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

championship match to the Chernobyl victim relief fund.) Then there was the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which was going into its tenth year by 1989, and had been as ineffective, unpopular, and expensive as the American and NATO sequel would be.
    Thanks largely to increasing Soviet exposure to news, ideas, and opinions, especially those from the outside world, the Soviet establishment found itself in a dilemma. If the authorities reacted as usual and cracked down over small transgressions, they would lose credibility as reformers and prove the critics’ point that Soviet society was backward and stagnant. But they also knew that if they permitted a small amount of criticism it would encourage others to speak out. The authorities’ responses were increasingly confused and inconsistent. Different manifestations of this catch-22 are what finally brought down the Soviet Union, despite Gorbachev’s best attempts to hold it together.
    Well before the Wall came down, it was clear to many of us on the “wrong” side of the Iron Curtain that major changes were inevitable. We had no idea what shape they would take, or where they would begin, but it was quite a novel experience for most Soviets to talk seriously and openly about anything to do with political transformation or a new direction for the country. And we weren’t sure if the democratic reforms were real or simply a “one party democracy” distraction to help Gorbachev shore up power against the Soviet old guard and to buy time for his failing economy. People in the street talked about the ethnic violence that was already accompanying many of the republics’ independence movements. We wondered whether or not millions of people would starve before economic reforms finally took place.
    On March 26, 1989, the USSR held its first real election since its formation in 1922. The newly created Congress of People’s
    Deputies of the Soviet Union was intended to put a democratic face on the Supreme Soviet, the body that still held the real power. But the Communist Party only won 85 percent of the seats (instead of the usual 99.9 percent), and among the independent insurgents was Boris Yeltsin, who won the Moscow district overwhelmingly over Gorbachev’s candidate.
    Ironically, the USSR’s limited experiments with democracy had their greatest early impact outside of the Soviet Union, in Poland. The sight of an actual election in the USSR, however sloppy and superficial, provided the Poles with the impetus for their own much more comprehensive experiment. Instead of adopting Gorbachev’s dreamed of socialist reform, Poland overthrew its Communist masters completely and the rest of the Warsaw Pact nations quickly followed Poland’s example.
    The current despots of many former Soviet states lived through and understand the dangers of the free speech “cracks in the wall” dilemma and have worked very hard to avoid it in their own nations. Putin and other ex-Soviet autocracies view what happened in Gorbachev’s regime as a negative case study. This is why they react so harshly against political criticism on a tiny blog or a single protester holding a sign.
    Modern dictatorships have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. They know that explosive energy will build unless there is a release valve. So they’ve created space for a strange kind of controlled dissent. The Echo of Moscow radio station and website are permitted to broadcast and publish material critical of Putin while smaller and less compliant outlets for dissent like my Kasparov.ru news service are banished from the Russian Internet. I was the chairman of Echo from 1991 to 1996, when it was independent. Now, while it still maintains an opposition character, it is owned by the media arm of state energy giant Gazprom and operates knowing it can be shuttered at any moment.
    Similarly, protest rallies can be registered and may take place, but organizers and participants may still find themselves prosecuted.