For the past several months, United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov has been engulfed in a campaign to help his former chess rival, Anatoly Karpov, win the presidency of the World Chess Federation. The incumbent, multi-millionaire Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, has been criticized for shady business dealings, alleged responsibility for the murder of a journalist, his admiration for Saddam Hussein, and a conviction that he has been visited by aliens, among other things.

On Wednesday, Ilyumzhinov won re-election in a vote of 95 to 55. “Considering the rampant abuses that took place there,” as the Karpov campaign web site puts it, “…it is difficult, if not impossible, to consider this a legitimate election.”

In an interview with the British magazine Standpoint shortly before the election, Kasparov discusses the importance of the Karpov campaign, his insights into Russia’s nefarious ruling elite, and the United Civil Front’s ongoing efforts to make the country truly democratic.

Can Kasparov Checkmate Putin?
By Anna Aslanyan
Standpoint Magazine
October 2010

Garry Kasparov grew up knowing that coming second was not good enough. This will to win was one of the crucial factors behind the 22-year-old Soviet chess player becoming the youngest-ever World Chess Champion in 1985. He retained his title for 15 years. The ambitious, outspoken youth was seen by the West as the new face of Russian chess — and, more importantly, of the country that was ready for the first time in 70 years to say good-bye to communism and start moving towards democracy. The Cold War, both on and off the chessboard, was over. Kasparov and his fellow players no longer had to be part of it and could concentrate on the game in which they excelled.

Or so it seemed in the heady days when Gorbachev’s reforms awoke a sense of elation in many. That was not to last long. Immediately after retiring from professional chess, Kasparov returned to action — this time on a political battleground. He formed the United Civil Front, a pro-democracy movement, and took an active part in creating The Other Russia, an anti-Putin coalition. After Kasparov’s plans to stand as a candidate for the 2008 Russian presidential race were disrupted — no one was willing to rent him a hall large enough to hold his supporters so he wasn’t allowed to be a candidate — he remained the leader of the UCF, organising an online “Putin must go” campaign.

However, it was not in his capacity as a political opposition leader that Kasparov visited Britain in September. He came to support his former rival, Anatoly Karpov, from whom he wrested the World Champion title a quarter of a century ago. It was the illegal arrest of Kasparov at a Moscow demonstration in 2007 that brought the two old foes back together: Karpov tried to visit his former rival in prison to lend Kasparov what support he could.

I meet Kasparov after the press conference held in London last month to promote Karpov’s campaign for the FIDE (World Chess Federation) presidency. The incumbent, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, has just lost his main political asset — the presidency of the southern Russian republic of Kalmykia. When one of the journalists talks about it as “resignation”, Kasparov is quick to correct him: “People don’t resign in Russia. He was kicked out.”

The eccentric Ilyumzhinov, who claims to have been abducted by aliens at one point, has led FIDE since 1993. During his reign, chess lost a lot of its glamour. Indeed, the championships are now held in places that, to quote Kasparov, “you need to be a very good student of geography to find on the map.” Desperate to be re-elected, Ilyumzhinov made exorbitant promises to national chess federations, of the type he would have to be “at least Russian president to fulfil”, as Karpov noted in his speech at the conference. There are, however, indications that Ilyumzhinov’s popularity is fading, both in Russia and worldwide.

When the event ends, Kasparov is torn between signing books, being photographed and giving advice to chess players. I start our conversation by apologising for returning to Russian politics now that his mind is busy with FIDE and related problems. “Not busy,” he interrupts, “I am absolutely immersed in this. We have to win.” However, he is soon talking about issues with which he has been out of touch for the last four months: his comrades-in-arms supported his decision to take a sabbatical. As for his enemies: “They are probably grateful to Karpov — he managed to take me out of the game for a while, after all.”

Vladimir Putin does not rule out the possibility of staying in power for another decade or longer. What does Kasparov think of Putin’s bravado? “Putin didn’t say anything new. It was probably the form his statement took that shocked, but the content was predictable all along. It became more or less clear, I think, in the middle of his second presidential term that he would never leave. You know the expression, ‘galley slave’ — I believe there is a certain Freudian subtext to it in Putin’s case. He is doomed to stay — he has nowhere else to go. He should have thought about this much earlier, but even if he ever was trying to solve this problem, to find an escape route, he failed.”

