In 2007, a former KGB general warned that he believed
former chess champion Garry Kasparov was next on a list of
Putin critics to be assassinated.
Putin is suspected of condoning the assassination of 14
people in the UK.
Kasparov has lived in exile in New York since 2013.
"Look I'm an optimist and I think it will not last forever," he
told Business Insider.
Putin will be a major issue at the World Economic Forum
in Davos this year because US President Trump will address the
meeting. Putin and Trump have a relationship that baffles
outsiders.
Trump gets unusually positive coverage in the
Kremlin-controlled Russian media, Kasparov says.
When I met Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster and
Putin critic,
in Lisbon recently, he was sporting a large Band-Aid on his
forehead. The wound had been sustained in the back of a taxi in
London on the way from Heathrow Airport to a conference in Canary
Wharf. With traffic crawling along, as it always does in London,
Kasparov decided he didn't need to wear a seatbelt.
Then the taxi driver slammed on the brakes.
Kasparov,
wearing the Band-Aid from his taxi accident.
(Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for The New
Yorker)
"I was just talking to my wife, talking to my mother, looking at
my phone. And next thing I remember I'm just lying on the floor
with my head covered in blood," Kasparov says. "At first, I
was screaming because - now it looks fine - but I was bleeding
for more than an hour, so it was pretty nasty. Then I realised
how lucky I was because I had my glasses on me, these glasses,
one inch down, could be my eyes. One inch on the side could have
been temple."
Kasparov went flying across the back of the Hackney cab, and hit
his forehead on the top side of the jump chair. After a couple of
stitches at Newham University Hospital Urgent Care,
he posted a picture of his injury on Twitter. It spawned a
rash of jokes in response: "Lame assassination attempt, Putin is
desperate," that kind of thing, Kasparov says. "The best one was,
'are you preparing to play Gorbachev at Halloween?' I was lucky,
but now I buckle up."
'People who knew them are all dead now because they were vocal,
they were open ... I believe that he is probably next on the
list.'
That Putin joke is only half funny.
Kasparov really is one of Putin's potential assassination
targets. In 2007, the former KGB general
Oleg Kalugin told Foreign Policy magazine that Putin's targeted
killings would one day reach Kasparov. The year before,
Kasparov had been one of the founders of Other Russia, a liberal,
anti-Putin, opposition group that Russian authorities have
repeatedly prevented from getting onto national election ballots.
Wikimedia Commons, CC
Kalugin said, cryptically, "People who knew them are all dead
now because they were vocal, they were open. I am quiet. There is
only one man who is vocal, and he may be in trouble: [former]
world chess champion [Garry] Kasparov. He has been very outspoken
in his attacks on Putin, and I believe that he is probably next
on the list."
Kasparov has twice been arrested by Russian police while
demonstrating, and he was prevented from renting an official
meeting hall for supporters of Other Russia in 2007, which is a
pre-ballot legal requirement for any politician who wants to run
against Putin.
Kasparov has lived in New York since 2013.
Business Insider asked him what it is like to never be able to go
back home to Russia, where his mother still lives.
"Oh, back to Russia, I could go today! The problem is not going
back to Russia - it's leaving Russia again! I still have my
Russian passport," he says.
Putin and Russia are suddenly one of the biggest issues at Davos
because President Trump will address the gathering
Kasparov is no longer one of Putin's most visible critics, but
Putin still regularly assassinates inconvenient Russians.
Fourteen people have been killed in the UK on Putin's orders,
according to an exhaustive investigation by BuzzFeed.
As world leaders, billionaires, and oligarchs meet at the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, again this year, Putin and
Russia are suddenly one of the biggest issues at the conference.
That's because US President Trump will address the Alpine
gathering for the first time.
Trump has repeatedly expressed his enthusiasm and admiration for
Putin. And many in America believe
Russia covertly interfered in the 2016 presidential election
in a way that swayed votes toward Trump.
Russia is normally mere background noise at Davos. While Russia
has a large military and is not afraid to flex its muscles in
Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, the country itself is relatively poor.
Its GDP ranks below Italy and Canada, and only just above Spain
— a country whose economy was so heavily battered by the
2008 credit crisis that it still hasn't fully recovered.
Russia's influence in the West is limited in large part because
European and US companies are afraid of doing business with
Russia, precisely because of the ever-present threat of showing
up on Putin's radar.
'Putin is only 65. The bad news is, I don't know when and how his
rule ends. But the good news is, he also doesn't know
that!'
That means individual ex-patriot Russians in the West who
disagree publically with Putin — like Kasparov — can
never go home.
Does Kasparov worry about being in danger from Putin?
"Would it help? I live in New York, so what else can I do? I live
in New York, I don't drink tea with strangers," he says.
"Tea with strangers" is a reference to the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, the former Russian FSB secret service agent who was
fatally poisoned in 2006 when he met two Putin agents at the
Millennium Hotel in Mayfair who placed radioactive
polonium-210 into his drink.
"I don't travel to certain countries where I believe that my
security could be in jeopardy. So, unfortunately, the list of the
countries I have to avoid is growing," Kasparov says.
"Look I'm an optimist and I think it will not last forever,"
Kasparov says. "Putin is only 65. The bad news is, I don't know
when and how his rule ends. But the good news is, he also doesn't
know that! I think I have to do what is the best for me and my
family. My mother still lives in Moscow but it's painful for her,
she's 80, and she's spent her entire life just working for me,
but she understands that it's just, she wants me well and alive."
Kasparov spoke to Business
Insider at Web Summit in Lisbon.
