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Like many more or less dilettante chess players, I have followed Kasparov's chess career with undisguised awe and at times outright envy. While I spent too many years of my youth trying in vain to climb the greasy pole of English junior chess, Kasparov was conquering the world in his early 20s. When leading Western grandmasters were giving up chess for accounting in the face of a post-Soviet influx of their East European counterparts in the early 1990s, Kasparov was trouncing Britain's geeky challenger Nigel Short without breaking a sweat.
In many ways, Kasparov represents the ultimate triumph of Soviet intellectual achievement. Trained by the father of Soviet chess, five-time world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, he went on to pioneer the use of computer programs and databases in analyzing chess, which revolutionized the game during his two decades at the top.
But in the bleaker climate of Russian politics, the country's media, political analysts and even some of his fellow liberals see him more as a dilettante who does not understand the rules of the game and who has more than one failed political venture to his name, from the Democratic Party of Russia, to the Liberal-Conservative Union, and now to the risky Committee 2008: Free Choice. Critics and even friends of Kasparov have noted an inability to commit to any one project for a sustained period. In short, everyone seems to be telling Kasparov: Don't dabble with the real world, go back to the safe confines of the 64 squares on the chessboard and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.
But if the politicos and media analysts were determined to show that a chess player could not understand politics, they merely managed to demonstrate their aptitude for mangling chess metaphors. The imagery deployed to describe Kasparov's decision to quit full-time chess for something like full-time politics -- both in the Russian and foreign press -- has been predictably chess-related, conjuring up all of the limited metaphors in editors' half-dozen-word chess lexicon. Some Western newspapers hailed a "stunning move" that was delivering a "check" to President Vladimir Putin, while other writers went even further, predicting imminent "checkmate."
The Chicago Tribune showed off its knowledge of chess and French by describing Putin as "en prise," a chess term that means a piece has been left vulnerable to immediate capture. Meanwhile, the editors of Britain's Guardian newspaper headed an otherwise engaging interview with the hoary old epithet "Endgame." Ah, the omnipresent endgame -- as in the Yukos endgame or the endgame in Chechnya, by which the media implies that it's all over, even if it winds up taking months, years or decades. As Kasparov could testify were anyone to ask him, the endgame in chess is one of the most complicated and little-understood parts of the game, which can take grandmasters a lifetime to master.
Kommersant, of course, went one better with its typically caustic headline, "Kasparov Slammed the Chessboard," alluding to the world champion's famous temper tantrums. These are less frequent than in his youth, it is true, but Kasparov's recent epithets for Putin, such as "fascist" and "Caligula," can hardly endear him to the Kremlin.
It is a paradox, indeed: While chess is often used to describe conflicts of great complexity, and chess players are rated the most clever and logical of intellectuals, most of the time their standing in the practical world is zilch.
Want a classic example of chess players' unworldliness? Bobby Fischer, the American world chess champion who beat the Soviets in 1972, now languishing in a Japanese detention center for breaking sanctions in war-torn Yugoslavia. His behavior in retirement, straight after winning the world title, ranks as one of the most bizarre in sporting history, leading most onlookers to conclude -- with more than a little justification -- that he was a total nut case. The image of chess players as inmates of rook-shaped ivory towers is further sustained by the bizarre record of the current president of the international chess federation, the mercurial leader of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.
So the idea that Kasparov could help bring some sense of direction to crisis-wracked Russian liberalism does seem far-fetched to many. As political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky pointed out this week, if Kasparov has not been able to bring the warring sides of the chess world together, how can he hope to succeed in building a political coalition from Russia's disparate opposition forces?
Kasparov's unreconstructed free-market-and-democracy views, which he likened to those of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's in a Wall Street Journal comment Monday, could also require a little tweaking in presentation if they are to have any effect on Russian public opinion. And yet, for all its improbability, Kasparov's challenge -- if not as a potential presidential candidate, then in his own preferred role as a leading "thinker" -- could be far more successful than Kremlin spin doctors or professional politicians expect. Stranger things have happened, and stranger characters have achieved high political office.
Playboy-turned-inheritor of the Bush family legacy, George W. Bush, now has the run of the White House, and ex-Hollywood action hero Schwarzenegger is in charge of the world's fifth-largest economy. And midlife crises can come in very handy for public figures to reinvent themselves, too. With his career as a Texas oil executive going down the drain, George W. turned 40, sobered up, then got himself some old-time Southern religion and never looked back.
One of Kasparov's projects over the next year, a book provisionally called "How Life Imitates Chess," could give a clue as to how he plans to apply chess logic to politics. If his preparation for political combat is anything like that for his chess tournaments, Kasparov's opponents should be afraid, if not very afraid. The stereotype of chess players thinking 20 moves ahead is usually just that, but it is all too real in Kasparov's case, as the world's other elite grandmasters can testify from their many losses to him where Kasparov never deviated from home preparation. So instead of working out powerful opening plays, crushing middlegame attacks and subtle endgame strategies, Kasparov could be devising economic programs, working out how to divide his political opponents and probing their psychological weaknesses.
Do the skills translate? It's hard to tell, but he certainly could bring something useful to the debate. Does he need a coach to help him hone his message? Maybe not so much as Dubya or Arnie did, and for sure he'll be a quick learner.
Kasparov was named earlier this month as a possible contender for president in 2008 by Leonid Nevzlin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky's chief lieutenant still at liberty in Israel, along with former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and independent State Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov. Although as someone born to Jewish and Armenian parents in Baku, the chances of Kasparov winning might seem remote. Yet there have been precedents of non-ethnic Russian leaders, from Catherine the Great to Stalin.
So after the Georgian and Ukrainian revolutions, could black-and-white be the new orange?
Tim Wall, night editor at The Moscow Times, is a former editor of British Chess Magazine. He contributed this essay to The Moscow Times.
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