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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Kasparov's political role is interesting. He's been a thorn in the regime's side for some years now, but has only been moderately harassed. Not entirely sure why; perhaps the cost/benefit analysis of how much they fear him (probably not greatly) versus how much negative PR they get from going after him.

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The Russian regime is too busy doing things that are important for Russia. Kasparov is a piece for the western media outlets to focus on as a political victim, while he's very unimportant in Russia and amongst Russians.

If he was a real problem, they would have put him down by now. If they didn't allow protests, they would be cracking skulls.

s/doing things that are important for Russia/stealing as much money as they can and putting them into offshore accounts/

Fixed that for you.

So you are saying he must be unpopular or unimportant because he hasn't been put down for causing problems to the state? If you think all the popular and important people are dead, then you really hold very little hope for the living.

No.

I'm saying that if Russia was oppressive as people are making it out to be, he would be silenced by now.

I present 4 possibilities: 1) If he was important and silenced, the claim that Russia is oppressive would hold. 2) If he is not silenced and important, there would be support for him within his own country, but then the country wouldn't be as oppressive as people make it out to be since he hasn't been silenced. 3) If he is silenced and unimportant, we would hear little to nothing of him. 4) If he is not silenced and unimportant, then he has a chance at getting attention from our news outlets that are always looking for an excuse to paint something has a humanitarian crisis as a pretext for war.

Number 2) doesn't survive the barest comparison with history, as if it were true then there would never be political revolutions in oppressive cultures.

Cultures and regimes are different, and this hits the nail on the head. The regime isn't oppressive by Russian standards. But by western standards, it is.

As a Russian, I can assure you that it is, in my mind and in the minds of the educated people I know.

What's Kasparov's status like with the people? Is he a kind of star or folk hero from the old chess days? Or has he been marginalized?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Without-Face-Unlikely/dp/15944... discusses it in great length.

Whenever he shows up, the venues seem to be either cancelled outright or suffer from all sorts of electrical and infrastructure problems all of a sudden. Couple of times he chose to take his message to the people outside the closed venue, he was egged, with police preventing his followers from chasing the perpetrators. Of course, those are also the images that TV stations choose display whenever mentioning Kasparov in passing.

When you control the media, it's easy to hand-pick quotes and stock photos to portray even the most eloquent and intellectual speaker as crazy bum who's shouting in public places to gain self-promotion.

What about his internet presence?

Nobody cares about Kasparov. That is his status now and always been.

I don't know why this is downvoted as it's actually true. Kasparov was that great chess player who had a long battle with Karpov [1] and eventually won. Then for some reason he decided to abandon chess and go into politics instead. At that point he became uninteresting.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Karpov

It's sad that people now remember Kasparov as "that guy who defeated Karpov", because he'd been absolute best in chess for a long time. It's actually even sadder that he dropped chess over politics altogether.

I'd say marginalized. Current crop of "folk heroes" now are mostly non-political figures turned politicians: corruption fighter Navalny, writers Bykov, Akunin and so on. Older politicians like Yavlinsky had their chance and failed spectacularly so their support is fairly limited. If you want to know the most influential political figure from Russian opposition, that's Navalny without doubt.

He's been ridiculed and ignored by the very same regime for as long as he was a supposed thorn in its side. Here's one example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbnySBqioB0 - a flying penis incident.

All in all, Kasparov has an incredible brain that, regrettably, peaked in its performance and application when he was a chess player. I left Russia over 10 years ago (meaning that I've spent most of my adult life in the Western world), and yet even when I was there it was bloody obvious that Kasparov was on the US payroll. The fact that a smart and practical person like him continued on the same path only cements my impression.

I think that's exactly what's going on. They were hoping if they just ignored him people would eventually lose interest. Since that hasn't happened it's on to plan B.

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