Garry Kasparov's deadly game

Garry Kasparov
HOW LIFE IMITATES CHESS
256pp. Heinemann. £20.
978 0 434 01410 1

Does life really imitate chess, as the title of Garry Kasparov’s entertaining new book would have it? Indeed, the truth would appear to be just the opposite. The game was once a staple of the sermons and moralities of medieval and Renaissance literature, the most celebrated of which was The Game and Playe of the Chesse by Jacobus de Cessolis – one of the first books to be printed in English by Caxton. We still tend to treat chess as an allegory: witness the first scene of the second Bond film. From Russia With Love opens with a chess tournament, in which the Russian grandmaster Kronsteen triumphs over the board and then moves seamlessly into plotting global domination. But How Life Imitates Chess belongs to a different category. Kasparov claims that chess can teach us how to make better decisions and so be more successful. His is, in other words, a self-help book, and it is not free of the tiresome jargon typical of the genre: “We can flout the laws of thermodynamics to create energy and quality through positive transformation”.

What lifts this book high above the run of such confidence-boosters is the extraordinary personality of its author. Kasparov is not only the greatest chess player the world has ever seen, he is also the leader of the opposition and the last hope of democracy in Russia. He has been brave enough to defy the man he refers to contemptuously as “a mere lieutenant-colonel in the KGB” with nothing more than his wits to live by. So the game Kasparov is now playing with President Putin is for his life. This fact gives his thoughts about chess and life an extra edge. Scattered throughout How Life Imitates Chess are autobiographical anecdotes that build up a portrait of a man who has hovered between insider and outsider throughout his career.

When he was growing up in Baku, his parents’ circle “largely consisted of Jewish professors and intellectuals who constantly questioned the official view, not only the blatant propaganda of the Soviet government”. The young Garry Weinstein (as he then was) listened to Radio Liberty and Voice of America, then argued the toss with his Communist grandfather. He was seven when his father died, and he adopted his Armenian mother Klara’s name after his chess teacher, the former world champion Mikhail Botvinik, “added that it wouldn’t hurt my chances of success in the USSR not to be named Weinstein”. With anti-Semitism being exploited by the neo-Stalinist Putin regime, Kasparov’s Jewish background is again in the foreground. This explains the need to prove his patriotic credentials: “I spent twenty-five years representing the colours of my country and I believe I am continuing to do so”. He explains that his decision to retire from professional chess in 2005 – still the highest-rated player after two decades – was “largely based on what I saw as the need to join the resistance to the catastrophic expansion of authoritarian state power in my home country”. Kasparov explains that the regime imposed by Putin is “not martial law exactly, call it ‘martial law lite’”. The lack of transparency and accountability allows the state to grow indefinitely: “Any criticism of state officials can be termed ‘extremism’, a term separated from terrorism by only a comma in Putin’s law book”. These political observations are scattered randomly throughout the book: “everything that I have written here” is explained by the decision to exchange supremacy in chess for the risk of politics. Kasparov argues that he was forced to leave his “comfort zone” of chess by the need to “be where I thought I was most wanted and needed”, above all by the thought of posterity.

“I don’t want my nine-year-old son to worry about Russian military service in an illegal war such as Chechnya or to fear the repression of a dictatorship”, he declares, though he concedes that this decision is seen by many as foolhardy: “After all, having his father attacked or jailed won’t be of much benefit to my son”. But Kasparov merely shrugs off all thoughts of assassination or incarceration: “There are some things that simply must be done . . . this is a fight that must be fought”. So what does Kasparov himself stand for? “There are millions like me in Russia who want a free press, the rule of law, social justice and free and fair elections . . . . To achieve these ends my colleagues and I have formed a broad non-ideological coalition of true opposition groups and activists. I am working inside Russia and abroad to bring attention to the decimation of Russia’s democratic institutions.” But how can chess help Kasparov to achieve his aim? One of the best features of the book are his insights into how he learned to play against his great rival Anatoly Karpov; they played five world championship matches, amounting to 144 games, between 1984 and 1990. Karpov “was strongly connected with the Soviet power structure . . . . Our contrasting fire and ice chess styles also reflected our ‘collaborator versus rebel’ reputations away from the board”. During their first, inconclusive match, Kasparov forced himself to imitate his opponent’s python-like style. When the match was stopped by the World Chess Federation president Florencio Campomanes at the behest of the Soviet authorities after forty-eight games, the exhausted Karpov eagerly “accepted” the decision, while the twenty-one-year-old Kasparov reluctantly “abided” by it. But the younger man had enjoyed a five-month master class at the champion’s expense. Kasparov won the return and did not relinquish the title for fifteen years.

To deploy the same strategy against Putin, Kasparov will have to force himself to create a highly disciplined political movement, able to draw on deep reserves of patriotic sentiment and the promise of a restoration of Russia to great power status. Given the state’s control of resources – and the catastrophic demographic structure, the outlook for Russia is grim. Kasparov will not find it easy simultaneously to woo the electorate, tell the truth and stay alive.

After the long list of unsolved murders – those of Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko are merely the most notorious – Garry Kasparov has every reason to be intimidated. Yet this coded manifesto of a book is only the latest sign that his courage at the chessboard has not deserted him in the political arena.
 
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Daniel Johnson has been a senior Editor and colunist on The Times and the Telegraph, and has written widely about German literature and culture. He is writing a book on the Cold War and chess, and a history of German thought.