Kasparov, a bishop against King Putin

This piece corresponds to issue 128 of the weekly newsletter Maravillosa Jugada, from EL PAÍS, which is sent by email every Thursday to newsletter subscribers;

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Hello!

How are they?

I, concerned about the life of a very influential character in mine, Gari Kasparov, who appears on the list of “terrorists and extremists” designated by the Russian Government, to which the France-Presse news agency has had access.

The news does not surprise me - if you continue reading, you will see that there are solid reasons for it - but it does worry me because President Vladimir Putin does not follow the wise principle of Aaron Nimzovich, a great chess theorist: “The threat is worth more than its execution".

The king of the Kremlin thinks just the opposite.

Therefore, the bishops that attack him are in great danger.

And Bishop Kasparov has been attacking for a long time: he already did so before retiring from top competition, in 2005, to dedicate himself, as a priority task, to fighting against Putin, whom he accused even then of wanting to “checkmate Russian democracy.” ”.

I strongly recommend that you read, with the perspective that 18 years give, the political interview I did with him in Moscow in December 2005. And if you want to know more, Kasparov's book “

Winter

is coming.”

), published in 2015, shortly after Putin annexed Crimea, is, unfortunately, a tremendous display of clairvoyance: Kasparov was one of the very few analysts who then defined the Russian leader as what we now know him to be without a doubt: a terrible danger to the world.

We know it, but some, and especially the United States Republican Party, subjugated by Donald Trump, acts as if they do not know it when it freezes the aid promised to Ukraine.

After the invasion, Kasparov once again clearly warned that Putin must be stopped at any cost, even if this includes, for example, Europe abandoning its energy dependence on Russia and assuming the harsh consequences of the transitional period.

It is true that “any price” also includes the risk of nuclear war.

But, when asked about it, Kasparov remembers that this gorse button cannot be pressed by Putin alone;

At least two more people are needed, the Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff, to agree, knowing that this will lead to the immediate destruction of most of Russia and its inhabitants.

After the 2022 invasion, Kasparov recalled a paragraph from his book with special interest: “A war is always terrible, but Putin's dangerous turn towards ethnic-based imperialism cannot be ignored.

Those who say that the Ukraine conflict is a long way off, and see it as unlikely to lead to global instability, miss Putin's clear warning.

There is no reason to believe that his announced vision of a

Great Russia

will end in eastern Ukraine;

and there is every reason to believe that he will not.

Dictators only stop when they are stopped, and appeasing Putin with Ukraine will only whet his appetite for more conquests.”

It was written almost ten years ago, but it is fully current.

I remember well that trip to Moscow for the aforementioned interview.

Two things surprised me.

I knew - from my long and numerous previous trips to the USSR and Russia - that a considerable percentage of Western Russians border (or cross) the line of racism and xenophobia, and therefore I was very skeptical about the political pull that could have a brunette born in Azerbaijan to an Armenian mother and a Jewish father.

But at that time (now perhaps it is different) Kasparov was still a recently retired national sports idol, and his glory outweighed his ethnicity.

I could see this clearly when I accompanied him to several polling stations (the municipal elections were being held) and to meetings with other opposition leaders, who treated him with great respect.

His main problem as a professional politician was not the lack of popular support but the atrocious veto that he suffered in the most important Russian media.

The other surprise was how convinced Kasparov was then that his life was in serious danger, after suffering two minor attacks at political events.

During the almost three days that I spent with him, a team of bodyguards surrounded us (in three shifts every 24 hours) and we moved around in an armored car.

Therefore, my first question was if he had read Don

Quixote

, given that he was risking his life even though he could live very well and peacefully, both inside and outside Russia.

As almost always when trying to understand the character Kasparov, the key to that extreme nobility and coherence with his ideas is in his mother, Clara Shagenovna, one of the toughest people I have ever met, and in the phrase she told me when she met him. interviewed for EL PAÍS SEMANANAL in December 1985 (unfortunately, it is not available in the digital newspaper archive), a month and a half after his son became the youngest world champion in history: “Being number one

is

very hard and very difficult.

Therefore, living for the pleasure of living is something that neither my son nor I understand.”

Kasparov in Cannes, this week (STEPHANE MAHE / REUTERS) and Navalni in an image from 2019 (Sefa Karacan / ANADOLU AGENCY)

Around 2012, six years after those three days in Moscow, Kasparov received very reliable information that extremist groups close to Putin were thinking of assassinating one of the three most popular opponents: Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny or Kasparov.

In 2013, the former world champion made the most difficult decision of his life: to emigrate to New York, leaving his mother in Moscow.

When she died during the pandemic (December 2020), he did not attend the funeral due to great fear of what could happen to her: Nemtsov had been shot dead near the Kremlin in February 2015, and Navalny had been poisoned in August 2020.

He emigrated to New York - with a second residence in Croatia to obtain a European passport - but remained as active or more than before: president of the Human Rights Foundation, writer, columnist, lecturer, still an occasional chess player. From time to time, Kasparov is a very intense political activist on Twitter (now X), frequently interviewed by major American media outlets.

Navalny died in a Siberian prison on February 16 while his fellow opponent, described by the Kremlin as a “foreign agent” since 2022 and now as a “terrorist and extremist,” slept in New York.

When he woke up, he reacted by calling the death a “murder,” adding: “Putin failed to kill Navalny quickly and secretly by having him poisoned, and now he has murdered him slowly and publicly in prison.

“Navalny has been murdered for exposing Putin and his mafia as scoundrels and thieves.”

I want to believe that Kasparov will know how to protect himself, and that he will be less optimistic and confident than in 2014, when I accompanied him for six days on a private plane lent to him by American patron Rex Sinquefield.

He toured countries looking for votes as a candidate for president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) against Putin's man who was then in office, Kirsán Iliumyínov.

The first thing he did before each takeoff and after each landing was call his mother.

Convinced that he would win despite being well aware of the enormous corruption prevailing among the delegates, he lost 110-61.

But I am cautiously optimistic that he will take every precaution for something that happened two years ago.

A Spanish documentary producer proposed that he travel to Seville and meet his once fierce rival Anatoly Karpov, (today a deputy of the Russian Parliament for Putin's party, although opposed to the invasion of Ukraine) to relive the duel for the world title that Both competed at the Lope de Vega theater in 1987. Although money was not a problem and his memory of Seville is very fond, Kasparov flatly refused.

And it is not difficult to deduce why.

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