Can a chess grandmaster become the next russian president?

Gary Kasparov, the former world chess champion for close to 20 years, has hit the headlines again. This time, he had been arrested (and then released) for organising a banned anti-Kremlin rally in central Moscow a few days ago. Mr Kasparov, who formerly retired from active chess competitions in 2005 at the height of his career to join politics, has been mobilising rallies across Russia in protest against President Vladimir Putin's 'dictatorship' regime. He has been openly and regularly criticising President Putin for corruption and the country's slide to dictatorship. President Putin has to constitutionally step down in 2008 and pave way to a free election. Kasparov has claimed that there is no proper election in the past.

In a country where there are few opposition leaders, Kasparov is the only one with celebrity status that stands out. There is no real democracy with most of the population still attracted to authoritarian figures. Though more and more people are joining the movement headed by Kasparov, the number is still very small. His coalition called, The Other Russia, has a mixture of strange bedfellows including hardliner communists, liberals and nationalists, among others. In other words, sort of a left-to-right wing movement. Many people are afraid of joining the uprisings. They wanted freedom of speech and media but is worried about political instabilty. Thousands are being daily questioned by the FSB (formerly KGB) for political extremism and some are put behind bars. See my earlier posting regarding the past condition in Siberia for political dissidents as told by Nobel Prize winner, Solzhenitsyn.

His arrest has drawn worldwide condemnation, especially from the Western countries. Due to security reasons, he had sent his young family (he has a six month old daughter) to settle abroad, in New York. He has also written a new book called "How Life Imitates Chess" although he himself admitted that sometimes life is much more complicated than chess! He said that "if you want to be at the top, at the cutting edge, then you have to be very objective".

He certainly has been very objective and resilient, in organising, coordinating and centralising his rallies, very much like a game of chess! So the question often put forth is, how many more moves will it take to checkmate President Putin? Unfortunately, checkmate is not so easy to achieve. On the contrary, Kasparov said that it is more a game of survival - its like always being in danger of a one move checkmate and how to survive from it.

In this new era, where people are getting more and more intolerant of corruption by governments all over the world, here is a saying by Mahatma Gandhi, that is becoming very popular in the blogosphere. It was written during one of his non-violence movements, 77 years ago:

At first they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win!

Though the stream is small, one day there may be many streams joining to become a big river!