Garry Kasparov

Perhaps the greatest chess player ever, the former world champion has become a fierce critic of his native Russia and an advocate for freedom around the world. While his views have attracted a loyal following, he has needed all his wiles to stay a move ahead of his rival, Vladimir Putin

- Jack Dickey

IN FEBRUARY 2013 the Investigative Committee of Russia gave Garry Kasparov’s 76-year-old mother a call. They were looking for her son.

Kasparov had been one of the nation’s brightest lights for decades. In 1985, at 22, he became the youngest winner in the history of the World Chess Championship. He was suave and cocky, a virtuoso, and he captivated the chess-mad U.S.S.R., where every world champion became a household name. He is widely considered the greatest player ever. Twelve years would pass, and the Soviet Union would fall, before he lost his first match, and even then he remained ranked No. 1 until his 2005 retirement, when he abandoned chess to become a political activist.

Russian president Vladimir Putin had been running the country for only five years, but already Kasparov saw the nation hurtling backward. Kasparov and his compatriots called for fair elections; instead Russia held votes that were presumed to have been rigged. The more Putin clamped down— silencing dissent, eliminating enemies—the more urgent Kasparov’s mission became. In 2007, he was jailed for protesting and then denied the opportunity to run for president. (Putin’s comment on the arrest: “Why did Mr. Kasparov, when arrested, speak out in English rather than Russian?”) Then, in 2012, Kasparov was arrested and detained while protesting against the imprisonment of the dissident feminist punk band, Pussy Riot. A Russian court acquitted him soon after on the charges that he bit an officer. But still the Investigative Committee, Russia’s equivalent of the FBI, wanted to have a chat.