The greatest chess player in history
has announced his retirement to fight despotism.
For most Americans, if they've heard of any chess players, they've heard of Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. Most Americans probably assume that Fischer was the greater player, because of the famous Cold War match in Reykjavik with Boris Spassky, which he won, and Kasparov's famous match with Deep Blue, which he lost. But while Fischer was great, most players and students of the game consider Kasparov to be the greatest ever. Kasparov's game, more than Fischer, more than anyone else, had a quality of "magic" that left opponents in awe. (Which may have been his flaw against Deep Blue--Kasparov's deeper psychological games didn't work against a computer.)
But the biggest difference between the two men are their politics. While Fischer retired at 29 to devote his life to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and fighting the ZOG, Kasparov has decided to devote his life to fighting real tyranny.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone following his career. He was a hero to many a young chess player in the West (including me) way back in the early 80s when he was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Chess bureaucracy, and by extension, the Soviet government itself. The Soviet Union tried as they could to keep the loyal party man Anatoli Karpov as World Champion, even to the point of canceling the end of the 1985 Championships when it became clear to everyone that Kasparov would win.
Throughout his career, he has never hesitated to speak out in favor of democracy in his home country, and as the article notes, is a member of the liberal Committee 2008, dedicated to ending Putin's reign in Russia. Ironically, it is almost certainly more dangerous to oppose Putin today than it was to oppose Brezhnev.
It is slightly ironic however that a man who would spend twenty years complaining about the politics of chess would now want to spend the rest of his life in real politics.
I also found it incredibly ironic that the google ad on the Telegraph story linked to was a typical neocon screed in Foreign Policy about how we have to support Putin or the results would be chaos. The author starts his points by saying that if Putin falls "there is no Thomas Jefferson waiting in the wings." First of all, you could have said the same thing about British rule in America in 1774, and we really did have Thomas Jefferson. At the time, however, he was just another mediocre Virginia farmer who dabbled in politics. No one can predict where the great men and women of the future will come from. But maybe, if we're lucky, the Thomas Jefferson of Russia has been sitting across from the chess table from us all along.
Maybe not, but I'd certainly be more willing to give democracy a chance with Kasparov than Putin's USSR-lite with a side of the Mafia.