Parallels between the current regime in Russia and those of Stalin and Mao have been drawn frequently enough, but Kasparov is more subtle. “Putin has all the traits of a dictator, but he is different from that lot — he is, in essence, an oligarch. I’ve said before that what he really wants is to rule like Stalin while living like [Chelsea FC owner Roman] Abramovich. Power for him is the means, not the end.” It was the realisation that Putin, were he to become president for a third time in 2012, could potentially stay until 2024 that made people concerned. Kasparov would not ascribe too much significance to this date, insisting that the prime minister’s recent statement naturally follows from all he has said and done before. “That he was instrumental in making [the current President Dmitry] Medvedev his heir was quite logical, too — things like that have happened before. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a clever move. Sometimes a successor, instead of toeing the party line, becomes a hindrance. Medvedev has never created any problems for Putin, who in this instance showed himself a fine psychologist.”

Remembering why he failed to stand last time, Kasparov believes this to be another example of people being afraid of the authorities. He cannot see things changing dramatically in the near future. When asked if he is planning an attempt to participate in the next election, he replies: “What exactly do you call the next election? To me, it’s just a date, 2012 or some other, doesn’t matter, which is set by them and has nothing to do with our activity. It should be clear to everyone by now that there is no democracy in Russia. You don’t need to prove this point further by trying — and inevitably failing — to register as a candidate. Only those who are on the regime’s side — and I mean, totally, without a shadow of a doubt — will be allowed to do so. To take part in this farce would mean to accept their rules, to surrender, to lie down and think of Russia, so to speak — and we are not going to do that.” This must be hard for a natural-born winner to accept. However, Kasparov’s mood is defiant, not defeatist.

He stresses that his politics have nothing to do with his personal ambitions, and that he got involved in a business where you cannot win driven solely by the motto: “Do what you must, come what may.” Yet it takes a lot of courage to embark on something as uncertain and unpromising. “Yes, I was prepared for uncertainty. Then again, how do you define a victory here? A defeat? This is a different game played by very different rules and you have to take it as it is. I’ve always said to my colleagues: ‘We are in for a marathon race, which can become a 100-metres sprint at any moment. The starting signal will be given by someone else and we should be ready for it.’ So it’s difficult to talk about winning and losing given the nature of the game. However, I don’t consider our efforts to be a failure. The fact is that most of the ideas I came up with back in 2005 are still relevant, perhaps more than ever, in Russian politics. If you look at our programme published in 2006, it’s all in there. We used to be criticised by other opposition forces for being too unrealistic, but now those concepts have become part of the mainstream.”

Characteristically, Kasparov is reluctant to call his activity straightforward politics. The UCF is part political party, part human rights organisation and part social movement. “We try to use the existing social landscape in order to promote democracy as the only way forward. Our approach is to take a particular problem — for instance, that of the Khimki Forest — and work with it.” He is referring to the ongoing battle to save a park in a Moscow suburb, a legally protected eco-system that will be wiped out by the construction of the new Moscow-St Petersburg motorway.

“Our main and, for now, only activity should be propaganda. We need to demonstrate to the people of Russia that changes are needed. A moment must come — it would probably require a backlash of some kind — when the country is ready to embrace democratic ways.” Kasparov goes back to the question of settling for a successful career as a trainer and an entrepreneur, one of his interests being chess computer programs, and adds: “We all had high hopes in the early 1990s. Then it became obvious pretty soon that you couldn’t just step aside. You had to fight or leave the country. I chose to fight — and have been doing what I can ever since.”

Leaving the country would have been easy for someone like Kasparov. He has been repeatedly criticised by Russian nationalists for acquiring American citizenship — rumours he dismisses as disinformation propagated by Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth organisation that is often compared to the Soviet-era Konsomol or even the Hitler Youth. “Neither I nor my wife has an American passport. My daughter, the youngest, does — she was born in the States. But I never applied for one. Those thugs thought they could say anything about me, but when the case came to court their only excuse was that they meant another person, an American citizen whose name also happens to be Kasparov.”

