Winter is Coming (23 page)

I will not be exaggerating if I say that millions of eyes throughout all of Russia and throughout the whole world are watching for the outcome of this trial. They are watching with the hope that Russia will after all become a country of freedom and of the law, where the law will be above the bureaucratic official.

Where supporting opposition parties will cease being a cause for reprisals.

Where the special services will protect the people and the law, and not the bureaucracy from the people and the law.

Where human rights will no longer depend on the mood of the tsar. Good or evil.

Where, on the contrary, the power will truly be dependent on the citizens, and the court-only on law and God. Call this conscience, if you prefer.

I believe this is how it will be.

I am not at all an ideal person, but I am a person with an idea. For me, as for anybody, it is hard to live in jail, and I do not want to die there.

But if I have to, I will not hesitate. The things I believe in are worth dying for. I think I have proven this. . . .

Everybody understands that your verdict in this case-whatever it will be-is going to become part of the history of Russia. Furthermore, it is going to form it for the future generation. All the names-those of the prosecutors, and of the judges—will remain in history, just like they have remained in history after the infamous Soviet trials.

Your Honor, I can imagine perfectly well that this must not be very easy at all for you-perhaps even frightening-and I wish you courage!

The words and dreams of a great man, regardless of his past sins or future activities. Five weeks later the judge extended the sentences of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev to 2017, which was later reduced to 2016 and then to 2014 on appeal. But of course Putin had yet more tricks up his sleeve.

Three years later Putin surprised everyone, including Khodorkovsky, by announcing he would release him, which he did on December 20, 2013. It was likely due to a combination of German pressure—Khodorkovsky thanked former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher for helping get him released—and Putin’s desire to tidy up loose ends before the Winter Olympics began in Sochi in February 2014. Khodorkovsky was drawing too much attention, having been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and the Olympic spotlight would have found him a tempting subject. It was also an opportunity for Putin to play his favorite role of the “good tsar,” showing mercy to a fallen foe and a chance to get something in exchange for the small cost of releasing him eleven months early. It also avoided the hassle of starting a third trial that would have to have escalated to crimes no less than murder to justify keeping Khodorkovsky imprisoned.

Khodorkovsky left for Germany on the day of his release to visit his ailing mother. He kept a fairly low profile upon his release, but soon he began to speak against the Putin regime and has reopened his Open Russia program.

There is no epilogue to Khodorkovsky’s story yet. As with so many Russian stories it cannot be written as long as Putin is still in power. As for Khodorkovsky’s ambitions, when I spoke with him not long after his release he said to me, quietly but confidently, “If I were Putin, I wouldn’t have let me go.”

There’s a very long list of things my hardline Soviet Communist grandfather would never have believed would happen in my lifetime, and my becoming the world chess champion doesn’t even make the top ten. Giving a speech on the importance of the “American values” of capitalism and liberty to a black-tie audience in Manhattan would be high on the list. So would my wearing a borrowed cowboy hat in Wyoming after lecturing there on the threat of Putin’s Russia.

The likely number one, however, took place on August 17, 2012, at a Moscow courthouse. Not even inside the courthouse, but outside of it. That was the day I was arrested and beaten by the police while protesting the sentencing of Pussy Riot, three members of the all-girl punk group that had been convicted for filming an anti-Putin protest inside a Moscow church. Their sentencing took place in the same Khamovnichesky court that had held Mikhail Khodorkovsky two years earlier. Unable to enter through the crowds, I was standing on the sidewalk outside speaking calmly with a few journalists when the police came over and literally carried me away.

By law, at least in theory, the police must inform you why you are being arrested. There were plenty of witnesses and even videos of my abduction to show that this never occurred. Instead, they show me, legs in the air, shouting, “What am I being charged with? What are the charges?” (As well as a few other words I would not want to explain to my young daughter.) They tossed me into the waiting police van and closed the door. But they didn’t lock it.

In a move I would quickly have reason to regret, I opened the door and demanded again to know what I was being charged with. My words were cut off as I half fell and was half pulled into the crowd of police outside the van. My arms were twisted and several blows came down on my head and body before they lifted me back into the van and shoved me to the rear. A Dutch photographer was quick enough to get a shot of me pinned against the van’s back wall by two cops, one bending my arm back and the other pressing against my throat.

I’m not objective about the events of that day, but I don’t think that an unarmed chess player nearing his fiftieth birthday presented such a terrible danger to an army of riot police. But while I was bruised for quite a while, I was lucky not to suffer any permanent injuries. My spirits were good enough that I could laugh when the police issued a statement that they were considering filing additional charges against me for biting one of the officers on the finger during their assault. Well, I am by no means a vegetarian, though as I turned fifty a few years ago I have had to cut back on red meat on my doctor’s advice. 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.

