Winter is Coming by Gary Kasparov Read Free Book Online Page A

presence of the Russian military in taking Crimea a year earlier.
    I do not believe that Merkel and Obama are so oblivious, especially Merkel, who was born in the Communist German Democratic Republic. So the only explanation is that they still find the Putin problem so politically thorny that it’s easier to pretend there isn’t one. And it may even be true, for them personally, for a while. Perhaps they only wish to postpone total catastrophe until they are safely out of office and can leave Putin to their successors. In any case, it is a moral capitulation that has produced very real costs.

THE END OF THE COLD WAR AND THE FALL OF THE USSR
    In the middle of the summer in 1989, I gave a long interview to a magazine that practically personified Western decadence in the Soviet imagination: Playboy. But it wasn’t just the publisher of my interview that raised eyebrows in the Soviet Union. Despite the increasing atmosphere of glasnost, openness, between America and the USSR, and the slow loosening of political repression under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, my outspoken criticism of Soviet society and my praise for America and Americans in particular were something of a scandal. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 was still five months away and largely unimagined. A month after that, Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush would declare that the USSR and the United States were no longer enemies. But even in this rapidly changing environment my comments sounded close to treason to some in the Kremlin.

    playboy: You sound like an American. Americans always want to be winners.
    kasparov: This is a very human quality. It proves that Americans are very close to true human nature.

    For Soviet authorities steeped in the myth of the moral superiority of Communism and the Soviet man, comments like these were quite serious. In today’s world it may seem quaint, or else catastrophically oppressive, but socialist ideology and perceptions of morality were very much part of the Cold War arsenal. When the Soviet sports authorities attacked me for wanting to retain my chess winnings, they condemned not only my disobedience, but my lack of socialist solidarity. For me to say that my neighbors in Baku should see my keeping the Mercedes I won in Germany as normal, healthy thinking was radical and subversive.
    Of course my interview wasn’t as much of a public scandal as Russian actress Natalya Negoda appearing nude in the same magazine earlier in the year after playing a call girl in a movie that shocked the prudish Soviet society. Her photos and my interview in a publication that was still banned in the USSR, and the confused responses they provoked, were indicative of the perestroika period. Our country’s tentative steps toward greater openness were tantalizing, but we knew we could be punished and the reforms rolled back at any time. There were no clear rules any longer, and more and more people were finding the audacity to test just where the lines were at a given moment.
    In 1987, Gorbachev said he wanted to build Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face,” to which I responded that Frankenstein’s monster also had a human face. Communism goes against human nature and can only be sustained by totalitarian repression. Without outside assistance, or massive amounts of natural resources like oil, repression leads to economic stagnation. Then there is the moral and spiritual stagnation of a society were individual success and excellence are all but forbidden.
    Of course there were specific events that helped expose the fatal flaws in the Communist system and force Gorbachev into his desperate attempts to reform and save the country. One was the
    April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, and how the crisis was handled revealed official levels of incompetence, corruption, and mendacity beyond those of any banana republic. (Anatoly Karpov and I donated the prize fund from our 1986 world