The Two Lives of Garry Kasparov

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The life of Garry Kasparov, who turns 60 on April 13, can be divided into two parts: the first is that of the chess champion, perhaps the greatest ever. The second is that of a political activist who, after retiring from chess, fought and still fights to oppose the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin in Russia.

The two lives, that of champion and that of dissident, are linked to each other, but at the same time very distinct: as world chess champion, Kasparov was honored first by the Soviet Union and then by Russia, where he obtained comfort and wealth. As a dissident, Kasparov was forced to flee the country – he now lives in Croatia – and was arrested more than once and feared for his life.

The sample
Garry Kasparov was born in Baku, in what is now Azerbaijan, on April 13, 1963. His father, Kim Weinstein, was Jewish, while his mother, Klara Kasparova, was Armenian. Kasparov was brilliant from an early age, and was included in the wide circuit of schools and academies dedicated to chess throughout the Soviet Union. At the time, chess was a matter of national pride and intellectual and sporting competition with the United States for the Soviet Union, and for this reason the best players were supported and subsidized by the state.

When she was seven, her father, Kim Weinstein, died suddenly. At 12, Kasparov was already a nationally known player, and on the advice of his chess masterformer world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, decided to adopt his mother’s surname: among other things because having a surname of Jewish origin like Weinstein could be an obstacle to his career in a still highly anti-Semitic country like Russia.

Kasparov became youth world champion in 1980, in 1981 he became all-Soviet national champion and in 1984 he played his first world championship final against Anatoly Karpov, the then champion, also Soviet. It was a historic final. The format was that the first player to win six games without counting draws would be declared champion, but for 48 games neither player was able to prevail over the other. The final (with various breaks between matches, of course) lasted six months, from September 1984 to February 1985. At the end, the two players were physically exhausted: since the start of the championship, Kasparov had lost more than 10 kilos.

At that point, in an unheard of decision never repeated afterwards, the president of the International Chess Federation Florencio Campomanes decided to interrupt the final without the title being awarded. In the end Karpov had won 5 games and Kasparov 3 (including the last two), with 40 draws.

However, the 1984 final was the moment Kasparov became world famous. Whereas Karpov was an excellent player but a master of defence, playing in an overall predictable style, Kasparov was a bold player, making bold attacks and playing chess in an exciting and impetuous manner. Among other things, the final was seen as a political allegory, also due to the personalities of the two challengers: Karpov was seen as a bureaucrat loyal to the Soviet regime, while Kasparov, younger, was presented by the media as a rebel and a innovator. He himself had on more than one occasion shown ill-concealed contempt for the decrepit Soviet ruling class of those years, even though he never carried out acts of open rebellion and would remain a member of the Soviet Communist Party until 1990.

In the 1985 world championship, Kasparov won in a much more agile way, and began one of the longest chess dominations in the history of the game: he remained champion until 2000, although at a certain point he and others broke away from the International Federation of chess, creating a new league. The rivalry with Karpov remained very strong for years.

Kasparov is now regarded as one of the best chess players who ever lived, if not the best of all.

However, he is also famous for another episode, when in 1996 he played a historic match against the supercomputer Deep Blue and became the first reigning world champion to be beaten in a tournament timed match. For Kasparov it was also a personal setback, and even today that match is considered a fundamental moment in the history of the development of artificial intelligence.

– Read also: Deep Blue 1 – 0 Garry Kasparov

The dissident
Kasparov lost his title as world champion in 2000, and although he continued to play chess professionally for some years, his interests gradually began to change. In those years, President Vladimir Putin was strengthening his power inside Russia, and was already showing all the elements of what would become his authoritarian regime. Kasparov, who was a first-rate public figure in Russia, known and admired throughout the world, began to convince himself that action was needed to counter Putin’s growing authoritarianism.

Kasparov officially retired from professional chess in 2005, and shortly thereafter announced the founding of the United Civil Front, an opposition party aimed at “preserving electoral democracy in Russia”. Around 2007 he began to organize and lead large anti-Putin demonstrations, known as the “Dissident Marches”, which were routinely repressed by the police. He was arrested a couple of times, and released soon after.

In 2008 he stood as a candidate in the presidential elections, but his electoral campaign was systematically boycotted by the Russian authorities, leading to failure. Masha Gessen, journalist and intellectual, followed Kasparov’s electoral campaign for a time and recounted in her book Putin. The faceless man how in every single city or town he went to to hold a rally the local authorities tried to hinder him. The halls reserved for speeches were closed shortly before Kasparov’s arrival due to some unspecified breakdown, or it was discovered at the last minute that a very noisy concert had been organized in front of the door, making it impossible to hold the rally. In some cases the police intervened to disperse his supporters. In others Kasparov and his associates were attacked, probably by people paid by the regime.

After a few very hard months, Kasparov renounced his candidacy and withdrew. The elections were won by Dmitri Medvedev, a close ally handpicked by Putin, who could not run again because he had already served two consecutive terms as president.

– Read also: How Putin became Putin

At the end of Medvedev’s four-year rule, Putin ran for the presidency again, and the discontent of the Russian population became uncontrollable at that point. At the end of 2011 and for a good part of 2012, huge protests against the regime were held throughout Russia: they were exceptionally well attended, especially in Moscow and other large cities, and showed that above all the city’s middle class was tired of Putin. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the white ribbon symbol of the protesters became practically a fashion in those months, and was worn by everyone on the street and in the workplace (Putin compared it to a condom).

Kasparov became one of the leaders of those demonstrations, which went on uninterrupted for months. Joining him, a whole new class of opposition leaders gained prominence, including Boris Nemtsov, who had been deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin, and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny.

Putin’s response, however, was harsh. The protests were violently repressed and hundreds of people were tried on very serious charges. The leaders of the opposition at the time suffered exceptional persecution. Navalny was imprisoned on false charges and in those years a long story of dissidence began, which led him to risk his life several times. Today he is imprisoned in Russia on very serious and politically motivated charges, e there are fears for his health. Boris Nemtsov would have remained in Russia for years to oppose, partly protected by his past institutional career, but he was killed in 2015 in Moscow, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin building, in what is believed to have been a political assassination, although the circumstances of his death have never been clarified.

Kasparov was arrested in 2012 and beaten by police while participating in a demonstration in favor of the opposition punk group Pussy Riot. The following year he fled Russia.

In the last 10 years Kasparov has continued to oppose him from exile, but in Russia his figure has gradually lost popularity. However, he remains one of the most important Russian intellectuals in the world, whose opinion is widely followed especially in the West. He has never completely abandoned the world of chess and participates sporadically in various tournaments. He has also been the teacher of various well-known champions, such as Hikaru Nakamura. Last year, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he wrote their Twitter:

The only way to end this is the fall of the Putin regime through the collapse of the Russian economy and defeat in Ukraine. Any other option means postponing until the next crisis.