Garry Kasparov
Garry Kasparov, born Garry Kimovich Weinstein on April 13, 1963, in Baku, Azerbaijan, is widely regarded as one of the greatest chess players in history. He began playing chess at a young age, quickly showing prodigious talent, and became the youngest World Chess Champion in 1985 at just 22 years old. Over his career, Kasparov dominated the chess world, achieving an unprecedented peak rating of 2,851 and winning numerous titles, including multiple championships against rival Anatoly Karpov. His matches often drew significant public interest, and he became a symbol of the sport, known for his strategic brilliance and competitive spirit.
Aside from chess, Kasparov has been a vocal political activist, particularly in opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. After retiring from competitive chess in 2005, he shifted focus to writing, business, and political endeavors, including founding the Kasparov Foundation and advocating for democratic reforms in Russia. His criticisms of Putin's regime intensified, especially following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, leading to his designation as a "foreign agent" by the Russian government. Despite facing political repression, Kasparov remains a prominent figure in both the chess world and global political discourse.
Garry Kasparov
SPORT: Chess
Early Life
Garry Kasparovborn Garry Kimovich Weinsteinon April 13, 1963, in Baku, the capital of the former Soviet republic Azerbaijan. Kasparov parents were Kim Moiseyevich Weinstein, a Jewish teacher, and Clara Shagenova Kasparov, an Armenian engineer. After the five-year-old Kasparov tried to solve a chess problem that his parents were pondering in the local paper, his father taught him the game. Soon the son was beating his teacher. Only two years later, Kasparov’s father died of cancer. Kasparov and his mother went to live with her parents, whose family name he adopted when he was twelve. This advice came from former world chess champion, who felt that Soviet anti-Semitism would hurt Kasparov’s career.
The Road to Excellence
By his third year in school, Kasparov was participating in chess tournaments. In 1973, he won his first prize for his performance in the Azerbaijan youth team championship. Impressed, the national team trainerAlexander Sergeyevitch Nikitinurged Kasparov to enter the prestigious Botvinnik School. In August, 1973, Kasparov passed difficult exams to study under former world champion Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik. In the past, Botvinnik had taught Anatoly Karpov, who became world champion in 1975.
Kasparov confirmed his reputation as a childhood prodigy in January 1976, by winning the Soviet Junior Championships at Tbilisi, Soviet Union Georgiaagainst much older opponents. In July, he played abroad for the first time in the World Junior Championships in Wattignes, France. At thirteen years old, Kasparov was the youngest player ever to represent the Soviet Union internationally, and, although he lost, he was on his way to earning an international reputation. In the next few years, fellow chess players started comparing him with two teenage predecessors who had gone on to become world championsBoris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, the American who had taken the world title from Spassky in 1972.
In spring 1979, in Banja Luka, Bosnianow in Bosnia and HerzegovinaKasparov’s first adult international tournament put him in a competition with fourteen grand masters. To his delight, he played well enough to earn not only his international master’s norm but also his first grand-master title, two major strides in one tournament. The start of the following decade brought him gold medals from Olympic competitions and an international rating of 2,625only 65 below that of Karpov. A Kasparov-Karpov confrontation became almost inevitable.
The Emerging Champion
On September 10, 1984 in Moscow, the twenty-one-year-old Kasparov confronted Karpov for a world championship match that turned into an endurance contest. Losing four of the first nine games, Kasparov seemed defeated. However, the next seventeen games were a draw. The competition created unprecedented problems in financing, logistics, and public relations as it dragged out to forty-eight games over the next five months. The forty-seventh game gave Kasparov his second victory.
In February, the Philippine president of the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE; World Chess Federation), Florencio Campomanes, canceled the match because of concern over the players’ exhaustion. Kasparov objected in vain. In 1985, when the two opponents resumed play in a London-Leningrad St. Petersburgreturn match, Kasparov won a twenty-four-game match by a narrow margin to become the thirteenth and youngest ever world champion at the age of twenty-two. Both men donated their earnings from this match to a relief fund for victims of the Chernobyl atomic power-station disaster.
In 1986 and 1990, Kasparov beat Karpov again, while their 1987 match resulted in a draw. In 1991, for his fifth match with Karpov, Kasparov did not have the full one hundred days he usually devoted to championship training because of political instability in Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, he again won in the New York–Lyon matches against Karpov.
In 1993, Kasparov left FIDE to create the Professional Chess Association (PCA) with British chess player Nigel Short. He promptly defeated Short, his new challenger, in the first PCA-sponsored match. Meanwhile, Karpov played against, and defeated, a Dutch grand master, Jan Timman, under the supervision of FIDE. Predictably, after winning these separate matches, Karpov and Garry both claimed the title of world champion. In 1995, Kasparov followed up his win with another PCA match in which he overcame Viswanathan Anand, an Indian competitor.
Continuing the Story
While rising to the peak of chess sportsmanship, Kasparov had also completed his high school studies with honors and then graduated from Baku’s Institute of Foreign Languages in 1986. In the following year, he wrote an autobiography dedicated to his father and focused on exploring his competition with Karpov. Later, Kasparov used his clout as an international celebrity to become a respected authority on postcommunist reform, speaking at world conferences and contributing articles on Russia to the Wall Street Journal. In addition to creating the Kasparov Foundation for charitable causes, Kasparov founded the Kasparov International Chess Academy to promote his game’s importance worldwide.
