Garry Kasparov is probably the greatest chess grandmaster of all time. He was ranked as the #1 player in the world for almost 20 years. His birth name was Garik Weinstein, but it was changed to because antisemitism was rampant in the USSR during his childhood.
He took his mother’s maiden name during intense childhood chess training, repeatedly winning competitions before he was even a teenager.
He first doubted communism at 13, when he traveled ro Paris for the first time to compete. He would continue traveling, and was 18 when he read Solzhenitsyn’s book Gulag Archipelago, which raised global awareness of the Soviet prison camps.
In 1985, he became the youngest ever world champion chess player at age 22. Throughout the 8ps and 90s, he played and defeated early chess-playing computer programs, only being defeated in 1997 by IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer.
He argued it was unfair because he wasn’t allowed to observed the computer’s past games, but the computer was updated with Kasparov’s past tactics.
In 1990, he and his Armenian mother’s family had to flee their homa in Baku, Azerbaijan. The Baku pogrom against Armenians targeted and murdered 90 people, beating and wounding hundreds more.
Months later, he helped found the centrist anti-communist Democratic Party of Russia.
After retiring from chess in 2005, he became a political activist, founding his own organization and joining an opposition coalition. At this point, he started to draw unfriendly attention. He was beaten with a chessboard he had just signed, by an attacker who claimed het hated Kasparov for going into politics.
In 2007, he and hundreds of opposition-party protesters were surrounded and jailed, allegedly for demonstrating without a permit and resisting arrest. Despite claiming to have been harassed by police and the Russian secret service ever since, he ran against Valadimir Putin in the 2008 election.
He was barred from the election by a technicality after failing to register a large enough venue, allegedly due to obstruction from the government. Putin himself criticized Kasparov for frequently speaking English. He was banned from running again and currently remains the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation.
In 2012, he was beaten by police and arrested whike attending the criminal trial of the all-female punk band Pussy Riot. Despite video evidence to the contrary, he spent a week in jail on charges of unauthorized protest and assaulting an officer, who claimed Kasparov bit his finger.
He became a naturalized Croatian citizen in 2014, citing fear that if he returned to Russia, he would be prevented from leaving ever again.
I haven’t met a single person from a Communist country who is like “It was great, I loved it. Thats why I fucking FLED” and somehow privileged North Americans have the audacity to tell these people that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Commie LARPers are such cowardly scum that would not last 1 day in a Communist country. Absolute retards these commie stans.
