more than Japan, not many fewer than the US. "Putin
can put them all in jail if they threaten his business interests. He
is a businessman. He isn’t about ideas. He could be liberal, he could
be nationalist, he doesn’t care. He supports Iran and Syria because he
needs tension because tension helps oil prices."
Kasparov says he sees the Khodorkovsky affair and the recent bout of
assassinations as evidence of increased political
instability. "They’re getting nervous," he says. "One month of free
Russian TV, one month of pictures of Abramovich’s villas, and the
regime would be gone and Putin knows that. The country would not
tolerate it."
When we discussed his own ambitions, Kasparov was less forthcoming. He
thinks the candidate to oppose Putin’s chosen successor in next year’s
presidential elections should come from the centre left and he, as his
articles in The Wall Street Journal have made clear, is a man of the
right. He was, however, scathing about the war in Iraq. "I don’t like
incompetence covered by arrogance. I’m not against fighting, but as in
chess, the threat is stronger than the execution. You don’t want to
pull the trigger. Bush squandered all his advantages."
And on the subject of wealth inequality in Russia, Kasparov, mindful
perhaps that a millionaire in a Brioni suit can be accused of being
out of touch, sounds a lot like an old-fashioned socialist. "In
Yakutsk, for instance, there are diamonds, gold, oil, coal, but 100
yards left or right of the main street, no roads! In the middle of
this total misery is a five-star hotel. It’s Third-World stuff. In my
country, expenses are nationalised, profits are privatised. Gas enters
a pipeline as a state monopoly, when it comes out the profits go into
private pockets. A lot of villages in Russia don’t have gas."
We talked about the bad reputation many rich Russians have gained in
London, and indeed across Western Europe. "They behave the best they
can," he snorts. "They’re arrogant because they make money out of
nothing. It’s wild money. The new Russian elite, they despise the
intellect. They buy this yacht and that yacht, it’s easy come, easy
go. It’s not like America in the 19th century, Carnegie, Morgan,
Rockefeller, they built something new. These people, they were just in
the right place when the national wealth was being redistributed."
To be involved in Russian politics is, he admits, "exciting, dangerous
and risky. But I feel motivated." Meanwhile, his family is
anxious. When I saw him in 1993, Masha, his first wife, was about to
give birth to Polina, their first child, in Helsinki, where wealthy
Russians tended to have their babies at that time. Five months ago,
Dasha, his third wife, 25, an economics graduate, gave birth to Aida,
his third child, in New York. "Finland was a matter of
convenience. This time, New York was a matter of safety. We didn’t
want to take the chance of our daughter being born in a hospital in
Russia."
Dasha and Aida are still in America, at Kasparov’s flat in
Manhattan. They will join him later on this European lecture
tour. Vadim, his ten-year-old son from his second marriage, lives near
him in Moscow. "We build relations, very close, I hope they will never
be broken." Masha and Polina, naturalised Americans, live in a further
property in New Jersey. Relations are still strained.
Neither Polina nor Vadim show any appetite for chess. Kasparov isn’t
concerned. "Polina is a good student, number one in her class." And
Vadim? "Ah, he’s bright, but he’s a bit lazy, he’s a boy. A friend
told me, ‘If your son studies all day, call the psychiatrist.’"
But study all day is precisely what he did, growing up in Baku,
capital of the then Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan. "Yes, but
I had the aptitude, and I learnt the work ethic strongly from my
mother." (His father died of leukaemia when he was seven. His mother
Klara, now 70, is still "my top manager".) "It’s difficult
today. There are so many diversions. In 1970, TV in the Soviet Union
was a joke. No computers, not many books, you had to find something."
And his chosen game was heavily promoted as a source of intense
imperial and ideological pride. Now, "nobody in Russia cares about
chess".
Russians under 30 he says, "would recognise my name but not my
face. I’m not on the TV any more." (Except to be denounced as a CIA
spy, as he was after the St Petersburg rally.) To older generations,
however, he is still a major celebrity. Part of his political clout
resides in the fact that, "To the left, I’m still the Soviet champion,
to the nationalists, I’m the intellectual pride of Mother Russia." His
ethnic origins, half-Jewish, half-Armenian, long considered a barrier
to political success, "are far less important than they were".
Other Russia hopes, he says, to run a candidate in next year’s
election, when, as things stand, constitutionally, Putin must step
down. Kasparov is coy as to whether the candidate, in 2008 or after,
will be him. "I don’t feel my personal ambition would be helpful to
the coalition." But he does have personal ambition? "My ambition is to
make a difference, to help my country, to be useful. I have energy, I
have strategic views, I want them to be invested in something
positive."
How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov is published by William
Heinemann on April 5 and is available from BooksFirst priced £18 (RRP
£20), free p&p, on 0870 160 8080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy.
An exclusive extract from How Life Imitates Chess will appear in
Business on Monday
From: Baghdasarian
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_an