In 1996, Kasparov amazed the chess world by playing against Deep Bluea computer built by International Business Machines (IBM). The match was played according to standard time regulations. Processing millions of chess moves in seconds, Deep Blue won the first game only to lose the match 4–2. In 1997, an updated Deep Blue with even faster processing capacities defeated Kasparov, winning three and a half out of six games. The machine’s victory did not threaten Kasparov’s status as perhaps the greatest chess genius in the game’s history, but his contact with IBM did advance his cause of promoting the acceptance of computers in the former Soviet Union. In 2000, Kasparov’s winning matches included the Bosnia 2000 Tournament for the “triple crown” and an Internet on-line competition with the world’s strongest female player, Judit Polgar of Hungary.
In the second half of 2000, at a match in London, Kasparov lost his titlewhich he had held for fifteen yearsto Vladimir Kramnik, who won 8.5 to 6.5. Nevertheless, during the early years of the twenty-first century, Kasparov won a number of major tournaments and maintained his rating as the top player in the world. However, because of financial and political problems, he was unable to play in a match that would have allowed him to regain his title as World Chess Champion. In January 2005, frustrated by FIDE’s inability to organize a viable match, he decided to stop trying to regain his title. A few months later, he announced that he was retiring from high-level competitions, though he continued to enter and triumph in blitz events.
Garry increasingly devoted his time to business and politics. He wrote and lectured about the requirement for corporate leaders and chess grand masters to exhibit similar kinds of preparation, discipline, and strategy. Politically, Kasparov became the most prominent opponent of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s policies. Kasparov tried to become a candidate in Russia’s 2008 presidential race, but he was outmaneuvered by Putin, whose hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, easily won. Kasparov subsequently moved to the United States, and was granted a Croatian passport in 2014.
Kasparov challenged Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the incumbent president of FIDE and a Putin favorite, for the federation’s presidency in 2010 and 2014,. Neither challenge succeeded. In 2010 Kasparov backed his former chess adversary, Karpov, while in 2014, Kasparov ran against Ilyumzhinov himself. In 2015 Kasparov was banned by FIDE for allegedly bribing FIDE delegates to support him in the election. Ilyumzhinov himself stepped down from the presidency of FIDE in late 2015 after he was sanctioned by the United States for his alleged business ties to the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
In 2015 Kasparov published Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped to mixed reviews. The book offers a critique of the United States and other Western powers for what Kasparov considers their weak response to the rise of Putin.
In the next decade Kasparov's criticism of Vladimir Putin increased. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 was a particular point of contention by Kasparov. Following the Russian incursion, Kasparov helped found an Anti-War Committee which advocated for Russia's top leaders to be arrested as war criminals. Putin responded by having Kasparov labeled a "foreign agent" who was subjected to special monitoring. In March 2024, the Russian government designated Kasparov as a terrorist and extremist. Such Russian government actions had been a mechanism to imprison and silence opponents to Putin. Kasparov's response was to declare his new standing to be an "honor."
Summary
Garry Kasparov was called “the greatest player in the history of chess,” an appellation with which he agreed. From the time he became the youngest ever World Chess Champion in 1985, to his retirement in 2005, he was almost always the top player in the world. His rating of 2,851 was the all-time highest chess rating, and he also held the record for consecutive tournament victories. After his retirement, he concentrated his efforts on writing, business ventures, and political activism.
Bibliography
Ahmatovic, Sejla. "Chess Champ Garry Kasparov Calls Inclusion on Moscow’s Terrorist List an ‘Honor’." Politico, 5 Mar. 2024, www.politico.eu/article/chess-garry-kasparov-russia-extremist-list-honor. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
Dejevsky, Mary. “Winter Is Coming by Garry Kasparov, Book Review: A Flawed Yet Vital Look at Russian Politics.” Independent, 9 Nov. 2015, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/winter-is-coming-by-garry-kasparov-book-review-a-flawed-yet-vital-look-at-russian-politics-a6740756.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
Kasparov, Garry. Garry Kasparov on My Great Predecessors. 5 vols. Guilford, Globe, 2006.
Kasparov, Garry. How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom. New York, Bloomsbury, 2007.
Kasparov, Garry, and Dmitry Plisetsky. Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess, Part One: Chess Revolution in the Seventies. Lyndon, Everyman Chess, 2007.
Kasparov, Garry, and Donald Trelford. Unlimited Challenge: The Autobiography of Garry Kasparov. New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1987.
Khodarkovski, Michael. A New Era: How Garry Kasparov Changed the World of Chess. New York, Ballantine, 1997.
Myers, Steven Lee. “Vladimir Putin’s Chess-Master Nemesis.” New York Times Magazine. New York Times, 6 Aug. 2014. longform.org/posts/vladimir-putin-s-chess-master-nemesis. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
Perdue, Mitzi. "Kasparov: 'Dictators Tell the Truth About What They Plan for the Future.'" RealClearWorld, 2024, www.realclearworld.com/articles/2024/04/10/kasparov‗dictators‗tell‗the‗truth‗about‗what‗they‗plan‗for‗the‗future‗1024086.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
Remnick, David. “The Tsar’s Opponent.” New Yorker, 24 Sept. 2007, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/01/the-tsars-opponent. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
"Russia Threatens Former Chess Champion Kasparov with Criminal Charges." Reuters, 1 June 2024, www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-threatens-former-chess-champion-kasparov-with-criminal-charges-2024-06-02. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
Waitzkin, Fred. Mortal Games: The Turbulent Genius of Garry Kasparov. New York, Putnam, 1993.
Watson, Leon. “Chess World Plunged into Crisis as FIDE President ‘Withdraws’ to Fight Syria Allegations.” Telegraph, 6 Dec. 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/12035992/Chess-world-plunged-into-crisis-as-FIDE-president-withdraws-to-fight-Syria-allegations.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
Yudovich, Mikhail. Garri Kasparov: His Career in Chess. Translated by Oleg Zilbert. Moscow, Raduga, 1988.