Winter is Coming

That chess was conceived as a wargame is clear from its earliest roots in India, where the Sanskrit word चतुरङ्ग or chaturanga means army, and we commonly use military metaphors to understand the game and chess metaphors to describe war and other life struggles. It's less clear why chess and its players should have figured so often in political battles throughout the 20th century.

We're all familiar with Kissinger's phone call to Fischer and the Cold War undertones of his match with Spassky, but before that there was Alekhine's association with the Nazis and the suspicious circumstances of his death, which has sometimes been blamed on French or Soviet agents, and afterwards the political aspects of the Korchnoi-Karpov rivalry, which was detailed in the 2018 documentary Closing Gambit: 1978 Korchnoi versus Karpov and the Kremlin and dramatized in the 2021 film Champion of the World.

Kasparov the political champion

Although the fall of the Soviet Union brought an end to the proxy wars over the chessboard, there was another story of chess and politics in the figure of Garry Kasparov. It was only in 1984, when he won the candidates match and earned the right to challenge Karpov, that Kasparov joined the Communist Party, and it's clear that he had reservations.

In an interview with Bill Kristol, Kasparov explained that his special traveling privileges as a chess talent allowed him to find books abroad that weren't available in the Soviet Union, such as The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, written between 1958-1968 and published in 1973, which described the development of the Soviet police state. Although the book was never published in the Soviet Union, editorials in the party newspapers accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting Nazis, which is reminiscent of Putin's strange accusations against Ukraine. Kasparov was debating these ideas with his family: "I always had this kind of debate with my diehard communist grandfather, who was a member of the Communist Party since 1931."

Already in 1990 he left the Communist Party to help form the Democratic Party of Russia, and in 1991 he was awarded the Keeper of the Flame award from the Center for Security Policy in Washington D.C., where he gave a speech warning the United States against half-measures in the name of stability:

“Intentionally or not, the U.S. Secretary of State is playing a highly unseemly role in a dangerous international poker game—one in which the stakes are paid in human lives! It is not difficult to discover the basic rule of this political poker: 'Stability’ and ‘order’ beat democracy and freedom. As Abe Rosenthal observed in one of his recent columns: ‘Dictatorships seem so much easier to deal with than messy democracies.'”

Kasparov versus Putin

He participated in the election campaign of Boris Yeltsin in 1996, but Kasparov was still focused primarily on his chess career until 2005 when he retired. At that point he turned his attention to political activism in Russia. Much like a chess player will transform positional gains into a concrete attack, Kasparov transformed his chess fame into political power, and helped to found several groups dedicated to electoral freedom.

In the spring of 2007 he was arrested at a protest, and in September of that year he announced that he was running for president. He was arrested again and detained for five days, and despite the fact that he earned significant votes in the electoral process, he was forced to end his campaign by indirect pressure from the Russian government.

His rhetoric about Vladimir Putin only escalated, and former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin warned: "There is only one man who is vocal and he may be in trouble: world chess champion Kasparov. He has been very outspoken in his attacks on Putin and I believe that he is probably next on the list." In 2012, Kasparov was arrested again and beaten while attending the trial of the punk band Pussy Riot.

Winter in Ukraine

Not long after that Kasparov decided that it was too dangerous for him to live in Russia, but he didn't stop challenging Vladimir Putin. In 2015, he published the book Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. In that book Kasparov criticized the Obama administration in particular, and the free world in general, for appeasing Putin in an effort to avoid a direct conflict. He warned that the failure of the United States to back up its "red line" proclamation about chemical weapons in Syria only emboldened Russia and China, for whom it was evidence that the free world was not prepared to fight for its ideals:

Those who say the Ukraine conflict is far away and unlikely to lead to global instability miss the clear warning Putin has given us. There is no reason to believe his announced vision of a “Greater Russia” will end with Eastern Ukraine and many reasons to believe it will not. Dictators only stop when they are stopped, and appeasing Putin with Ukraine will only stoke his appetite for more conquests.

Actions directed at Putin were also shockingly weak despite the clear presence of Russian forces and Russian arms flooding into Ukraine. It’s one thing for academics and pundits to calmly sympathize with Putin and his “vital interests” and his “sphere of influence,” as if 50 million Ukrainians should have no say in the matter. It’s quite another thing for Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel to fret about the “instability” and “high costs” caused by sanctions against Russia, as if that could be worse than the instability caused by the partial annexation of a European country by a nuclear dictatorship, carried out with impunity.

As always when it comes to stopping dictators, with every delay the price goes up. Western leaders have protested over the potential costs of action in Ukraine at every turn only to be faced with the well-established historical fact that the real costs of inaction are always even higher. Now the only options left are risky and difficult, and yet they must be tried. The best reason for acting to stop Putin today is brutally simple: it will only get harder tomorrow.

These passages were all written in 2015. Here's Kasparov's reaction to the events in Ukraine this week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYhsloRid_c&list=LL&index=1