Word: kasparov
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Great champions, like politicians, are forged in defeat. Garry Kasparov's came in February 1985 at the end of a match for the world championship of chess. Kasparov's rival, Anatoly Karpov, had jumped to an early and seemingly impregnable 5-0 lead. The rules stipulated that the match would be won by the first to win six games. After a long series of draws, Kasparov clawed his way to 5-3. Then Florencio Campomanes, head of the international chess federation, intervened, claiming the players were exhausted. Kasparov, just 21, was enraged. Later that year, he defeated Karpov...
Having established himself as one of the greatest chess masters of all time, Kasparov is an underdog again. As a leader of the Other Russia, a coalition of opponents to the government of Vladimir Putin, Kasparov has become Russia's most conspicuous political gadfly--a symbol of the sense that as the world prepares for the end of the Putin period (presidential elections are due to be held in March 2008, and under the Russian constitution, Putin cannot stand for a third term), all is not well in Russia. The Other Russia has been holding a series of protest marches...
...during the Soviet era of gulags and totalitarianism. But Russia's political system is dominated by a military-industrial-security complex, many of whose members (like Putin) have roots in the old KGB and seem determined to maintain control of the nation's natural resources for their own benefit. Kasparov doesn't believe Russia's leaders are readying themselves for a new cold war with the West; Russia can't instigate another such struggle. Today's motivating ideology, Kasparov says, is "Let's steal together...
...Kasparov, you might say, has been enveloped by politics all his life. Being a Soviet chess prodigy will do that for you. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1963, he started playing chess before he was 5. After his father died when he was 7, Kasparov's mother Clara--whose last name he took--shepherded his career. (She still does. When TIME interviewed Kasparov at their spacious, Soviet-era apartment in Moscow recently, it was Clara who kept an eye on the clock and reminded Kasparov of his next appointment.) As he grew up, Kasparov says, he became aware...
...media, they're forced into the street - and into strange alliances. The Other Russia, in fact, is an unlikely motley amalgamation: members of the traditional democratic and liberal Yabloko party; new liberal factions, The United Civic Front and The Popular Democratic Union, led by former world chess champion Gary Kasparov and Putin's former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov respectively; and of the left radical extremist National Bolshevik Party (NBP), led by a flamboyant writer Eduard Limonov. While the liberal groups call for a return to democratic reform, the violence-prone NBP calls for a revolution. Not unlike the Soviet dissidents...