Returning to the forthcoming FIDE elections, we talk about Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has repeatedly been accused of accumulating an enormous fortune by unscrupulous means, and his statement that “a wealthy president is the best safeguard against corruption in the country”. Kasparov points out that the oligarchs who are running Russia these days made their money after they came to power: “This is what makes the whole difference. Russia can only serve as a counter-example in these speculations since it has no history of wealth going back a couple of centuries. On the other hand, I would have nothing against a leader who was well-off before, and not as a result of, starting a political career. Such wealthy people might be immune to corruption — at least, I’d like to hope so. At the same time, the temptation may be too strong even for them. The way I see it, corruption is about your personal attitude. For me, it’s simply unspeakable to steal, to bribe or take bribes — but then again, I am relatively poor compared to the ruling classes.”

In a country where at least 15 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, corruption is a serious problem. Although not suggesting it can be resolved immediately, Kasparov has a vision of future changes. “You have to explain to people that their financial troubles result from the lack of basic freedoms. Until this is understood, democracy will remain impossible. Sure, TV is a powerful weapon,” he continues, then quips with a smile, “of mass destruction. But at the end of the day, as domestic appliances go, a fridge is more vital.”

The move came a week after the Federation nominated chess grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, backed by opposition leader and longtime chess rival Garry Kasparov, as a candidate for the presidency of the World Chess Federation. The incumbent, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is the multi-millionaire president of Russia’s autonomous Republic of Kalmykia. Among other things, Ilyumzhinov is famous for declaring an “economic dictatorship” and claiming to have been visited by aliens.

What exactly the stakes are in this unlikely scandal is the topic explored in this column written for Grani.ru by Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.

The column is also available in Spanish.

Ilyumzhinov’s Game – For the Benefit of the Elites
By Stanislav Belkovsky
May 24, 2010
Grani.ru

Another striking move was made the other day in the battle for the presidency of the World Chess Federation [FIDE]. By order of Arkady Dvorkovich, an aide to the president of the Russian Federation and chairman of the Supervisory Council of the Russian Chess Federation (RCF), several men in black seized the legendary Central Chess Club on Gogolevsky Bulvar and sealed off the office of RCF Chairman Alexander Bakh and, of course, the accounting office. Such is the way that all professionals and fans that support the candidacy of 12th World Champion Anatoly Karpov for the post as the head of FIDE were given a clear signal: you can meddle about, bustle around, do whatever you want – but we (that is, Dvorkovich & Co.) will never, under any circumstances, ever give you FIDE.

What happened was unsurprising. It fits entirely into the theory and practice of contemporary Russian monetocracy (monetary power is absolute). What’s surprising in this story is something else: that the progressive community of the Russian Federation began, for some reason, to sob like a whale over the “modernizing liberal” Arkady Dvorkovich, and became terribly worried about the possibility that the presidential aide could lose his untarnished reputation. Which, obviously, is no less of a national asset than all of our chess world champions put together.

In connection with that, I want to call for a vote on the following question: on what basis was it concluded that Dvorkovich, the aide mentioned here, is a “modernizing liberal,” and not a corrupt crook, perfectly typical for the contemporary power machine of the Russian Federation? What has this civil servant done in his career that’s been modern or liberal?

By all appearances, the progressive community once counted Mr. Dvorkovich as one of their own, given his Jewish surname, nice haircut, and expensive cuff links (you would think Igor Sechin had more expensive cuff links). Following these artificially chosen criteria further, we must come to the conclusion that there are only modernizing liberals in the government of the Russian Federation. Everyone else has left. And that means that the progressive community has been victorious, although this is not yet very noticeable.

Yes, a couple of years ago, when the Medvedev Thaw had only just begun, Arkady Dvorkovich made one radically liberal pronouncement: he promised to slash the VAT; and if the bureaucracy was going to resist, then he would swap out the entire bureaucracy for a chess-playing grandmother. But here, out of our impassible taiga, the terrible roar of Finance Minister Kudrin was heard, and not once has any bleating by aides about the VAT been repeated ever since.

