Kasparov

Kasparov had been one of the nation’s brightest lights for decades. In 1985, at 22, he became the youngest winner in the history of the world chess championship. He was suave and cocky, a virtuoso, and he captivated the chess-mad U.S.S.R., where every world champion became a household name. He is widely considered the greatest player ever. Twelve years would pass, and the Soviet Union would fall, before he lost his first match, and even then he remained ranked No. 1 until his 2005 retirement, when he abandoned chess to become a political activist.

Russian president Vladimir Putin had been running the country for only five years, but already Kasparov saw the nation hurtling backward. Kasparov and his compatriots called for fair elections; instead Russia held votes that were presumed to have been rigged. The more Putin clamped down—silencing dissent, eliminating enemies—the more urgent Kasparov’s mission became. In 2007, he was jailed for protesting and then denied the opportunity to run for president. (Putin’s comment on the arrest: “Why did Mr. Kasparov, when arrested, speak out in English rather than Russian?”) Then, in 2012, Kasparov was arrested and detained while protesting the imprisonment of the dissident feminist punk band Pussy Riot. A Russian court acquitted him soon after on the charges that he bit an officer. But still the Investigative Committee, Russia’s equivalent of the FBI, wanted to have a chat.

“They ‘invited’ me,” Kasparov says, “to be questioned as a witness in one of the many political cases they were investigating.” For guidance he called his friend Boris Nemtsov, another opposition leader. Nemtsov told him, “Garry, you enter the building as a witness, and if you exit the building, it’s as a suspect. Stay away.”

Kasparov by then was spending most of his time in New York City. Now, more than four years later, he has yet to return to Russia. He lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with his wife, Daria, and their daughter, Aida, 11, and son, Nikolas, 2. (He has another daughter and son from two prior marriages.) He crisscrosses the U.S. and Europe as chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, which promotes democracy around the world.

As for Nemtsov? He was gunned down in Moscow in 2015, hours after he spoke in support of a protest against Russia’s war in Ukraine. “I wish Boris had followed his own advice,” Kasparov says.

According to Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen leader in exile in Great Britain, Putin and Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov resolved after protests in 2012 to punish four major opposition leaders: Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov would be jailed, and Nemtsov and Kasparov would be killed. Kasparov notes that indeed Navalny and Udaltsov were sentenced to prison terms, and Nemtsov was killed—“so maybe it’s a real story.”

Kasparov has even been getting an unusual question at book signings recently: Why aren’t you dead? To these queries he replies that at this point, his death would only negligibly burnish Putin’s strongman credentials; he has already made his point.

As the grandmaster sees it, Putin reached a point in early 2014 where he had run out of moves domestically. “You need confrontations with the free world to stay in power [in Russia],” says Kasparov. So Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Although the new territory bolstered his neo-Soviet reclamation project, retaliatory sanctions from the West manacled the Russian economy. (A coincidental collapse in the price of crude oil had already jeopardized Putin’s agenda.) But Putin, pressured to retreat, chose instead to counterattack. He increased Russian involvement in Syria, casting his country as the courageous enemy of ISIS.

The menace Putin posed troubled Kasparov enough for him to publish a book, Winter Is Coming, his first nonchess title, in 2015. In it he likened Putin’s past decade to Hitler’s 1930s, and he fingered Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Gerhard Schröder as latter-day Neville Chamberlains.

As with most every Hitler comparison, it struck some as hyperbolic and alarmist. Well, it did back then. “I tried to tell people that winter was coming, and they didn’t want to hear it,” Kasparov says. “Now people all want me to tell them to be afraid.”

Kasparov was reminded recently of his 2015 book-tour appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO talk show. Maher told Kasparov to wake him up when Putin invades Poland. Kasparov says it took all he had not to jump up and down on his chair. “Well,” Kasparov says now, “it seems as though he skipped over Poland and went straight to Wisconsin.”

Do you really want to know what happened with the Russian meddling in U.S. affairs?