Knowing that witnesses and all the evidence in the world wouldn’t matter inside a Moscow courtroom, my friends and I scrambled to put together as many photos, videos, and testimonies as we could and publish them widely before my trial. Our hope was that if it was totally obvious to the entire world that I had violated no laws, it would be too embarrassing for the government to convict me on the charge of “participating in an unsanctioned protest.” That was 2012, when it was still possible to imagine the Putin government being embarrassed by anything.

I am quick to admit that in this I am very lucky to have a certain amount of protection because of my famous name. The news picked up the story and footage of my arrest and beating in minutes. Thanks to the power of social media, thousands of people could help my friends and me look through hundreds of photos and videos to prove that the officer who was going to charge me with assault had sustained the cut on his finger before my arrest. Unlike most Russians who are abused the way I was, or worse, I had the knowledge and resources to mount a defense campaign.

A week later, after nine hours in court, I was acquitted, to the great surprise of everyone, myself included. It was perhaps the first time ever in Putin’s Russia that someone had been acquitted of those charges in this way. Ironically, I had been one of the first people convicted under the draconian new anti-protest laws when I was jailed in 2007. In my statement after the acquittal, I thanked everyone who had expressed support and pleaded for those who had helped me to stay involved.

“This result demonstrates the power of solidarity. This means more than donating money and your voice. It is a shared sentiment that freedom matters everywhere, for every person, not only in your own country. It is essential to stay involved. The more people pay attention and bring pressure from the grassroots, the more cases will end the way mine did and the fewer will result like that of Pussy Riot. Find a way to make a difference!”

It was a bittersweet moment. While I was being arrested outside along with many others, the three young women of Pussy Riot inside had been sentenced to two years in a prison colony. Maria Alyokhina, twenty-four, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, twenty-two, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, thirty, had performed a brief “punk prayer” inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the

Savior, mentioning Putin by name in the video they made of it. You can guess which was considered the greater act of sacrilege by the authorities.

I will return later to these brave women and their story, which became an international sensation that confirmed to the entire world that Putin’s regime had finally turned the corner into irredeemable despotism. But I would first like to explain how I came to be standing outside that courthouse and getting tangled up in ways that my grandfather would never have believed. For that we have to leave Moscow and go to Spain, and to the small Andalusian town of Linares.

In 197
5, at the age of twelve, I played my first individual major chess event at the national level, the Soviet Junior Championship. Ten years later in Moscow, I became the youngest world champion in history. On March 10, 2005, in Spain, I played my last serious game of chess, winning the Linares super tournament for the ninth time. After three decades as a professional chess player, the last two of them as the number one ranked player, I decided to retire from professional chess.

It’s not common, in our age, for someone to retire while still at the top, but I’m a man who needs a goal, and who wants to make a difference. My accomplishments and contributions are for others to judge, but I felt that I was no longer playing an essential role in chess. Reclaiming the unified world championship was out of reach due to political chaos in the chess world, so I was reduced to unfulfilling repetition.

I have always set ambitious goals, and I have been lucky enough to attain most of them. I had achieved everything there was to achieve in the chess arena. Meanwhile, I felt that there were other areas in which I could still make a difference, where I could set new goals and find new channels for my energy. My new projects included working on a book on decision making, called
How

Life Imitates Chess,
as well as lecturing and giving seminars on the topic. Another was the promotion of chess in education. The US-based Kasparov Chess Foundation (KCF) supports chess in schools and was working on a blueprint for teaching chess in the classroom. KCF now has centers in Brussels, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Mexico City with thousands of participating schools and a wide variety of events and training programs.

But all of those things could have waited. The main reason for my decision to leave chess when I did, and so completely, was of course politics—or what passes for politics in an autocracy. For many years I had been an ardent supporter of democracy in Russia, and at times I had participated in political activities back when campaigns and endorsement and votes actually mattered. By 2005, those things were already largely irrelevant to the power structure in Russia, but we still had hope. Thanks to a two-term limit, 2008 would bring the end of Putin’s presidency unless he wanted to risk becoming a pariah by abrogating the constitution completely. With Putin not running, our goal was to build enough momentum to bring a real democratic alternative to the ballot. I wasn’t sure how it was going to happen, but I knew I had to try.

As I wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
a few days after my retirement, my plunge into political activism was also personal:

When I look at my eight-year-old son I know the stakes of this battle could not be higher. Many well-off Russians are sending their children to foreign schools, far from the dangers created by our authoritarian leadership. Most of my compatriots don’t have that option. I do, but I want my son to grow up in the country in which he was born. I don’t want him to have to worry about military service in an illegal war or fear the repression of a dictatorship. I want my son to live in a free nation and to be proud of his country, and of his father. . . . There are millions like me in Russia who want a free press, rule of law, and fair elections. My new job is to fight for those people and to fight for those things.