In general, in order not to focus on cuff links, let’s analyze an abstract civil servant and figure out what exactly his concrete motivation is.

See here, ladies and gentlemen, respected progressive community. If some civil servant arranges for a personal living room named after him in the building of a commercial bank, and his brother has a job as an officer for public relations or government relations in the country’s most scandalous construction company, then believe me, he has long ago defined the terms of his reputation. He is actually publicly announcing to all interested parties: yes, I am a thief, I am corrupt, and I’m proud of it. Because the laws of the monetocracy are the social morals of the current Russian Federation, I would say. In the Euro-Atlantic world, such a bureaucrat would be thrown out of the civil service and blacklisted. But we aren’t in the Euro-Atlantic world.

Well, and if a civil servant makes such a fuss over such internationally renowned businessmen as Ziyavudin Magomedov (one step away from the Russian Chess Federation presidency) and David Kaplan (FIDE Director for Development and FIDE representative in Moscow) – what does this say? Or do you not know what kind of businessmen these are? No, I do not wish to dwell in detail on the reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theater, which their company, Inteks, is carrying out in full swing. Or even on the third oil terminal in the port in Primorsk, although parts of that are interesting. Remember all the financial institutions like Diamant, VIP-Bank, etc.? That they were closed for money laundering? And the murder of Andrei Kozlov, the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, remember? It’s true that a certain Alexei Frenkel took the rap for everything. He, apparently, didn’t have the chess know-how to jump off the board in time.

If an abstract civil servant recklessly promotes the interests of such a business, then already nothing frightens him. And there’s no need to cry on his Gucci vest. Save your tears.

Still, something sometimes occurs to progressive society so that at the last moment, fearing a total loss of face and FIDE’s reputation, all these little kids, including Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, stop. And they don’t bring the matter to the finish line. And that means that Anatoly Karpov will then become president of the World Chess Federation.

No. The little kids aren’t going to stop. FIDE’s reputation interests them somewhat, but only to the extent to which they control the Federation and all of its financial commodity flows. And they’ll do anything to keep that control. The seizure of the Central Chess Club – that’s only the beginning.

Next they’ll do everything that has become customary. They’ll convene some kind of emergency session of the RCF that will wipe out any of Karpov’s followers from any and all of their posts. They’ll draw up court rulings that confirm that the candidate for the FIDE presidency from Russia can only be a man with the surname starting with the letter I. Foreign participants of the FIDE Congress who are coming to Khanty-Mansiysk to vote for Karpov will not be granted entry visas. They’ll post a video on the Internet showing Karpov copulating with a rook. Finally, under some pretense, they will expel foreign federations from FIDE that cry out the word “Karpov” too persistently. There are many ways. Now they’ll put out yet another installment – we’ll see the new results. By the way, according to ancient folklore: if former television host Solovyov begins to piss on Karpov on his blog, it means that the installment is underway.

You ask: and why are these kids so hung up in general on this FIDE that they’re ready for the sake of their victory to bring down the entire edifice of world chess? For what? In the conditions of a monetocracy there is but one response: dough. Lots of dough. They have extensive plans to reform and commercialize chess. For example, it has already been announced that the FIDE headquarters will be moved to Moscow after Ilyumzhinov’s reelection. What does this mean? It means that the little kids are going to get money from the government or from banks close to the government (VEB, VTB, whoever else) to construct the headquarters. I think it’ll be around $300 million. They don’t give out more for such a plan, and less would be pointless. How many mouths there are to feed! Then, relying on the unprecedented experience accumulated in the process of reconstructing the Bolshoi Theater, $200 million (of the $300) will be immediately sawed off. More accurately, it has already been sawed off. Now. Today. In advance. And what – as if they’d allow Karpov to come and break up their entire saw-happy joyride?

