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A Conversation with Garry Kasparov

World Policy Institute
For nearly three decades, since he first exploded onto the world scene, Garry Kasparov ruled the chessboard. A product of the Soviet system that elevated chess and its greatest champions to a pantheon reserved only for the most revered members of the elite, this grandmaster from the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan was at once worshipped and feared. Millions played this de facto national game in small, crowded, smoky rooms and vest-pocket parks across the Soviet Union. Those at the pinnacle of political power feared him as they watched, helplessly, the arrival of a popular outlander into their most hallowed precincts. At age 13, he won the Soviet junior championship, and within three years was rated number 15 in the world, becoming a grandmaster a year later.

It was in the final decade of the Soviet era that Kasparov rose to international fame. In January 1984, with just five years left until the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was the number 1 ranked chess player in the world. But ahead of him lay one last hurdle for the world title—Anatoly Karpov, darling of the nomenklatura, embraced by President Leonid Brezhnev and each of his successors as an example of the finest product of the Soviet system. To take on the Soviet chess establishment, Kasparov joined the Communist Party and just months later played Karpov in a marathon 48-game match, which concluded a year later with 24 more games, leaving Kasparov triumphant. By 1987, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Komsomol—the union of Soviet youth. But in November 1989, the wall came down, and the Soviet Union began its rapid disintegration. While Kasparov continued to play chess—brilliantly—he had begun to look beyond the chessboard to the new, open society that held so much promise, he hoped, for new beginnings.

Today, Kasparov has transcended his circumscribed beginnings and has sought to build a bridge from the game of chess to the transformation of the Russian government, a political game where the stakes are so much higher. A leader of Moscow’s liberal opposition, he is confident that the end is near for the system that for so long curbed his aspirations for a free Russia. And, even more broadly, there are profound lessons to be learned from the link between his game and the societies where its most accomplished players flourish, as he explained to World Policy Journal editor David A. Andelman and managing editor Christopher Shay.