Winter is Coming, by Garry Kasparov

Winter is Coming, by Garry Kasparov

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

I just finished reading the book Winter is Coming, written by the chess champion and Russian political activist Garry Kasparov, I must point out that something quite strange happened to me almost at the end of it, many points began to cross with another book that I read at the same time (I have that habit of reading several books at once), the endless Disinformation of Ion Mihai Pacepa; Pacepa is considered the highest-ranking dissident in command, ever out behind the so-called "iron curtain", at a certain point it became strange how certain pages connected and complemented in a special way in singular synchrony as reading the same book, as creating a single, extremely enriching experience that could only equate to seeing two screens with related information, only that having the enough capacity to pay attention to both.

I became a follower of Kasparov's writings after the book How Life Imitates Chess, an extraordinary book in which Kasparov creates a perfect analogy with the discipline in which he became a master, I certainly agree with such analogy, and that I would even compare with Judo, that irony that the points where Winter is Coming and Disinformation converge are about Vladimir Putin, an excellent strategist of today who is also a practitioner of Judo, there are many things I can disagree with an aspiring dictator like Putin, but I cannot deny that he has been able to push his agenda beyond Russian borders and that he has been able to read global trends efficiently.

When we speak of the "Deep State" attacking the administration of Donald Trump in the USA, we must not forget that the KGB, the security agency of the Soviet era, today transformed into the FSB, was precisely that, a "state within a state, "a" Deep State " of the Soviet era, a self-regulated entity within another major entity, so we can somehow sense that if someone knows well about these obscure issues it is Putin, once a member of the KGB, he not only experienced the disintegration of the USSR, but also saw the operation of that "Deep State" within Russia that ended up taking power beyond what it once had in Soviet times, now under the name of FSB, and encumbering him as the supreme leader, it was definitely a comeback for the KGB, and a successful silent and peaceful, shall we say “democratic”? coup d etat.

Winter is Coming is the passionate narration of a committed Kasparov who tells us about the curious step towards the freedom of the Russian people, who paradoxically looked for a member of that repressive body (similar to what happens in Mexico when you choose a former PRIist in order to “save” you from the PRI) to make them their hero, and it is quite tragic to see how the fallen KGB along with the entire Soviet apparatus, found new life years later with Vladimir Putin, already without the communist ideology, but with the same "state within a state" taking the leading role and absolute power, eliminating democratic advances, creating external enemies in order to exacerbate nationalism and creating a kind of simulated democracy in order to obtain wealth for a select club of like-minded individuals loyal to the supreme power.

Kasparov narrates the collapse of the USSR and the chaos that arose from it and the indifference of the West that not only abandoned Russia to its fate, but created the perfect vacuum for the return of an authoritarian and repressive state, the first signs of these and the brilliant reading of Vladimir Putin that allowed him to become a new risk factor for the global equilibrium, even though economically Russia has not been able to recover except for a short period of high oil prices.

Winter is Coming is a last cry of a Russia submerging in the dictatorship, in a kind of modern dictatorship implanted "democratically" that paraphrasing the Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan: "we got on the train of democracy to arrive, and once we have arrived, we got off this one ... ", modern dictators like Putin use that own or simulated “democracy", as Fidel Castro once said, although Castro said it was a "democracy" different from "bourgeois democracy", in which only the party in power appoints their own candidates and allows people to vote for those "options" in a gross and grotesque simulation, the tragedy of Winter is Coming, is that that style of modern dictatorship, propaganda modern (or disinformation), classic Stalinist repression and simulated democracy, is beginning to spread throughout the world, and we may not be talking only about Russia drowned in this dementia authoritarianism, maybe we are already immersed in it.