“Today Ukraine, tomorrow Poland”. How the world did not listen to Kasparov

It was March 2007. , a former world champion, who had retired almost exactly two years earlier, took a pen and notebook and presented a diagram of the protesters’ march through. Like a general planning a battle or a chess player analyzing a winning combination, he sketched the Uprising Square and showed where the police had gathered to block the street leading to the governor’s office.

– Tactical error. Typical of this government – explained Kasparov why only a few policemen guarded Nevsky Prospect, which had been invaded by a crowd of several thousand demonstrators. Of course, he was also among the protesters against the governments.

“Not the Kremlin’s autocracy!”, “Putin is the most dangerous criminal”, “Down with Putin”, “We want a different Russia!”, “Free elections, not imitations” – these are just some of the slogans raised by the demonstrators.

That demonstration lasted two hours and ended in clashes with the police. Also with the detentions of several opposition leaders. Kasparov escaped, but was arrested a month later – in Moscow, where there were much fewer protesters, and the military was also involved in their dispersal – truncheons, tear gas and pre-prepared military and militia trucks were in motion.

Kasparov was interrogated at a police station in Moscow for several hours, then stood trial. For shouting anti-government slogans, he was fined 1,000 rubles (then around 29 euros). He appealed the proceedings to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which agreed with him. He justified the ruling that the Russian authorities had violated the freedom of assembly and ordered them to pay for moral damages 10,000 zlotys each. euro to Kasparov and two other opponents, and the other six – 4 thousand each. euro.

“Today Ukraine, tomorrow the troops will come to you”

Kasparov was not the only critic of Putin at the time, but perhaps he was the most prominent. And he brought to opposition politics – as the New York Times wrote – the same energy and aggression that characterized his chess. He attacked Putin and the Kremlin with a language rarely used in Russia. – This regime is losing touch with the real world. It is a deadly combination of money, power, blood and impunity, Kasparov said years ago.

And it also says that today when. – Putin prepared this invasion in front of the eyes of the whole world. He is at war with the free world. This is the third world war and it is already underway. It is not yet a hot war between NATO and Putin, but we are already facing an existential threat to our civilization, warned 59-year-old Kasparov a few days ago in. – For Putin, Ukraine is the same as Poland is for Stalin. It does not recognize Ukraine as a state. It will not stop until it is destroyed as a sovereign country and taken over by the Russians. There is no negotiation here. Today Ukraine, tomorrow the troops will come to you – he explained.

What do we really believe?

Kasparov for Putin has always been someone from the outside. Not a Russian, but a half-Jew and half-Armenian born in Baku, the capital of predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan, from where Kasparov moved to Moscow in 1990, when tensions between Armenians and Azeris intensified.

“Growing up in Baku, I watched the all-powerful Soviet state lie to us in the face, every morning in the newspaper and every evening on the news. When I started climbing the Olimp chess board, I realized that every sports official, but also a supporter or a neighbor, was a potential informant of the authorities. That if he sees disobedience in you, it could result in the loss of your job, freedom or even life – this is also how Kasparov recalled the beginning of his chess career. He grew up as an athlete, but not in isolation from everyday life, from politics.

Even then, he had an analytical mind that went far beyond the board. He looked for problems in the functioning of the state in the society itself. The fact that many people really believe in the regime’s history served to citizens by the only righteous authority. – There is also a large group of people who pretend to believe the authorities out of fear. And then there are those who may or may not believe it, but their ambition and attitude to survive, and especially prosperity, push them to demonstrate faith in false narratives. This approach can ensure their social advancement. Especially if someone is in a hurry and his conformism is even intensified by accusing and slandering other people – Kasparov explained last year in an essay in the “Big Ideas” series in the New York Times, where the writers answered one fundamental question: “What do we really believe? “

“I was wrong about Putin”

Kasparov, who became the world chess champion in 1985, when he defeated Anatoly Karpov as a brash 22-year-old novice, was involved in politics from the beginning. In the 1980s, he believed in Mikhail Gorbachev – glasnost and perestroika, that is, in the policy of opening the Soviet Union. But when the Union collapsed in the early 1990s, it backed Boris Yeltsin and other new democrats.

He broke up with Yeltsin after less than six years – in 1996, when he supported another presidential candidate, Alexander Lebiedz. He was looking for his place on the social and political map of Russia. Until 2001, when, after a year in Putin’s presidency, as an associate of The Wall Street Journal, Kasparov wrote in his column a text titled “I was wrong about Putin.”

“Unfortunately, my forecast based on the assumption that the young, pragmatic leader would strengthen democracy in Russia, fight corruption and eliminate errors in Yeltsin’s foreign policy was only wishful thinking,” admitted Kasparov.

And since then he has continued to criticize Putin. He mocked his foreign policy, accused of intimidating the former Soviet republics, and criticized him for cultivating ties with Iran, North Korea and China. He accused Putin of emasculating the media, suppressing political opponents and independent businessmen, and undercutting the basic institution of democracy, i.e. free and fair elections.

Good thing it was chess, not baseball

Kasparov fought fiercely. In 2005, he created the United Civic Front, and a year later, together with the Other Russia coalition, even declared his readiness to run in the presidential elections in Russia. In December 2007 – after receiving many signals that he should do it for his own good – he quit his candidacy. He was already traveling around the country with bodyguards, but his employment was not explained by the fact that critics of the Kremlin – such as the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot in Moscow in October 2006 – were killed, but by fear for ordinary hooligans. “I’m lucky that the popular sport in the Soviet Union was chess, not baseball,” he laughed after the 2005 incident when one of the fans hit him in the head with a chessboard that Kasparov had signed just a moment earlier.

Over time, Kasparov withdrew from politics, but did not withdraw from criticizing Putin. In 2012, he was elected president of the Human Rights Foundation, then arrested and beaten in a feminist demonstration during the trial of Pussy Riot members. They are Russian activists who are salt in the Kremlin’s eye to this day. Much more than Kasparov, because the state’s control of television has long ago prevented the views of the former grandmaster from reaching the Russians en masse. This was the case in 2007, when the demonstration in St.Petersburg took place. Television, dependent on the Russian government, covered it quite generally at the time. As “an act of all kinds of radicals, from fascists to leftists,” not by Kasparov himself.

Now his criticism of Putin’s actions is definitely stronger, and Kasparov himself has a grudge against the West for not reacting to it earlier. He recalled that he wrote about it in many articles, as well as in the book “Winter is coming. Why Putin and the enemies of the free world must be stopped”, which was published in 2015. Kasparov had already warned then that the Russian dictator would unleash hell in the world. He called Putin “a bandit from St. Petersburg’s yard” and compared him to Adolf Hitler.

– Hitler did not have an atomic bomb. And under Stalin, it appeared, but the then leader of Russia died before he could use it. Will Putin dare to take such a step? When dealing with such a man, we should prepare for the worst. I have repeated many times that if he has the opportunity, he will threaten all mankind. And no one wanted to hear it – Kasparov reminded on Monday in an interview with “”.