Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Just then there was a dull pop, very much like a gunshot, and the women screamed, “Garry! Garry!” The crowd broke apart, and Kasparov’s bodyguards tried awkwardly to shield him while keeping people from trampling one another as they rushed off the porch. A young man standing in front of the building suddenly turned out to be holding a bottle of ketchup, which he shook up violently and then aimed at Kasparov and squeezed. Kasparov was presently covered: his head, his chest, and the right shoulder of his blue sport coat were stained sticky red. The porch was empty now, save for a clear plastic bag with several broken eggs in it that had hit the roof of the porch before landing: that was what had made the popping sound.

An old woman, now standing on the porch with us, tried to clean Kasparov’s face with a handkerchief. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he whispered over and over again, apologizing for triggering this incident in a town that was already racked with grief. Another woman in black, heavyset, in her forties, said, “Let’s go to the school—it’s safe there,” and Kasparov walked down the street, surrounded by the women, toward the building that had nearly been destroyed in the attack that ended the hostage crisis. For the ten minutes or so that they walked, Kasparov talked about the inevitability of a political crisis, the importance of protest, and the need to put aside political differences in the name of dismantling the regime. The crowd gradually grew as people came out of the houses and apartment blocks along the way to join the walk.

They entered the school through the giant holes in the walls of what used to be the gymnasium. At the end of the siege, this space was filled with children; this was where most of them died. The physical evidence suggested the gymnasium was damaged by tanks firing at point-blank range: there were giant holes in the thick brick wall where steel-grated windows used to be. Inside, the space was charred—by a fire, the Mothers of Beslan believed, started by a flamethrower used by the Russian troops (the state had acknowledged that flamethrowers were used, but denied that they could have led to a fire).

Kasparov gasped when they entered the gym. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he whispered. The women walked to different corners of the ravaged space and began wailing; soon the hall was filled with a muffled, high-pitched sound. Kasparov looked stricken: his eyes red, mouth slightly open, head shaking. It was clear that it would not be possible to talk in here: the room was oversaturated with grief. He asked to be given a tour of the school, and as he walked around with the crowd, now grown to about a hundred people, he talked: “I’m walking through this school, thinking: How do people in Moscow keep walking around, saying something, continuing to lie? Among them, there is someone who gave orders to open fire. If that person gets away with it, we will all be to blame!”

The rest of Kasparov’s day was bizarre. He went on to Vladikavkaz, a half-hour’s drive away, capital of North Ossetia. He was scheduled to give a talk, but his manager was notified that the curtain in the hall had collapsed onto the stage, so the space was unavailable. About four weeks into his campaign, this was familiar: every venue Kasparov rented anywhere in Russia had something go wrong. Here, not only was the hall unavailable, but in front of the building there was a hastily organized children’s event with extremely loud music. Kasparov went anyway and shouted to a crowd of about sixty people, talking about social spending, which constituted about 15 percent of the Russian budget—far less even than in the United States. Several teenagers hovered around the edges of the crowd. One threw a rock at Kasparov and missed. Kasparov kept talking. Then there was a torrent of eggs, two of which hit Kasparov in the head. The teenagers who threw the eggs ran off toward the police vehicles and quickly disappeared: there was no effort to hide that they had been brought there by the police and acted under their protection. When a German journalist who was also hit by an egg tried to chase his assailant, one of the policemen—who later turned out to be the local interior ministry spokesman—grabbed him by the arm and rudely told him to mind his own business. “Their regime is afraid of words!” shouted Kasparov.

Two of his bodyguards, visibly shaken, were whispering to each other. “He was just a kid—I couldn’t see it coming,” said one. “I was in the wrong position,” admitted the other, who tried but failed to shield Kasparov’s head. Eggs are not that dangerous, but they served to demonstrate how defenseless Kasparov was, despite his rotating staff of eight bodyguards.

“We’ve foreseen everything that’s foreseeable,” Kasparov said to me. “But if I really thought about it, I couldn’t go on.” One of his bodyguards always watched over food preparation, and Kasparov drank only bottled water he carried with him and ate only food ordered for the entire table.

At a dinner at the close of his trip to North Ossetia—a roughly five-hour affair during which Kasparov played three games of chess, two of them with a local seven-year-old prodigy—Alan Chochiev, an Ossetian activist who had recently served eleven months in prison for distributing antigovernment leaflets, made a toast: “No one has ever tried what you are doing. You are addressing not four hundred thousand people in every city. Not even four hundred at a time, in some large hall. You are talking to fifty or sixty people at a time, in a country with a population of 145 million. It’s a crazy task. I want to raise this toast: Here is a man who chose to do the impossible. May it now become possible!”

That was only half the story of Kasparov’s impossible task. Kasparov was not just agitating for his point of view; he was also attempting to gather and spread information, turning himself into a one-man substitute for the hijacked news media. He grilled local sympathizers about the situation in their region, then passed this information on. His chess player’s memory was invaluable: according to one of his assistants, he had never kept a phone book, because he could not help remembering every phone number he heard. Now he was constantly aggregating and averaging in his mind. He kept a running tally of the percentage of local taxes each region was allowed to keep, the problems opposition activists faced, and details of speech and behavior that he found telling. Now that local and national media existed only to spread the government’s message, information had to be gathered in this piecemeal manner.

In Rostov, where Kasparov spoke in front of the public library—he had been scheduled to speak in the library itself, but it had been shut down, under the pretense of a burst pipe—a young man approached his assistant, gave her his business card, and said he wanted to participate as a local organizer. When I asked his name, he said, “That’s impossible. I’ll get fired immediately.” As I later learned from Kasparov’s assistant, the man was an instructor at a state college.

Kasparov had flown a chartered plane to the south of Russia, and the plan had been to use it to go from city to city. But after spending most of one day grounded because no airport in the region would give permission to land, the group of thirteen people—Kasparov, his staff, and two journalists—had to switch to cars. When we arrived in Stavropol, it turned out our hotel reservations had been canceled. Standing in the lobby of the hotel, Kasparov’s manager called around to every other hotel in the sleepy city; all claimed to be fully booked. This was when the manager of the hotel showed up.

“I am sorry,” he said, clearly starstruck. “You must understand the position I am in. But can I take a picture with you?”