Man in the News: Garry Kasparov

Man in the News: Garry Kasparov
By Charles Clover
Published: September 25 2009 23:15 Last updated: September 25 2009 23:15
Financial Times

Hunched over a chess table, chin wedged into his knuckles, eyes fixed in concentration, a familiar figure returned to Russia’s television screens this week. He had been little seen of late: after 2005, Garry Kasparov, who retired from chess to become the face of political opposition to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, all but disappeared from the airwaves.

Yet as Mr Kasparov played a mini-championship in Spain marking the 25th anniversary of his five-month “marathon match” against Anatoly Karpov – a man he describes on his blog as his “eternal opponent” – an informal Kremlin ban appeared to lift. “We are pleasantly surprised that they show his face at all,” says Marina Litvinovich, Mr Kasparov’s spokesperson, though she notes that the broadcasts “show him exclusively as a chess player, not as a political figure.”

Since his retirement, Mr Kasparov has been a rabble-rousing leader of the “Other Russia” opposition movement, a fixture at marches that usually feature more grey-camouflaged special forces troops than demonstrators. He has been beaten, thrown in jail, and denounced publicly as a traitor and an American-backed puppet by the Russian media. His foray into politics, he reckons, has been a success, but not exactly what he bargained for.

In many ways, 2005 was precisely the wrong time to gain traction as a democrat in Russia. Most people were tired of western-style liberalism following the economic collapse of the Yeltsin years and Mr Putin was immensely popular. “He [Kasparov] really thought that his name and his reputation and abilities would allow him to create this big, broad political front. It didn’t really work out. It’s not because he wasn’t capable. It’s just that the people were passive,” says Lev Ponomarev, a democratic activist who has known Mr Kasparov for two decades.

Now 46 years old, Mr Kasparov grew up in Baku, Azerbeijan, the son of an Armenian mother and a Jewish father. At just 10 he started at the Mikhail Botvinnik chess school in Moscow, where Mr Karpov had earlier studied, and rocketed up the World Chess Federation Rankings through his teens. Even as a young man, Mr Kasparov displayed an outsider’s determination to overturn the chess establishment. “You could already see he was a dissident”, says Mr Ponomarev.

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