Kasparov is a man of many theories—that’s all they are, theories—but they’re shaped by years of tussling with Putin, and untainted by any great yearning for President Hillary Clinton. (Kasparov’s American political hero is Ronald Reagan, thank you very much.)

“In Putin’s eyes, Trump was the perfect counterpart,” he says. “The way Trump views the world is all about doing business, about deals.” Kasparov figures Putin aspired to approach Trump with the deal of all deals: “NATO, the EU, who gives a damn? Let’s redesign the map; you’re FDR, I’m Stalin. Maybe we bring in Angela Merkel, or the president of China—we’ll be the new Big Three. Equals! Who cares about Estonia, Latvia, Syria? We’ll play the game. Mmm, for Trump, that’s music to his ears!”

How would such a deal get done? Who would even be able to put it in front of the president, knowing that it contravened American doctrine and would not make it through the ranks of career foreign service officers at the State Department?

That, Kasparov says, is where Michael Flynn came in: “I’ve been saying from Day One that he was compromised.” Former acting attorney general Sally Yates says she told the White House in January that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Kasparov says Putin must have figured Flynn would quietly advance Kremlin interests.

With Flynn in control of the national-security apparatus and in back-channel communications with Russia, and with Rex Tillerson, a Russia-friendly dealmaker, atop a threadbare State Department (nearly 200 posts stood empty as of late April), all the pieces had fallen into place. Putin had influenced the U.S. election and now he could do the same to U.S. foreign policy.

But in early February, top-level government sources leaked to The Washington Post that Flynn had discussed with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak the possibility of lifting sanctions Obama had placed on Russia, and then had lied about it to FBI agents. Four days later, Flynn was fired.

Politicians and commentators have long treasured chess as a metaphor for diplomacy. (Even Trump: “You can’t terminate [multilateral pacts]—there’s too many people, you go crazy. It’s like you have to be a grand chessmaster. And we don’t have any of them.”) It’s not a bad metaphor, as metaphors go: Diplomacy, like chess, offers multitudinous but not limitless options for moves and countermoves, and rewards careful evaluation of your position and your opponent’s.

When Kasparov rose to prominence, though, chess was not just a geopolitical metaphor but a vehicle for geopolitics itself. The game has always been thought of as a relatively pure measure of intellect, and the presence of a Soviet atop the world rankings signaled to the empire’s subjects, no matter how poor and starving they may have been, that they possessed some sort of superiority.

An unbroken run of Soviets had held the world championship from Stalin’s tenure to Brezhnev’s. Then came Bobby Fischer. A decade before he beat then champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972, a 19-year-old Fischer had alleged in Sports Illustrated that the Soviets had fixed international tournaments and conspired to deny him a shot at the world title for the sake of propaganda. (They almost certainly had.) But he eventually did conquer Spassky.

Anatoly Karpov claimed the title in 1975, when Fischer’s mania prevented him from defending it. And Karpov still held it in 1984, when Kasparov came calling, determined to remake the image of the Soviet chess superstar as the U.S.S.R. itself was loosening up. Karpov was an ethnic Russian and a Communist Party darling; Kasparov was, in his words, “a half-Armenian, half-Jewish menace to this good Russian boy.” His attacking style also contrasted with his predecessors’.

Their first match took five months—and never ended. Karpov led five games to three (there had been 40 draws) when chess authorities called it off, ostensibly to protect the health of the players. (Kasparov contended that Soviet powers had prevailed upon the chess federation to suspend it before Karpov blew the lead.) The 1985 rematch in Moscow, contested under modified rules to prevent another marathon, saw Kasparov win 13–11. Kasparov won again in ’86, and drew in ’87, retaining his title.

Kasparov characterized the matches then, in SI, as a “battle between democracy and totalitarianism.” In Playboy, in 1989, he complained about the U.S.S.R.’s sexual repression, its government and “the Soviet chess mafia.” He threw his support behind the incipient pro-democracy, pro-capitalism movement.