Off the Board : Soviet Politics Again Intrudes on Kasparov’s Chess

The sun had burned through the morning fog in Malibu earlier than usual, but Garry Kasparov ignored it. The world chess champion stabbed with a fork at his breakfast of raw onion and cold turkey.

Kasparov ate mechanically, his eyes fixed on a large-screen television for the latest news of the sweeping changes overtaking the Soviet Union.

This past month in Malibu was supposed to have provided Kasparov a vacation from such political distractions and an opportunity to spend more time on his chess game. But on this morning last week, the chairs at his chess table, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, were empty.

“How can you spend more time on chess when so much has happened?” he asked in an impassioned voice.

To the outside world, Kasparov is known as the world chess champion from the Soviet Union. But Kasparov, an outspoken democratic activist, lately has introduced himself as the champion from Russia, a prophetic distinction. And now, as the independence movement among Soviet republics demonstrates that his anti-Soviet instincts were shared by millions of his countrymen, Kasparov cannot stop thinking, and talking, about the current turmoil.

The intense, wiry 28-year-old has rented, for $40,000 a month, the sprawling clifftop home where Madonna married Sean Penn amid frenzied media coverage six years ago. Johnny Carson lives next door. But such trappings have been only a passing curiosity to Kasparov. He is more interested in the house’s television, fax machine and telephone--his links to the homeland.

“Every day I have information from my friends, they give me background,” he said. “But you should be there, to touch it.”

As his country seems in flux since the attempted coup, so Kasparov also seems in transition, at the edge of personal and public decisions regarding his future in chess, business and politics.

Kasparov, born in the republic of Azerbaijan of Armenian and Jewish ancestry, was a child chess prodigy and world champion by age 22. In the chess world, he is considered egotistical, temperamental, a man who sees the world in black and white. He describes himself as “uncompromising,” a man with a “sense of being exceptional,” and “unable to do anything by halves.”

Now perhaps the future is not so clear. For the first time in 10 years of winning, Kasparov finished second and third this spring in tournaments held in Spain and Holland. Some wondered whether Kasparov would retain his hold on the game at the next world championship match, in 1993, and speculated the champion’s obsession with politics was responsible for his stumbles.

Kasparov agreed he has been distracted. “This year was difficult to play normal chess,” he said. “So much has happened. Even my nervous system is limited by emotions.”

In April, he resigned from the Russian Democratic Party he helped found because he felt the leadership was too accommodating to the central Soviet government. While many believe he eventually will run for a seat in the Russian Parliament, Kasparov will only say definitely that he will “participate in a new form of the democratic movement. . . . I will be one of the prominent politicians on the bridge between West and East.”

This has not been an easy time personally, either. His wife of 2 1/2 years, Maria, recently had a miscarriage while visiting her parents in Finland. In a recent morning of nonstop, semi-lecturing talk, it was the one subject that left him speechless and staring at the ground.

Kasparov has “business and political” meetings in New York next week before he can rejoin his wife, he said. In the meantime, while in Los Angeles, he has promoted decidely capitalistic causes, seeking financial sponsors for the 1993 championship match in Los Angeles, promoting chess education in American schools with his international chess academy, and working to set up a consulting company.

Money does not seem to be a problem for him. Kasparov led a movement among Soviet athletes and other competitors to retain more of their winnings, and thanks to chess, is widely considered a wealthy man. In his recently updated autobiography, he said only that he was “financially secure.”

Since the coup, Kasparov has been making public his opinions about the Soviet Union. “I said it would be over in two days, and I was right,” he declared.

Now, he said, “The big race is about to begin, the financial race, the economic race.” Kasparov believes “every businessman from the West” will descend on the various republics looking for commercial ventures, and that a land boom will occur as government-controlled property becomes available for sale “within four to six months.”

Gorbachev, Kasparov said, “has disappeared already. . . . Nothing in the world can save Gorbachev.” He believes the full story behind the Soviet president’s role in the coup has not yet been told. He is convinced the anti-reform moves toward hard-line control that coup leaders sought really began last January, when Gorbachev ordered the crackdown in Lithuania. But Gorbachev’s subsequent hesitation, “moving forward and backward,” on other issues finally led the coup leaders--”his old allies”--to their action, Kasparov said.

Kasparov suspects that the original emissaries who visited Gorbachev in the Crimea actually asked him to lead the coup, and that the venture fell apart when the president declined. Kasparov does not believe Gorbachev was truly under house arrest, because the president was allowed to retain “his loyal security force, 30 well-armed KGB guards. . . . Gorbachev was playing dead.”

The country, he feels, should end up “a loose confederation of republics, like the European community,” but with economic ties retained. “The republics are in such bad economic shape they need continued relations,” he said.

His mother, Clara Shagenovna Kasparova, has been staying with him in Malibu, along with chess grand master Sergei Makarychev, who serves as his trainer. Kasparova said she cooks native meals most evenings because she finds American food “without flavor, without smell.” Her son, she added, probably doesn’t notice. “He pays no attention to food. When he eats, he talks. His mind is far away.”

When he awakens, Kasparov said, “with one eye still closed, I turn on the television,” to catch up on the news. Then he gets “upset,” he said, with American news coverage, finding the correspondents’ observations “stupid.” Had news coverage been better this year, Kasparov contended, the Soviet legislature’s suspension of the Communist Party this week would have been “no surprise.” Even now, he said American politicians and the media wrongly focus on Gorbachev and a centralized Soviet Union, rather than the “inevitability” of the national movements.

His thoughts on post-coup Russia had consumed the morning. The sun was high over the Pacific coast. Kasparov said it was time for him to go down to the beach, swim, and take a nap. And then, he said, “I’ll spend several hours at chess.”

It sounded like a promise he was uncertain he could keep.