GArri Kasparov, 58, was world chess champion from 1985 to 2000. He chairs the Human Rights Forum and the Renew Democracy Initiative. He has not set foot in Russia since 2013 and did not meet his mother until her death in 2020. He lives with his family in New York.
On March 10th it will be 17 years since you gave up your chess career and made it your life’s work to warn the world about Vladimir Putin. It took a very long time for the world to see the Russian President as you do. Is there a good feeling in it now, somehow?
That I was right is no cause for celebration. It’s tragic for my country. Thousands of young Russians are dying for this mad dictator. Many of them were born under Putin and die under Putin.
In your book “Winter is Coming” (German edition: “Why we have to stop Putin”) you warned in 2015 that Putin would attack Ukraine again. Why wasn’t your call to supply arms to Ukraine and end dependence on Russian gas and oil?
It wasn’t a success, nobody wanted to believe me at the time. When asked if I really thought Putin was more dangerous than ISIS, I said: The terrorist organization comes and goes, Putin is a constant existential threat. I was looked at as if I were an idiot. Many people no longer know what ISIS stands for. Today I stand as Nostradamus because I described something that people didn’t want to see. My seven-year-old book is now Amazon’s best-selling political book Kindle. I hope this war will lead to the collapse of his regime. It’s the first time since the end of the Cold War that almost the whole world has come together. In my wildest dreams I would not have expected such solidarity within four or five days.
What surprises you the most?
Even Kazakhstan’s President Tokayev, whose rule Putin recently rescued, is now giving him the cold shoulder and has stopped broadcasting Russian TV channels. Olaf Scholz amazed me when he changed an Ostpolitik that goes back to Willy Brandt and included Germany in global security policy. FIFA is involved, the IOC is involved.
Opponents, not only on the board: regime friend Anatoly Karpov (right) in the 1984 World Cup duel against regime critic Garry Kasparov
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Image: imago
With the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the 2018 World Cup and tens of millions for the World Chess Federation, Putin has invested immensely in sport.
But it’s not about sport for him, it’s always about Putin. It is part of his network just like Chelsea or Schalke 04 or various charity events. How he built soft power through all of this will likely go down in history as the most sophisticated operation to undermine the free world. Putin has not shied away from spending billions on it, and chess is a small part of this huge campaign. The surprising thing is that within a week there is nothing left of it.
How can Putin’s regime fall?
For a dictatorship to collapse, three factors must be met: The first is a military defeat. That can happen if Ukraine resists long enough. The second factor is economic and financial collapse, and that’s just a matter of weeks. The third factor is isolation. This is very important psychologically. If all three components are met, the regime can collapse overnight because people will take to the streets and the oligarchs will throw Putin out. Russia today cannot be compared to the fanaticism under Stalin or in Hitler’s Germany, where people were willing to die for their beloved leader. Putin’s regime is all about money, it’s more like a mafia state. As long as the boss hands out money and protection, people will stand behind him. As soon as no more money flows, the loyalty is gone immediately.
Who will stop Putin in Russia?
If we knew who could do that, that person would already be dead because Putin would have eliminated the threat. I am constantly asked what needs to happen: do millions of demonstrators have to stand in Red Square? Will there be a palace coup? Will the oligarchs intervene? It’s all together. When dictatorships end, you can never predict who will make the last move. On the video from the Russian Security Council we saw the terrified faces, their fear of Putin and the consequences of his madness. You can’t expect them to act immediately, but every day they are losing assets and room for manoeuvre. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets at the risk of being beaten, arrested and jailed for years. Today they are protesting against the war, maybe next week because the standard of living is collapsing. If there are hundreds of thousands or millions in the streets, who will attack them? The propaganda machine is also eroding. In the last few days we are seeing a lot less Russian trolls on the internet. Probably no one pays them anymore.
