Garry Kasparov's Endgame

In the second excerpt from his new book, How Life Imitates Chess, the former chess champion talks about how he hopes to change the political situation in Russia

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Former chess champion Garry Kasparov released his latest book this month, at the same time he formally entered the race to become President of Russia. How Life Imitates Chess is Kasparov's effort to examine how the lessons from his chess career can be applied to the worlds of business and politics. As such, it's something of a primer on his political strategy in Russia, where his outspoken criticism of Vladimir Putin and his own presidential aspirations are considered far-fetched at best and dangerous at worst. In this, the second of two excerpts from the book, Kasparov addresses directly how he hopes to change the political situation in Russia.

At the end of 2006, as this book was headed to the printer in several countries, the internal political chaos in Russia spilled out into the world's headlines. A British national, KGB agent defector, and harsh critic of the Kremlin, Alexander Litvinenko, was assassinated with the rare radioactive substance polonium 210. The investigation into his death currently spans at least three countries.

Litvinenko's murder came on the heels of the Moscow killing of the well-known investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya—on Russian president Vladimir Putin's birthday, no less. The killings have turned a spotlight on what the West had assumed was the autocratic but stable Putin regime. Suddenly the foreign media is realizing what we in the Russian opposition have been saying for years—the Kremlin is ever closer to dictatorship than democracy and yet is not stable at all.

The Best Way to Learn is To Teach

This interest has led to a corresponding increase in attention to my own role in the opposition movement and to questions about how my former career as a chess champion has aided my mission. With that in mind, my publisher wondered if it would be appropriate to include some last-minute comments about how I have applied the lessons presented in this book to my political fight in Russia.

But this epilogue is more than a topical convenience. While writing this book and preparing my business lectures, I have discovered a great deal about synthesizing these lessons and using them in practice. It is quite accurate to say that I have been learning from my own book, confirming the old adage that the best way to learn a topic is to teach it. The most important, and most difficult, element on my new political agenda was developing a strategy that would pump life into the anti-Putin forces. It was like sitting down to a chess game already in progress and discovering my side was close to checkmate in every variation.

I could immediately draw a parallel to my first world championship match, the 1984–85 marathon against Anatoly Karpov. There I spent months a step away from total disaster, a situation that required an entirely new strategy, one based more on survival than triumph. I did it; I survived to fight another day, and the next time we met I was victorious.

Sorting Out Allies From Enemies

The anti-Kremlin forces were in a similarly dire state in 2004. Unfortunately, in this game our opponents change the rules regularly and always to their advantage. But even in this unpredictable and unfair contest a good strategy gives us a fighting chance. I started with the fundamentals of planning: a thorough evaluation of the position and the determination of its most vital elements. Finding the outlines of the big picture came first. It was necessary to sort out allies from enemies, an easy enough task in the black-and-white world of the chessboard but far more complex in the gray realm of politics. Two things eventually became clear to me. First, that the continued existence of organized opposition to Putin's crackdown was in no way guaranteed. We needed to dig in to survive or risk being pushed completely off the board. There is no losing with grace or reaching a peaceful accord with such an opponent. When facing an authoritarian regime bent on total control, every day you endure sends out a message of hope: "We're still here." With no access to television and other state-controlled media, it was essential for us to find other ways to get out those vital words.