International Herald Tribune, France
March 9 2007
Putin’s grandmaster opponent seeks to stir up the opposition
By Steven Lee Myers Published: March 9, 2007
MOSCOW: Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, took a pen
and notebook and diagramed the protesters’ march through St.
Petersburg a week ago. Like a general reliving a battle or a player
analyzing a winning combination, he drew circles and lines. He
sketched Uprising Square and showed where the police had gathered in
strength, blocking the street leading to the governor’s office.
A tactical mistake! "This is typical for this government," he
explained. "They protect themselves."
As a result only a few police officers guarded the main commercial
street, Nevsky Prospekt. And so that was where Kasparov and thousands
of others – as many as 5,000 according to some estimates – poured
through a barricade and marched into the city’s historic center,
defying the government ban and the recent Russian history of
political apathy.
The whole thing lasted only two hours, ending with brief clashes with
police and more than 130 arrests, including those of several
opposition leaders, though not of Kasparov. Still it was one of the
largest protests to date against the government of President Vladimir
Putin.
And to Kasparov, it was a first crack in the authoritarian political
system Putin has created, one that Kasparov has committed himself to
dismantling as presidential elections approach next March.
"We never saw such a protest," he said, speaking animatedly in fluent
English. "Everybody recognizes it is a new page."
Kasparov, 43, is not Putin’s only critic, but he may be the most
prominent, the most articulate and the most fervent. He has brought
to opposition politics the same energy and aggression that
characterized his chess, attacking Putin and the Kremlin – or the
regime, as he repeatedly calls it – with language rarely spoken so
bluntly in Russia.
"This regime is getting out of touch with the real world," he said in
another interview not long ago. "It’s a deadly combination of money,
power and blood – and impunity."
Such attacks have drawn the scrutiny of the authorities, though so
far nothing worse, though someone attacked Kasparov with a chessboard
in 2005. ("I am lucky," he said at the time, "that the popular sport
in the Soviet Union was chess and not baseball.") An aide was also
attacked and badly beaten last year by mysterious assailants.
He now travels with bodyguards. He hired them out of concern for
hooligans, he said, not because other Kremlin critics have been
killed, including the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot and
killed in Moscow in October, and Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB
officer who was poisoned in London in November. A prominent political
scientist, Stanislav Belkovsky, recently said he had warned Kasparov
that he could be a target.
"If the state goes after you," Kasparov said when asked about that,
"there’s no stopping them."
This is not the place Kasparov expected to be when he resigned from
the world of professional chess two years ago, quitting while still
the highest ranked player, if no longer the world champion. (He said
he stopped playing entirely, then added, "a bit on the Internet.")
He is a famous man and a wealthy one, the author of numerous books on
chess and its lessons for life, and he is now leading acts of civil
disobedience in an uphill battle to protest Putin’s policies.
"I am absolutely objective," he said. "I think we can lose badly,
because the regime is still very powerful, but the only beauty of our
situation is that we don’t have much choice."
Kasparov is the chairman of the United Civil Front, an organization
he created in 2005 to promote activism in a country where it has
steadily disappeared, though for reasons that are fiercely debated.
He is also the guiding strategist behind the Other Russia, a union of
groups from across the political spectrum united in their
marginalization by the authorities loyal to Putin.
The Other Russia has held conferences, including one on the eve of
last year’s meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized countries, and
staged rallies like the one in St. Petersburg.
"It was not a protest against a concrete measure," he said. "It was
not, ‘give us more money, salaries’ or ‘stop raising prices.’ It was
a protest against the regime." Their ability to unify disparate
discontents, he added, "is why the government panicked."
Kasparov has always been something of an outsider. He is half Jewish
and half Armenian, born in Baku, the capital of mostly Muslim
Azerbaijan. He moved to Moscow in 1990 when tensions between
Armenians and Azeris turned into what he called "genocide" against
the Armenians.
By then he was already world champion, a title he won in 1985 as a
brash upstart against Anatoly Karpov, the champion considered a
favorite of the Soviet establishment. He became a strong advocate of
glasnost and perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of opening up
the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
When the revanchist coup against Gorbachev failed in August 1991,
Kasparov threw his support behind Boris Yeltsin and the other new
democrats. For a time in the early 1990s he was a leader of the
Democratic Party of Russia. He broke from Yeltsin to support a
challenger, Aleksandr Lebed, in the 1996 elections.
A criticism against him has been political fickleness: that he has
drifted from project to project, even as he continued to compete,
mostly abroad. A constant, however, has been his opposition to Putin.
After an initial grace period, he began to fulminate against the new
president, reaching a broad international audience as a contributor
to The Wall Street Journal. One column, published in January 2001,
barely a year after Putin became president, was titled, "I was wrong
about Putin."
"Unfortunately, my forecast, based on an assumption that a young
pragmatic leader would strengthen democracy inside Russia, fighting
corruption and level the curves of Yeltsin’s foreign policy, was
wishful thinking," he wrote.
Kasparov has not let up since. He rails against Putin’s foreign
policy, accusing him of intimidating former Soviet republics who by
culture and history should be close allies, while fostering ties with
countries Iran, North Korea and China, who should not be. He accuses
of Putin having neutered the media, stifled political opponents and
independent businessmen and undercut the essential institution of
democracy: free and fair elections.
His biggest challenge may be being ignored. The state’s control of
television ensures that his views never reach the mass public. News
reports on national channels of the St. Petersburg march described
the protesters generally, not Kasparov specifically, as "all manner
of radicals from fascists to lefties."
Kasparov is arguing for political freedoms at a time when Putin’s
approval rating hovers around an atmospheric 80 percent. The economy,
fueled by high energy prices, is growing. A retail binge is under
way, especially in Moscow and even outside of it. He argues that
Putin’s control of all levers of power has obscured the fundamental
weaknesses in the system: the corruption, the extreme gap between
rich and poor, the declining standards of health care, education, of
living standards.
"At the end of the day," he said, referring to his campaign before
the 2008 election, "it will depend on whether people care.
"You can’t invent public protest. It either exists or it doesn’t
exist."