The Tsar's Opponent.(Biography)

On a recent summer evening, the greatest player in the history of chess, Garry Kasparov, wrapped up an exhausting series of meetings devoted to the defeat of the Kremlin regime. After days of debate, a motley pride of unlikely revolutionaries--bearded politicos, earnest academics, and multigrained environmentalists--collected their cigarettes and left Kasparov's apartment, divided and worn out. Little had been accomplished. Crumpled drafts of fevered proclamations lay scattered on the kitchen table. Puffy-eyed and unsmiling, Kasparov grunted a curt farewell to his comrades and went off to make yet another urgent telephone call.

Kasparov is forty-four. He was the world chess champion for fifteen years. Until his retirement, two years ago, his dominance was unprecedented. Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Fischer--none came close. Chess has outsized meaning in Russia, and Kasparov at home was a cross between the greatest of athletes and a revered intellectual; with his status came celebrity, foreign investment accounts, summers on the Adriatic, an apartment along the Hudson River, friendships among Western politicians and businessmen, and the attentions of beautiful women. Now he has volunteered for grim and, very likely, futile duty. As the most conspicuous leader of Drugaya Rossiya (the Other Russia), an umbrella group of liberals, neo-Bolsheviks, and just about anyone else wishing to speak ill of Vladimir Putin, he is in nominal charge of opposition politics in a country that, in actuality, has no real politics except for that which takes place in the narrow and inscrutable space between the ears of its President.

Kasparov's mother, Klara, shares his apartment and his travails. "It is like we are soldiers together in the ditches," she once said. "Even when we are at a great distance, Garry and I can feel each other's mood." Like her son, Klara Kasparova is impossibly energetic, deeply intelligent, and a touch melodramatic. It had been a tedious few days of marathon jawing and internal spats. The Other Russia was scheduled to hold its annual conference the next morning at a Holiday Inn in central Moscow, but some of its leading figures had decided to boycott over the question of whether to unify immediately behind a single Presidential candidate for the March, 2008, election.

"All day and night, people running here and there, meeting, talking, drinking tea," Klara Kasparova said, with a long sigh. Her dyed-red hair was askew, her face slack. "This apartment has been like Smolny." A romantic analogy: the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, in St. Petersburg, had been the Bolshevik headquarters during the October Revolution. Lenin barely left the building in those manic weeks, and, when he did, he sometimes disguised himself in surgical bandages.

Kasparov's redoubt in the Arbat neighborhood of Moscow is not nearly as elegant as Smolny, but the address is one of Soviet-era privilege and among the most expensive areas on the real-estate market. Government officials and members of the cultural elite were awarded apartments there. Kasparov was never obedient or politically reliable like his great rival Anatoly Karpov, but he didn't lack for comforts. His kitchen has a flat-screen television, an Italian espresso machine, and other swish appliances that would surely have brightened Lenin's late nights at Smolny.

Kasparov pocketed his phone and slumped into a chair at the kitchen table. He is handsome and athletic, but thicker than he once was, and his hair, black and curly when he won the world championship, is now graying and cropped close to his skull. Though the meetings had ended with a split, which Russia's small opposition can ill afford, Kasparov seemed to thrive on the claustrophobic intensity of kitchen politics. "The intellectual brainstorming always takes place here," he said. "We did it like this when I was playing chess and when I was beginning in politics, in the nineties. The kitchen tradition is part of our culture."

Klara asked a maid to make coffee. The espresso came bolshoi trippio--enormous mugs of steaming caffeine. It became easier to see how Kasparov was able to work heroic hours and then, well after midnight, settle down at his computer to play "blitz"--five-minute-long games of chess. He plays anonymously, but the cognoscenti know his style of attack. They still feel his presence. Sinatra cannot sing anonymously.