Avast
"I'm out of Russia, that's basically good news. I don't spoil
their lives there. They can, of course, create problems, I mean
real problems for anybody anywhere. Now it's more difficult in
New York than in other places, in Europe for instance, say in
Greece or in Cyprus for instance or in Hungary ... there are
places where Russian influence is really strong. But I doubt that
right now Putin is too concerned about being criticised even by
me. He already reached the point where having enemies in the free
world is very important for him, because he sells this point in
Russia. So right now sanctions is the biggest hurdle,
and that's why he's desperately trying to find any bargaining
chip with Trump to make a deal," Kasparov says.
Of course, the big unanswered question for everybody in Davos is,
what is the true nature of the relationship between Putin and
Trump? Does Putin have some kind of hold over Trump — as
the infamous Steele dossier suggests? Or is it simply that
Trump really likes to be in the presence of powerful people, and
that Putin — and ex-KGB man — is playing him like an
asset,
as James Clapper, the former US director of national
intelligence, believes?
'This is, by the way, part of Putin's message ... Truth is
relative — everybody's bad. We bad, they bad, we corrupt, they
corrupt. We don't have democracy, they have a circus.'
Kasparov doesn't believe it is quite that sinister.
"No, what I saw from the beginning of the US presidential
campaign is that the Russian press they like Trump but for
different reasons. So they started liking him because he could
help them to portray US elections as a circus. And this is, by
the way, a part of Putin's message, both inside and outside of
Russia. Truth is relative — everybody's bad. We bad, they bad, we
corrupt, they corrupt. We don't have democracy, they have a
circus. So that was the original message," he says.
Kasparov
and Anatoly Karpov in 1986 at the Centenary World Chess
Championship in London.
(Photo by
Trevor Jones/Getty Images)
It was only when Trump began leading in the polls that Russia
upped its game.
"Then they saw that Trump was winning the primaries, and the
messages changed. And that's the time
when Manafort showed up. 'Oh, Trump! Good guy! But he
will never win because the election was rigged!' So this is
the message that was prevailing. And by the way, Trump
kept repeating it, but that was the Kremlin's narrative,"
Kasparov says.
'America-bashing is 24/7 on all the Russian channels, on
Kremlin-controlled media. Trump is an exception. Trump personally
is not criticised.'
The context to that narrative is that anti-American propaganda is
the default background noise of Russian media. Putin needs to
constantly remind Russians of the American threat, to justify the
strong-state that he controls.
"America-bashing is 24/7 on all the Russian channels, on
Kremlin-controlled media," Kasparov says. "Trump is an exception.
Trump personally is not criticised. The only criticism, mild
criticism, is that he's too weak to fight the deep state, which
is amazing. ... So everything's bad in America. Except Trump,
who's a good guy."
Kasparov believes that Putin was caught by surprise when Trump
won, and hoped that it would lead to a new "grand bargain," like
Yalta in 1945, at which the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union
carved up much of the planet into East and West empires.
Kasparov
at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, in 2017.
(Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for
TechCrunch)
'I think Putin had a dream of bringing Trump to Yalta'
"I think Putin had a dream of bringing Trump to Yalta, to Crimea,
and to do another — not big three maybe this time — big two.
You could hear Trump, some of his people like
Newt Gingrich, at that time spoke about Tallinn being a suburb of
St Petersburg."
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is only 85 miles from St.
Petersburg but after the breakup of the USSR it looked West, to
Europe, and joined NATO. Undoing NATO, or reducing its power, is
one of Putin's fondest dreams. (Historically,
the Russian military and security services have regarded
themselves as being constantly surrounded by enemies. The
loss of the Baltic states after the Cold War exacerbated this
paranoia. Getting them back into Moscow's orbit, by levering them
out of NATO, would recreate the former buffer zone of Soviet
satellite states that protected Russia from Europe until the Iron
Curtain came down in the late 1980s.)
Kasparov
in 1993, when he was world chess champion, in
London.
(Photo by Howard Boylan/Getty
Images)
"That's language that is reflected, their mentality, that they
could make a deal with Putin ignoring traditional American
allies," Kasparov says.
So it undoubtedly gave Putin great cheer when, in June 2017,
Trump began criticising his military allies in NATO and
suggesting that he would pull American military spending from it.
But then ... nothing happened.
'You could just hear them all roaring, wow, what's happened? How
on this earth could Trump not subdue the American elite?'
Trump has been largely hemmed in by a sclerotic US Congress. His
executive orders have been tripped up, delayed, or watered-down
by the federal judiciary.
Kasparov hopes that will stand as a teaching moment for ordinary
Russians. The weakness and the strength of the American system is
that being the US president is not the same as being the Russian
president. In a democracy, a president is merely one
powerful actor who must get the permission of two other branches
of government in order to act.
Not like a dictator, in other words.
"This is the moment of big confusion in Russian state propaganda:
the decision, several decisions of American federal judges, to
stop the travel ban. It was really hard for Russian propaganda to
deal with the fact that a judge, a federal judge, could nullify
or put an injunction on a presidential decree, on an executive
order," Kasparov says.
"It was a great disappointment in the Russian press," Kasparov
says. "You could just hear them all roaring, wow, what's
happened? How on this earth could Trump not subdue the American
elite?"
"So somehow it helped us, those who were promoting the concept of
the separation of powers, because it proved to the world, even to
those in Russia who follow the news, that separation of powers is
not an empty sound. It's a real thing, and it was a big blow for
Kremlin propaganda," Kasparov says. "The whole idea was, oh this
election is a farce, the man in the White House calls all the
shots. No, he doesn't!"
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