WINTER IS COMING
Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
Garry Kasparov with Mig Greengard
PublicAffairs
290 pages; $26.99
Russians in positions of power tend to measure their country's standing in the world against the United States, longing to be recognised as equally important and powerful and getting very angry when they're not so treated. President Vladimir Putin has made victimhood at America's hands a leitmotif of his reign, and many Russians have bought into his claim that Washington tirelessly seeks ways to weaken, impoverish and otherwise humiliate their country. Many critics of Putin, in Russia and in the West, similarly hold that Washington's treatment of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union was disdainful and thus undermined embryonic moves toward democracy, contributing to the rise of Putinism.
Garry Kasparov, the great Russian chess grandmaster who has become a fierce Putin opponent, offers a mirror image of this theme. In his view, espoused in many articles and now in Winter Is Coming, the West - more specifically, the United States, and even more specifically the Democratic Party under President Obama - is guilty of chronic appeasement and weakness in letting bad guys like Mr Putin stay in power.
I should say up front that I cannot agree that the United States somehow deliberately sought to humiliate Russia in those chaotic days in the 1990s when Communist rule collapsed, or somehow failed to support the first tentative democratic reforms. To argue that the United States had the prescience and power to understand and direct events in Russia overlooks the enormous complexity in the disintegration of a vast, nuclear-armed, totalitarian empire. From the time Mikhail Gorbachev first loosened Soviet control until the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, events moved in ways nobody in the East or West could predict or fully grasp, and it is to Russia's and America's credit that so little blood was shed in that momentous transition.
Mr Kasparov sees things differently. To him, what hope there was for Russia after the Berlin Wall came down soon turned into a steady march toward authoritarian rule under a former KGB agent, aided and abetted by a feckless West. Half the book is about the evolution of Mr Putin from Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor to the capo di tutti capi of a mafia state. There is not much new here, and most readers will not need to be convinced that Mr Putin is a bad guy.
The other and more important theme of the book is the reputed absence of a moral component in Western foreign affairs, which has "encouraged autocrats like Putin and terrorist groups like ISIS to flourish around the world." Mr Kasparov's message is aimed at an American audience. Written in English (with the chess writer Mig Greengard), and with a title borrowed from Game of Thrones, Winter Is Coming is meant as a warning of impending doom should the West persist with the "moral capitulation" that Mr Kasparov repeatedly decries.
There's no pretence of non-partisanship here, no subtlety. A fiery man known for his dynamic play in chess and for his self-assurance, Mr Kasparov fully credits Ronald Reagan for the end of the Cold War and the fall of the "evil empire" - "Lesser problems were left to lesser men" - and he has no doubt that "the world would be a safer, more democratic place today had John McCain been elected" president, or at least Mitt Romney, who called Russia "without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe." Barack Obama, by contrast, is relentlessly and repeatedly skewered: The president is "reluctant to confront the enemies of democracy to defend the values he touts so convincingly"; he is "busy retreating on every front".
I covered Mr Kasparov's ascent to the world chess championship against the grandmaster openly preferred by the Kremlin, Anatoly Karpov, in matches that became a memorable ideological contest between the audacious upstart and the dull company man. In 2005, Kasparov retired from professional chess and dedicated himself "to push back against the rising tide of repression coming from the Kremlin," and he was admirably active in the anti-Putin marches until a relentless crackdown curtailed open opposition. Mr Kasparov now lives in self-imposed exile - temporary, he insists - in New York.
The real problem with Winter Is Coming is with its presumption that the United States is somehow responsible for what Russia has become, or for what it should become. Even Reagan, the president Mr Kasparov so adulates, never sought regime change in the "evil empire," instead looking for areas of cooperation with Mr Gorbachev. And ultimately it was Mr Gorbachev, more than any American or other Western leader, who played the greatest role in bringing down the Soviet system.
Yet Mr Kasparov, born and raised in the Soviet Union and intimately aware that Communism was overthrown first and foremost by Russians themselves, acknowledges their responsibility for Mr Putin's rule only in one throwaway line - "In the end, Putin is a Russian problem, of course, and Russians must deal with how to remove him.'' The next sentence is: "He and his repressive regime, however, are supported directly and indirectly by the free world."
This is not the place to argue the merits or feasibility of arming Ukraine or cutting Russian gas imports. Nor is there a need to defend President Obama against Mr Kasparov's crude and baseless insults. The question to be posed is whether even the most aggressive Western stance toward Mr Putin would make him less dictatorial or Russia more free. That change must come from within, and I would have much preferred to hear Mr Kasparov's take on what must change in Russia and how the Russians might do it. There are plenty of other people to trash Barack Obama.
