The Dailies

Former chess champion Garry Kasparov released his latest book this month, at the same time he formally entered the race to become President of Russia. How Life Imitates Chess is Kasparov’s effort to examine how the lessons from his chess career can be applied to the worlds of business and politics. As such, it’s something of a primer on his political strategy in Russia, where his outspoken criticism of Vladimir Putin and his own presidential aspirations are considered far-fetched at best and dangerous at worst. In this, the second of two excerpts from the book, Kasparov addresses directly how he hopes to change the political situation in Russia.

At the end of 2006, as this book was headed to the printer in several countries, the internal political chaos in Russia spilled out into the world’s headlines. A British national, KGB agent defector, and harsh critic of the Kremlin, Alexander Litvinenko, was assassinated with the rare radioactive substance polonium 210. The investigation into his death currently spans at least three countries.

Litvinenko’s murder came on the heels of the Moscow killing of the well-known investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya—on Russian president Vladimir Putin’s birthday, no less. The killings have turned a spotlight on what the West had assumed was the autocratic but stable Putin regime. Suddenly the foreign media is realizing what we in the Russian opposition have been saying for years—the Kremlin is ever closer to dictatorship than democracy and yet is not stable at all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 9:36 am and is filed under Infotainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.