Garry Kasparov: Playing Unsafe

“PEOPLE WHO WERE born behind the old Iron Curtain are often described as having paranoid tendencies. As a member of this group, I can only say we had a lot to be paranoid about,” wrote Garry Kasparov in the New York Times in June 2021. It was not paranoia but a realistic assessment of personal safety that led Kasparov to flee Russia in 2013 and he has been living mostly in New York City since, having acquired Croatian citizenship in 2014. Born Garik Kimovich Weinstein, half-Jewish, half-Armenian, in Baku, Azerbaijan, of all places, Kasparov had a lot to be paranoid about even when he wasn’t old enough to understand the nature of the regime and state that bound his family. That family eventually fled the anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan in the death throes of the Soviet Union, and it taught young Garry, named after Harry Truman whom his father, heart and soul untouched by communist propaganda, admired, “the wisdom of Soviet dissidents: do what you must!”

Doing what one must in Vladimir Putin’s Russia turned out to be no less dangerous than doing what one must in erstwhile Soviet Russia. Now he is on the list of “terrorists and extremists” where Russia’s financial monitoring agency, Rosfinmonitoring, has put him, a designation that first and foremost restricts his bank transactions. Kasparov’s reaction on X (formerly Twitter) began: “An honor that says more about Putin’s fascist regime than about me.” And he told Politico, “Today would be a good day to add Russia, Putin and all his cronies to the state sponsors of terror list.” Kasparov has been on the list of “foreign agents” since he spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Fortunately for Kasparov, he can say all that and more from the safety of distance, although the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, is known to have long arms and a disregard for basic decency, public safety and the rule of law to put the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which it succeeded, to shame. Alexei Navalny, with whom Kasparov had once marched on the streets, wasn’t so lucky. In a 2021 interview with the Guardian, Kasparov had clarified how he saw things: “Boris Nemtsov came back. Alexei Navalny came back. What’s the point of becoming a martyr? I can do much more by staying here.” Nemtsov was assassinated in 2015 in Moscow. Navalny perhaps knew he was returning to die. But Kasparov knew better. An ex-general of the KGB had warned long ago that the regime’s “targeted killings would one day reach Kasparov.” That was around the time he was jailed in 2007 and years before the 2012 anti-Putin protests, in which Kasparov played a leading role, and his subsequent flight. Maybe the enforcers of Yasenevo and Lubyanka won’t dare a repeat along the lines of Litvinenko or Skripal with such a high-profile target? Only the Kremlin knows.

Kasparov was 22 when he became world chess champion by winning his second match against Anatoly Karpov in 1985. Little can be said about Kasparov without mention of Karpov. They personified the two halves of the Soviet and post- Soviet Russian soul: the communist loyalist and vocal Putin supporter versus the child brought up on dissident wisdom, rebel and exile. Karpov played a cold, conservative, ruthless chess, where the only certainty seemed to be the foretold defeat of his opponent. Till Kasparov came along, playing a high-risk, kamikaze game while calculating many moves ahead that shocked fans and experts with its aggression and rewriting of the dos-and-don’ts—“part Mike Tyson, part Stephen Hawking”. In 1996, a decade after his break with FIDE, Kasparov played his first match (not his first against a computer) against IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue and won. The second match, in1997, was won by the computer, the first tournament-level defeat of a reigning world champion to machine. But Kasparov wasn’t done. In a legendary 1999 match

against future world champion Veselin Topalov, he teased the Bulgarian by breaching the 8th rank (Kasparov played black) with his king. Kasparov observed later: “He [Topalov] looked up. Perhaps there was a sign from above that Topalov would play a great game today. It takes two, you know, to do that.” Touché.

It would take two in Moscow too. And the Kremlin’s chessboard has only one player. “Putin’s interest, if we use a chess analogy, is to make sure that the game is not played by any rules, unless he chooses them,” Kasparov had said. He hasn’t given up but he isn’t playing chess with Putin.

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Sudeep Paul

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