Garry Kasparov, Dissident
Running for president in Russia is a dangerous enterprise.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, November 1, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
One of the current truisms of the news business is that the Internet has shrunk the world, and that everyone knows everything from the Web the moment it happens. Yet sometimes, we know nothing. Last month, the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov announced his candidacy for the presidency of Russia, to be decided in March. The world shrugged at the Kasparov candidacy, and went back to surfing the Web.
Is this because we in the wired world already know all there is to know about what's up in 21st century Russia? Or in fact are we clueless about the place Churchill described as the deepest enigma? Garry Kasparov believes the latter, and so as leader of a grab-bag coalition called Other Russia, he has undertaken his doomed effort to succeed Vladimir Putin. He works hard to get his message out in the West, but he is given relatively short shrift by the professional skeptics among the Western media and its intellectuals. Yes, he has no chance, but the inattention is a mistake.
I believe Garry Kasparov should be regarded as Russia's first post-Soviet dissident. Starting in the 1960s, deep in the Cold War, the world essentially put under its protective custody a generation of anti-Soviet dissidents. Their names became household names--Sakharov, Sharansky, Bukovsky, Medvedev, Sinyavsky, Kopelev, others. Solzhenitsyn, too hot to handle, was exiled in 1974.
The primary reason for analogizing Mr. Kasparov to these dissidents is not for his opposition to the Putin government and his views on Mr. Putin, though these are worth listening to. The more relevant reason is that he believes his life is in danger.
In an interview this past weekend for "The Journal Editorial Report" on Fox cable news, Mr. Kasparov spoke with his characteristic force and animation about what he believes are the underlying weaknesses of a Russia that looks to be thriving under Mr. Putin. Mr. Kasparov was scheduled to fly back to Russia a few days after the interview, and at the end he was asked if he feared for his safety. One could not help but notice that his answer came after a brief but obvious hesitation.
"Yes," he said, "I am. I'm afraid, my family's afraid. It's our greatest concern."
Why? Logic argues against killing Mr. Kasparov. The street demonstrations in Moscow by his group number in the low thousands (though they attract truncheon attacks by a small army of police agents). A murder would make him a martyr in Russia, where he is still revered as a Soviet and Russian hero. As a political threat, he is a fly on the back of the Putin rhinoceros.
But this is Russia. For all the same reasons one could have said the same of the Russian journalists killed or mysteriously dead there in recent years. Their names are also a "dissident" list: Ivan Safronov of Kommersant, Iskandar Khatloni of Radio Free Europe, Paul Klebnikov of Forbes Russia, Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya Gazeta. Freedom House estimates some two dozen journalists have been killed since Mr. Putin came to power. Earlier this month, in Prague and Washington, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty held symposiums on the status of Russian media, tied to the first anniversary of Ms. Politkovskaya's murder. Mr. Kasparov was there. Other than the Washington Times, the symposiums received virtually no press coverage in the West.
Mr. Kasparov is no political dilettante. His first article on the status of democracy in Russia appeared on this page in August 1991. He was 28 years old. He came to our offices near the World Trade Center for lunch, and one has to say that at first it was hard to set aside that the fellow discoursing over Chinese food on the West's unseemly affection for Mikhail Gorbachev possessed the most mammoth chess brain in history.
We made him a contributing editor to the Journal editorial page, and in the years since he has written often for these pages on Russia's wild ride to its current state. Across 16 years, Mr. Kasparov's commitment to democratic liberty in Russia and in its former republics has been unstinting. At that September 1991 lunch, Mr. Kasparov proposed an idea then anathema to elite thinking in Washington and the capitals of Western Europe: The West should announce support for the independence of the former Soviet republics--the Baltics, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and the rest.
One suspects that Vladimir Putin noticed what the young chess champion was saying in 1991 about the old Soviet empire. The Russian president has famously said, "The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."
Russia today is not what it was. Mr. Kasparov, however, has not stopped analyzing what it has become. Briefly, he argues that Mr. Putin's internal and external politics should be seen almost wholly as a function of oil prices, the primary source of revenue for the Russian state and the prop beneath the extended Putin political family. Mr. Putin's "unhelpful" policies on Iran and the like, Mr. Kasparov argues, keep the oil markets boiling--but not boiling over. Money in the bank, at $94 a barrel. He says Mr. Putin is the glue that binds this fabulously wealthy family, and if he left politics in any real sense they would start killing each other.
As to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's argument that the West needed Mr. Putin inside the G-7 structure so it could "influence" him, the former chess champion replies: "Occasionally you have to look at the results of your brilliant theories." Bringing Mr. Putin in as G No. 8, he says, "jeopardized the whole concept of this club, seven great industrial democracies."
Arguably these views make Mr. Kasparov a dissident even in the increasingly cynical, "pragmatic" West. To their credit, the West's political elites in the 1970s protected the Soviet Union's dreamers. Today Mr. Putin wants Russia to be seen again as dangerous. It is that. Garry Kasparov deserves protection. He stands for something important. A word from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would be a start.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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