In general, they have very extensive plans to work on chess. Just recently, David Kaplan (that same FIDE director for development and FIDE representative in Moscow) gave an interview to a popular Moscow newspaper. The person who did the interview – who seems to be a grandmaster – characterized him as a “mathematician.” Since I’m not such a well-known mathematician like Kaplan, I’m afraid of distorting the trajectory of scientific thought here, and am forced to bring in a piece of the interview. Here it is.

Kaplan: This is what my know-how consists of. I thought up the so-called “principle of squares.” I’ll clarify what that is. The worst thing in chess is when you are constantly beaten and you lose all interest in the game. Why, for example, is poker so popular right now? Because any player always has the chance to stand out. This means that chess players need to join into groups where all the players who meet have equal chances amongst themselves. I call such groups squares. And if a million dollars in prize money awaits the winner of the “square,” then young people will give up absolutely everything.

Interviewer: But who is going to give them this million?

Kaplan: I am personally ready to invest 32 million dollars in this venture. And I’ll find more sponsors for a billion. Two large banks have already agreed to allocate money for this project. Moreover, chess players will be attracted by stars of a global proportion. We already have 300 famous people on our list, including, for example, Madonna… The main task is to bring about the players’ interest. It’s important that they spent time every day on the virtual chessboard, playing in their square (there are 64 overall), even if for just a few minutes – a couple of games in a blitz. And in a year they would have played a thousand games overall. There are altogether 200 thousand fans the world over who routinely play on the Internet. And to earn a million while playing with those equal to yourself you’ll find more. So for money, a minimum of 50 million people will come. Let’s think about this further. How much is a portal for that number of visitors worth? A billion dollars! There’s the trick, the stunt, an effective business idea… Believe me, we’re standing on the brink of a chess revolution.

It is entirely believable that a gigantic supercomputer, perfectly and of course absolutely necessary to manage a portal for $1 billion, would be set up in the Skolkovo Innograd [Russia’s aspiration to recreate Silicon Valley near Moscow -ed]. And they’ll spend another, say, $500 million from the Russian budget on it. It would be, one could say, entirely logical.

But Ziyavudin Magomedov, who in the case of Ilyumzhinov’s reelection will probably become head of the RCF, has announced that, in the very near future, a series of chess tournaments will be held directly on the borders of conflicted countries (Azerbaijan/Armenia, North Korea/South Korea, etc.). This is a very rich topic. It wouldn’t be bad, either, to send a group of leading chess players (headed by Karpov and Kasparov, naturally) to the Gulf of Aden to hold a chess match with the Somali pirates. The promotion for chess will be ballistic. FIDE and its sponsors will split the ransom fifty-fifty. There’s the trick, the stunt, an effective business idea.

We also mustn’t forget that FIDE and the general structures of chess are almost ideally suited for money laundering in general and bribery in particular. So you’d like for your person to have, for example, a big post in whatever Ministry of Economic Development, the VEB or there in the Skolkovo Innograd – sponsor a chess tournament on the border between Sudan and Zimbabwe. And there’s no corruption!

There is no doubt that the little kids are going to think up a whole lot more to raise the level of income for chess. Why not, for example, rent out the names of chess pieces? For example, for $150 million a year the king could be named “Oleg Deripaska,” and for $200 million a year, the queen could be “Elena Baturina.” “The grandmaster has sacrificed Baturina and has bravely advanced on Deripaska.” The sort of new income that would flow right away! To economize, we could modernize speed chess. The new rules are extremely simple: two chess players meet – whoever has more money before the beginning of the game is the one who wins. Not to mention the knockout system, for which there are always blackguards who know no pity.

When Anatoly Karpov said that the polemic in the FIDE Congress in Khanty-Mansiysk could turn out to be unsafe for human life, he wasn’t at all mistaken. For the little kids, money means a great deal more than life (someone else’s, naturally).

Should the understanding be that the little kids are afraid of nothing in general? No, they’re afraid – of the FBI in the United States, of the seizure of foreign assets, and of visa problems in Euro-Atlantic countries. This is what we need to work on.

In sum, this is how we’ll live to see chess in the 21st Century.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.