CHECKING PUTIN’S POWER PLAYS
Chess grandmaster Kasparov takes up literary arms against Russian president
Last Saturday, a young Russian soldier, Vadim Kostenko, died at an airbase in Latakia, Syria, the first fatality among Russian troops in the war-ravaged country.
Official sources said he hanged himself over lost love. But as his family buried him in Grechanaya Balka, across the Azov Sea from Russia’s newly annexed Crimean Peninsula, they disputed this, saying Kostenko had a broken jaw and cracked skull.
If you ask Garry Kasparov, the former chess grandmaster and exiled Russian dissident, who has just published a new book, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin And The Enemies Of The Free World Must Be Stopped, there is reason to share this skepticism.
For all Putin’s hyper-confident bluster, Kasparov says, the perennial president is vulnerable to the domestic political toll of dead young soldiers. And so, as the “mafia” leader of a personality cult similar to Hitler’s Germany, he lies.
“It’s all about him staying in power, because he doesn’t have any other goals,” Kasparov told the National Post this week in an interview. “He doesn’t have any strategy, unless you call tactics of survival strategy.”
Unlike in proper democracies, where politicians are often bland academics and lawyers, Russian and Soviet dissidents come from eclectic backgrounds, from Andrei Sakharov the nuclear scientist, to the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the punk performers Pussy Riot, the oligarch Michael Khodorkovsky and Kasparov, the chess grandmaster, a man who knows a thing or two about strategy.
Though it is more about Putin than himself, Kasparov’s book describes the reasons why the greatest chess player in history — who played under Soviet and Russian flags long before he famously beat, then lost to a computer — has taken up literary arms against the despot of his motherland.
From his exile in New York, which followed several attempts to break into Russian politics, he describes his 2012 arrest while protesting the Pussy Riot sentencing outside a Moscow court. He was tossed in a police van, then when he opened the door asking why he was being arrested, was violently put down and later accused of biting an officer.
“I am by no means a vegetarian, though as I turned 50 a few years ago I have had to cut back on red meat on my doctor’s advice,” writes Kasparov, now chairman of the Human Rights Foundation.
“But I can say with certainty that were I to acquire a taste for human flesh, the way Bengal tigers are said to do, I would never bite anyone under the rank of general.”
He is less restrained in his description of Putin, whom he repeatedly compares to Hitler. He said the “body bag” factor of dead soldiers limited Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, and prevented him from outright annexing South Ossetia and Abkhazia in his conflicts with Georgia.
Now in Syria, where Russia has formed a dangerous alliance with Iran, dead soldiers are once again a liability to be concealed and eliminated, just like dissidents.
This, Kasparov says, is just one piece of evidence Putin is running out of arguments for himself, as the Russian economy — not very strong to begin with — struggles under low oil prices.
“So finding enemies becomes paramount for his domestic policy. But he ran out of enemies inside Russia,” he says.
After Ukraine, which like Georgia made tentative steps toward a western way of life, Kasparov thinks Putin contemplated pushing west into Estonia and Latvia, until NATO made clear those borders would be protected. Moving south and east into Kazakhstan would be easier, but would challenge an even greater power on the far side.
“Messing with China? This is not an option for Putin,” Kasparov says. “So he ended up in Syria.”
The Russian media are presenting this as a fight on terror, but Kasparov sees it as more of an addiction to conflict, with an ever-increasing dose. Putin is like a Mafia boss seeking to prove he is the most vicious man around, to discourage challengers.
Unlike most dictators, as Kasparov tells it, Putin did not have to fight for his position. The former KGB agent was selected by Russian leader Boris Yeltsin to protect against oligarchic groups that might scheme revenge. In time, though, especially after he managed to co-ordinate an extraordinary extension of his rule through his proxy Dmitry Medvedev, Putin came to see himself as a messiah, which blended with his view of Russia’s destiny.
“I would not mix his messianic views with intelligence,” Kasparov said. “I don’t think Putin is well read. I can afford the luxury of listening to his speeches in Russian, and I can tell you that’s not the most entertaining intellectual pleasure.”
Putin does, however, have pretensions to intellectuality, and has foisted works of philosophy and literature on his aides, books by pre-Soviet writers like Vladimir Solovyov who gave voice to a vision of Russia as the Third Rome, destined to gather in the Slavic lands under one rule.
Ideological dictatorships can afford to break with tradition, Kasparov says. The Soviet Union did not see itself as successor of Czarist Russia. It was a “primary state,” with its own cult and ideology. Modern China likewise starts counting in 1949.
Modern Russia, on the other hand, is not an ideological dictatorship. It is a “one-man dictatorship,” closer in this way to North Korea. And so, like a monarch without a bloodline, Putin needs tradition. This is why he has mined Russian history all the way back to Vladimir the Great, the first Slavic Christian leader, a massive statue of whom is to be erected on Putin’s orders in central Moscow.
“Dictators that are planning to rule forever, they always look for ancient traditions to find justification for their claim to power,” Kasparov says. “He thinks he’s Russia.”
Though he imagines a role for himself in a post-Putin Russia, Kasparov is starkly pessimistic about the future.
“The end of Putin’s rule will not be, of course, through the lawful election process. It will be stupendous. It will be abrupt. It will be bloody. And it will bring Russia again at the verge of self-destruction,” Kasparov says.