Checking Putin: Garry Kasparov on chess, communism, and Russia's 'one-man dictatorship'.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Vladimir Putin - Interview

"PUTIN IS a paranoid, aging dictator who believes he is Russia," says chess-champion-turned-human-rights-activist Garry Kasparov. "Russia today is not like the old Soviet Union or modern China. It is not an ideological dictatorship with the Politburo Central Committee of the Communist Party. It's a one-man dictatorship."

Kasparov had one of the most storied careers in chess history, becoming the youngest-ever world chess champion in 1985 at age 22, then holding the No. 1 ranking for almost all of the next two decades. He also developed an early interest in politics, initially supporting Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms of the late 1980s and eventually challenging the authority of longtime Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. Today, from his position of exile in New York, Kasparov is leader of the anti-Putin United Civil Front and also chairman of the Human Rights Foundation.

reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Kasparov in November at a dinner co-hosted by the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that promotes free market think tanks in the developing world.

reason: Talk a little bit about the enduring lessons of the fight against communism.

Garry Kasparov: I think we've forgotten many important lessons of the Cold War. I have to say that when I entered this field in the mid-'80s as the newly born world champion, it was not as dangerous. Gorbachev badly needed to reconcile with the West. The Soviet economy was in terrible shape. Oil prices were sharply falling, thanks to the cooperation between Reagan's administration and the Saudis. And it was absolutely clear even for the Soviet Politburo that the arms race against the United States was no longer a plausible option.

So Gorbachev tried hard and he made several attempts to convince Ronald Reagan to accept some sort of peace accord. Thanks to Reagan's intuition, and despite the advice of all his advisors, his administration, the State Department, and the Pentagon, he said "no" in Reykjavik. And I think by saying "no" in Reykjavik, Reagan made perestroika and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union inevitable in such a short period of time.

reason: And of course Reykjavik ...

Kasparov: ... a symbolic place. [In] 1972, Bobby Fisher beat Boris Spassky. That was another episode of the big victory of the free world in the Cold War.

reason: Thereby condemning all of us in grammar school in the '70s to joining chess clubs.

What was it like to grow up in the Soviet system? You were in a relatively privileged position.

Kasparov: I was relatively privileged, because of my chess. I think certain things are very hard to describe. Because to understand them, you have to live with them. I grew up in the later '60s, '70s, early '80s. Of course I haven't experienced the horrors of Stalin's time. But it was still the country that was not free.

You couldn't find hard believers in the Communist regime. It was all dying down. My mother's father was a die-hard Communist. He died in 1981. I was 18, and we were talking about Afghanistan and other things. And he was shocked that after spending 50 years in the Communist Party, he had to line up to buy butter and bread. Something went wrong.

So that's why the collapse of the Communist system was somehow imminent. I think Gorbachev's plan was not to remove Communism but to create something more plausible without giving up the role of the Communist Party.

reason: Do you think, in the end, that there's no way to do that? If you give people a little bit of freedom, it's going to collapse?

Kasparov...