Garry Kasparov's Greatest Hits, and Why He Knew Putin's Next Move Was Invading Ukraine

I've been publishing, editing and interviewing Garry Kasparov since 2005. His message has been consistent: Putin won't stop until the Free World stops him.

(Illustration: Barbara Kelley)

By Michael Judge

The art above is from a 2005 op-ed my former WSJ colleague, Tunku Varadarajan, and I commissioned from Garry Kasparov after his last professional chess match. It depicts the final position of the last game of his 1987 World Championship match against fellow Russian Anatoly Karpov. It was a must-win game for Kasparov. If he lost or drew, Karpov would retake the title. In what The New York Times called a “dramatic comeback,” Kasparov won to keep it.

What’s needed now for Ukraine and its allies in the West to defeat Vladimir Putin and his invading soldiers might be described the same way—a dramatic comeback. In that 2005 op-ed Kasparov, already an ardent supporter of the democratic movement in Russia, explained that he was leaving professional chess because he believed his “talents and experience” could be useful in the political realm.

“There is something to be said for a chess player's ability to see the whole board,” he wrote. “Many politicians are so focused on one problem, or a single aspect of a problem, that they remain unaware that solving it may require action on something that appears unrelated. … In politics as in chess,” he continued, “if you have the advantage you must press it quickly—or lose it. For the first time in history, we are in a position to checkmate tyranny. Momentum is largely on the side of democracy.

“This is not yet the case, alas, in my home. Russia is in a moment of crisis and every decent person must stand up and resist the rise of the Putin dictatorship. Russia boasts too many generals and colonels in politics and too few thinkers. (Even Russia's chess players are in decline, a symptom of the larger malady.) I hope my vision and ability to think strategically can be of help to my native land. We must act now to unite and to create real democratic opposition to the Putin regime. I can now offer not only my name and my advice, but my active participation.”

Since those words were published on March 14, 2005, Kasparov has done nothing but “stand up and resist,” first as an opposition leader within Russia, and, since 2013—after being arrested and beaten by Moscow police and having his opposition efforts largely thwarted by Putin’s thugs—as chairman of the international Human Rights Foundation and the New York-based Renew Democracy Initiative.

In 2015, with the publication of his prescient book, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, he spelled out clearly and ferociously why the West’s continued appeasement of Putin, even after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, would result in still more Russian aggression and a larger, far more costly, confrontation with the U.S. and its European allies.