This is not the first year that the famous Russian chess player and oppositionist has been accused of making a scandalous appeal to NATO countries. We checked whether Garry Kasparov said something similar.

As reported in many publications, in 2011, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (at that time the leader of the Solidarity opposition movement), speaking in Washington at the “Risks of Reset” conference, called for action against Russia from a position of strength. He allegedly called the experience of establishing democracy through military intervention and, in particular, through “humanitarian” bombings, successful. The fact that Kasparov “called on the West to bomb Russia” was once written by such resources as “Military Review", "News Agency", Oper.ru, NoNaMe, Amic.ru, "Peekaboo" And Kaniv.net, users on social networks (Facebook, "Livejournal"). In May 2023, the famous blogger Stas Ai Kak Prosto (Stas Vasiliev) in his Telegram channel reminded me of this case as part of a dispute with the user Garry Kasparov. The latest publication at the time of writing was read by about 266,000 people.

The 13th world chess champion Garry Kasparov disagreed with the current Russian government back in the early 2000s, a short time after Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia. In 2001 he signed letter in defense of the NTV channel, in 2003, together with other famous figures called stop the war in Chechnya, later headed the committee he created “2008 - free choice" and movement "United Civil Front", and in 2007 was even nominated candidate for President of the Russian Federation from the opposition coalition “The Other Russia”. However, he never received official registration as a candidate - according to oppositionist, due to massive refusals to rent him a large premises for the required law congress. Nevertheless, Kasparov continued his active political activities. And indeed, on October 25, 2011 he spoke at the conference “The Risks of the Reset: Why Washington Should Be Careful with Moscow,” organized by the Heritage Foundation think tank in the American capital. The full text of his speech, including answers to questions, is available in English on the website of the Heritage Foundation.

In one of the episodes of his speech, Kasparov touched upon methods of countering the policies of Vladimir Putin. In particular, he said: “A tough rebuff and the establishment of a firm, even confrontational line is the only message to which the Putin regime will respond. They only respect strength. All this talk about how involvement [in world processes] is slowly changing Russia has been refuted. Twenty years ago it was expected that Russia would eventually adopt Western ways, but it is now clear that the opposite has happened. Countries dealing with Russia have time and time again adapted to the corrupt practices institutionalized by Putin. As I said in my speech to Congress last June, the system is not corrupt; corruption is the system itself. So if you're going after these guys, you'll have to use cans rather than tanks. Hit their wallets because that's what they care about." Kasparov concluded by emphasizing that the United States needs to implement "a reset that supports the Russian people, not their oppressors" and "make that distinction clear."

Thus, Garry Kasparov, speaking about measures of pressure on the Russian government, emphasized that they must be peaceful and economic. This directly contradicts the text that is distributed on the Internet. As an Internet search showed, this is the first time such a text came out on the information portal Infox.ru two days after the conference, October 27, 2011, authored by a certain Nikolai Petrov. Note that the full transcript of Kasparov’s speech was available on The Other Russia website on October 26. A month later, when the material was distributed to many media outlets, Kasparov filed a lawsuit against the publication Infox.ru for the protection of honor and dignity in the Ostankino District Court of Moscow. February 20, 2012 court approved a settlement agreement between the parties, and a week later the management of the Infox.ru website published refutation under the article that caused a scandal: “The editors of the information portal Infox.ru admit that the material “Kasparov called for war with Russia” published on the portal Infox.ru on October 27, 2011 is biased and contains false statements that discredit the honor and dignity of Garry Kimovich Kasparov that he calls for war with Russia.”

Thus, already at the beginning of 2012, the issue with Garry Kasparov’s quote was closed, but in the future this did not stop interested or simply inattentive people and the media from disseminating it. Let us note that the latest high-profile case (with blogger Stas Ai Kak Prosto) was marked by a double embarrassment. As another famous blogger rightly noted, Ilya Shepelin, the blogger did not conduct his entire correspondence dialogue in front of an audience of thousands, including the accusation based on an unreliable quote, with the real Garry Kasparov. In his official verified Twitter, the opposition politician earlier reportedthat his only real account on Telegram is garrykasparov_official, and all the others are fake.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons