A week later, after nine hours in court, I was acquitted, to the great surprise of everyone, myself included. It was perhaps the first time ever in Putin’s Russia that someone had been acquitted of those charges in this way. Ironically, I had been one of the first people convicted under the draconian new anti-protest laws when I was jailed in 2007. In my statement after the acquittal, I thanked everyone who had expressed support and pleaded for those who had helped me to stay involved.
“This result demonstrates the power of solidarity. This means more than donating money and your voice. It is a shared sentiment that freedom matters everywhere, for every person, not only in your own country. It is essential to stay involved. The more people pay attention and bring pressure from the grassroots, the more cases will end the way mine did and the fewer will result like that of Pussy Riot. Find a way to make a difference!”
It was a bittersweet moment. While I was being arrested outside along with many others, the three young women of Pussy Riot inside had been sentenced to two years in a prison colony. Maria Alyokhina, twenty-four, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, twenty-two, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, thirty, had performed a brief “punk prayer” inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, mentioning Putin by name in the video they made of it. You can guess which was considered the greater act of sacrilege by the authorities.
I will return later to these brave women and their story, which became an international sensation that confirmed to the entire world that Putin’s regime had finally turned the corner into irredeemable despotism. But I would first like to explain how I came to be standing outside that courthouse and getting tangled up in ways that my grandfather would never have believed. For that we have to leave Moscow and go to Spain, and to the small Andalusian town of Linares.
In 1975, at the age of twelve, I played my first individual major chess event at the national level, the Soviet Junior Championship. Ten years later in Moscow, I became the youngest world champion in history. On March 10, 2005, in Spain, I played my last serious game of chess, winning the Linares super tournament for the ninth time. After three decades as a professional chess player, the last two of them as the number one ranked player, I decided to retire from professional chess.
It’s not common, in our age, for someone to retire while still at the top, but I’m a man who needs a goal, and who wants to make a difference. My accomplishments and contributions are for others to judge, but I felt that I was no longer playing an essential role in chess. Reclaiming the unified world championship was out of reach due to political chaos in the chess world, so I was reduced to unfulfilling repetition.
I have always set ambitious goals, and I have been lucky enough to attain most of them. I had achieved everything there was to achieve in the chess arena. Meanwhile, I felt that there were other areas in which I could still make a difference, where I could set new goals and find new channels for my energy. My new projects included working on a book on decision making, called How Life Imitates Chess, as well as lecturing and giving seminars on the topic. Another was the promotion of chess in education. The US-based Kasparov Chess Foundation (KCF) supports chess in schools and was working on a blueprint for teaching chess in the classroom. KCF now has centers in Brussels, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Mexico City with thousands of participating schools and a wide variety of events and training programs.
But all of those things could have waited. The main reason for my decision to leave chess when I did, and so completely, was of course politics—or what passes for politics in an autocracy. For many years I had been an ardent supporter of democracy in Russia, and at times I had participated in political activities back when campaigns and endorsement and votes actually mattered. By 2005, those things were already largely irrelevant to the power structure in Russia, but we still had hope. Thanks to a two-term limit, 2008 would bring the end of Putin’s presidency unless he wanted to risk becoming a pariah by abrogating the constitution completely. With Putin not running, our goal was to build enough momentum to bring a real democratic alternative to the ballot. I wasn’t sure how it was going to happen, but I knew I had to try.
As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal a few days after my retirement, my plunge into political activism was also personaclass="underline"
When I look at my eight-year-old son I know the stakes of this battle could not be higher. Many well-off Russians are sending their children to foreign schools, far from the dangers created by our authoritarian leadership. Most of my compatriots don’t have that option. I do, but I want my son to grow up in the country in which he was born. I don’t want him to have to worry about military service in an illegal war or fear the repression of a dictatorship. I want my son to live in a free nation and to be proud of his country, and of his father…. There are millions like me in Russia who want a free press, rule of law, and fair elections. My new job is to fight for those people and to fight for those things.
My son Vadim is now eighteen and has no knowledge of what it is like to live in a free Russia. What he has seen of democracy and civil liberties he has learned the way I did as a teenager in the USSR, from traveling abroad and reading foreign news. At least he and his generation have the Internet, which is still relatively free in Russia. Two thousand five was also the year of my third marriage, and my wife Dasha continues to play a vital role in making this new phase of my life a happy and successful one. Our daughter Aida and our son Nickolas were born in and are growing up in a free country. But contrary to how I’d envisioned it, that country is the United States, not Russia.
A few months prior to my retirement, the Beslan school hostage crisis shattered the global conscience. I place it here, outside of the chronology, because of the impact it had on my decision to leave chess and because of my personal experience visiting the site in 2005.
On September 1, 2004, Chechen separatists took over eleven hundred hostages at a school in North Ossetia, a Russian region of the Caucasus bordering Georgia. It was what we call “First Bell” or Knowledge Day in Russia, the start of the school year when parents and other family members accompany their children to school. Thirty very heavily armed terrorists took over the school and herded the hostages into the gymnasium. The building was mined with IEDs (real ones, unlike at Nord-Ost) and a number of hostages were killed immediately.
The situation outside the school was predictably chaotic as disparate groups of regional and national security forces and political forces formed separate camps. Parents and other locals refused to leave the area, many because they wanted to prevent any military assault on the school. Memories of Nord-Ost were still very fresh. The attackers’ demands were similar to 2002: withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya and recognition of Chechnya’s independence. Other reports said they also wanted United Nations recognition of Chechnya.
They also demanded the presence of several regional politicians to serve as intermediaries, including North Ossetia’s president, Aleksander Dzasokhov, and the president of neighboring Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov. Neither came to Beslan. Dzasokhov later said that he had been forcibly prevented from coming and told Time magazine that “a very high-ranking general from the Interior Ministry told him, ‘I have received orders to arrest you if you try to go.’”
Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was one of the few Russians trusted by the Chechens, was also invited. She immediately set off for Beslan but never arrived. Her tea was poisoned during the flight, putting her into a coma, and after coming close to death at a small medical center in Rostov, she returned to Moscow to recover. She stated that she was sure Russian security forces “neutralized me because they knew I was going to Beslan to set up talks.”