Spy games is right. In Russia, he is regularly followed, tending to meet
colleagues in cafés, “And then we have about an hour before they [the
police] set up something [surveillance].” His phones are tapped. Unlike Anna
Politkovskaya, the journalist who made her name investigating Russian war
crimes in Chechnya, shot dead in Moscow last October, Kasparov employs armed
bodyguards in Russia. “I’m lucky I can afford it, so direct physical assault
probably will not work. State terrorism is another story.” Does he mean
poison? “Yes, I try to avoid situations where this can occur. Such as not
flying by Aeroflot. And if I do, I don’t eat any food. There is a risk of
being the victim, but I have to reduce the chances. But, if they want to get
you, you have to be philosophical. I take it as part of this moral duty that
I’m carrying through.”
He isn’t complacent, he says, but “I don’t have any business in Russia. I pay
my taxes.” So did Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the billionaire chairman of the oil
company Yukos, now serving a nine-year jail sentence for, it is widely
believed, daring to fund Putin’s opponents. Yukos, meanwhile, “is under the
control of Putin’s guys”.
Does he think Putin is personally corrupt? He laughs. “How rich is the man who
can put a billionaire in jail in one day?” There are, officially, 61 dollar
billionaires in Russia, the infamous oligarchs, more than Germany, more than
Japan, not many fewer than the US. “Putin can put them all in jail if they
threaten his business interests. He is a businessman. He isn’t about ideas.
He could be liberal, he could be nationalist, he doesn’t care. He supports
Iran and Syria because he needs tension because tension helps oil prices.”
Kasparov says he sees the Khodorkovsky affair and the recent bout of
assassinations as evidence of increased political instability. “They’re
getting nervous,” he says. “One month of free Russian TV, one month of
pictures of Abramovich’s villas, and the regime would be gone and Putin
knows that. The country would not tolerate it.”
When we discussed his own ambitions, Kasparov was less forthcoming. He thinks
the candidate to oppose Putin’s chosen successor in next year’s presidential
elections should come from the centre left and he, as his articles in The
Wall Street Journal have made clear, is a man of the right. He was, however,
scathing about the war in Iraq. “I don’t like incompetence covered by
arrogance. I’m not against fighting, but as in chess, the threat is stronger
than the execution. You don’t want to pull the trigger. Bush squandered all
his advantages.”
And on the subject of wealth inequality in Russia, Kasparov, mindful perhaps
that a millionaire in a Brioni suit can be accused of being out of touch,
sounds a lot like an old-fashioned socialist. “In Yakutsk, for instance,
there are diamonds, gold, oil, coal, but 100 yards left or right of the main
street, no roads! In the middle of this total misery is a five-star hotel.
It’s Third-World stuff. In my country, expenses are nationalised, profits
are privatised. Gas enters a pipeline as a state monopoly, when it comes out
the profits go into private pockets. A lot of villages in Russia don’t have
gas.”
We talked about the bad reputation many rich Russians have gained in London,
and indeed across Western Europe. “They behave the best they can,” he
snorts. “They’re arrogant because they make money out of nothing. It’s wild
money. The new Russian elite, they despise the intellect. They buy this
yacht and that yacht, it’s easy come, easy go. It’s not like America in the
19th century, Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, they built something new. These
people, they were just in the right place when the national wealth was being
redistributed.”
To be involved in Russian politics is, he admits, “exciting, dangerous and
risky. But I feel motivated.” Meanwhile, his family is anxious. When I saw
him in 1993, Masha, his first wife, was about to give birth to Polina, their
first child, in Helsinki, where wealthy Russians tended to have their babies
at that time. Five months ago, Dasha, his third wife, 25, an economics
graduate, gave birth to Aida, his third child, in New York. “Finland was a
matter of convenience. This time, New York was a matter of safety. We didn’t
want to take the chance of our daughter being born in a hospital in Russia.”
Dasha and Aida are still in America, at Kasparov’s flat in Manhattan. They
will join him later on this European lecture tour. Vadim, his ten-year-old
son from his second marriage, lives near him in Moscow. “We build relations,
very close, I hope they will never be broken.” Masha and Polina, naturalised
Americans, live in a further property in New Jersey. Relations are still
strained.
Neither Polina nor Vadim show any appetite for chess. Kasparov isn’t
concerned. “Polina is a good student, number one in her class.” And Vadim?
“Ah, he’s bright, but he’s a bit lazy, he’s a boy. A friend told me, ‘If
your son studies all day, call the psychiatrist.’”
But study all day is precisely what he did, growing up in Baku, capital of the
then Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan. “Yes, but I had the aptitude,
and I learnt the work ethic strongly from my mother.” (His father died of
leukaemia when he was seven. His mother Klara, now 70, is still “my top
manager”.) “It’s difficult today. There are so many diversions. In 1970, TV
in the Soviet Union was a joke. No computers, not many books, you had to
find something.” And his chosen game was heavily promoted as a source of
intense imperial and ideological pride. Now, “nobody in Russia cares about
chess”.
Russians under 30 he says, “would recognise my name but not my face. I’m not
on the TV any more.” (Except to be denounced as a CIA spy, as he was after
the St Petersburg rally.) To older generations, however, he is still a major
celebrity. Part of his political clout resides in the fact that, “To the
left, I’m still the Soviet champion, to the nationalists, I’m the
intellectual pride of Mother Russia.” His ethnic origins, half-Jewish,
half-Armenian, long considered a barrier to political success, “are far less
important than they were”.
Other Russia hopes, he says, to run a candidate in next year’s election, when,
as things stand, constitutionally, Putin must step down. Kasparov is coy as
to whether the candidate, in 2008 or after, will be him. “I don’t feel my
personal ambition would be helpful to the coalition.” But he does have
personal ambition? “My ambition is to make a difference, to help my country,
to be useful. I have energy, I have strategic views, I want them to be
invested in something positive.”
How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov is published by William Heinemann
on April 5 and is available from BooksFirst priced £18 (RRP £20), free p&p,
on 0870 160 8080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
.
An exclusive extract from How Life Imitates Chess will appear in
Business on Monday
