The other potential candidates for President had their own problems. Viktor Gerashchenko, the former head of the state banking system, had extensive experience in the domestic economy, but he was an apparatchik. Mikhail Kasyanov, the former Prime Minister, is younger and less dour than Gerashchenko, but he acquired the nickname Misha Two Per Cent, for the alleged “tax” he levied on all deals crossing his desk when he worked in the finance ministry.

If one speaker had moral authority, it was Sergei Kovalyov, a biologist and former political prisoner. Now in his late seventies, Kovalyov wearily stepped to the microphone and informed the delegates that victory in the coming elections was impossible “without the approval of the Kremlin.”

“So what do we do?” he said. “A critical mass has to be built. Not too many people understand that democracy is dull, scrupulous work. . . . If there is no chance at all to win the elections, then the danger of participating in the elections is that it becomes a trap, a trick for government propaganda. . . . But what a real candidate can do is speak the truth about the regime to a maximum number of people.”

The trouble with Gerashchenko or Kasyanov, he said, is that they are “former nomenklatura” and they will have to spend the campaign answering for past sins. Bukovsky was “a gifted politician beloved by the dissidents of my generation,” Kovalyov said, but then added, with uncharacteristic sarcasm, “A candidate for President has to actually live in the country that he proposes to lead.”

At the end of the session, Kasparov invited questions from the floor. One woman, saying that she was a reporter for a business paper that no one seemed to recognize, suddenly started ranting at Kasparov, threw a cloud of thirty-dollar bills at him, and declared him an American agent. She was one of the demonstrators from the Young Guard. Kasparov was unflustered. “You know, I was getting disappointed,” he said, by way of adjourning. “I thought they had forgotten about us completely.”

Afterward, Kasparov, Limonov, and Andrei Illarionov, the most prominent of the liberal economists who once worked under Putin, left the hotel and drove to the downtown studios of the radio station Echo of Moscow. Kasparov and Limonov appeared first on a popular talk show hosted by the journalist and professor Yevgenia Albats. It had been a day of long speeches and internecine squabbles, and the overwhelming feeling was that opposition in Putin’s Russia was, if not entirely futile, then close to it. A supportive caller from the provincial city of Orenburg brought a smile to Kasparov’s face, but he was prepared to claim only small victories.

“We began as an absolutely hopeless movement,” he said. “Now we’re in the game.”

Even that was bold.

In the hallway, Illarionov told me that it would be a disaster to take part in the March elections. The opposition would be crushed and coöpted. “Garry has invested his energies and his day-to-day life in this, and I respect him very much,” he said. “But this is a mistake and will lead millions of people into a dead end.” His fear ran deeper than mere defeat. As a tsar, he said, “Putin reacts traditionally. And, if they have no real enemies, they create them. They need enemies. They cannot live without enemies. If all enemies are destroyed, then there is Yabloko, the Republican Party, the Right Forces, the Other Russia—they’ll finish these enemies. It’s a natural law of dictatorship.” The best that Kasparov could do, in the short term, was to establish the idea of an opposition in the narrow margins provided by the state.

As the summer wore on, however, it became clear even to Kasparov that the Other Russia could only put forward a “parallel” candidate, a symbolic one. At first, Kasparov was reluctant to be that candidate, but when he proceeded to win many of the Other Russia’s regional primaries in August and September he began to change his mind. “It seems I have no choice,” he said.

“The problem is, we are short of resources and we have too little time to create powerful momentum to overthrow the regime,” Kasparov went on. “But we do want to show that this regime is violating our basic constitutional rights. We want to use the campaign to publicize our ideas and tell the public that we are here. What we’re saying is, we won’t win now, but, when this regime collapses, be aware that we are here.”

One summer evening, I took the metro to my old stop, Oktybrskaya, where the familiar bronze statue of Lenin, pointing to the remote “shining future,” still stood. As I walked along the boulevard called Bolshaya Polyanka, I could see the House on the Embankment, a vast gray Constructivist pile that had accommodated much of the Communist Party’s political and cultural élite in Stalin’s day. During the purge of 1937, a third of the building’s residents were arrested and dispatched either to the Gulag or to the cemetery with a shot in the back of the head. A gigantic Mercedes emblem now rotates alluringly on the roof of the House on the Embankment.

After a while, I arrived at the October Chess Club, the most popular club in the city. Situated in a long basement room, the club was filling up with men and women of all ages taking their places at scruffy boards. International grand masters occasionally come for a game, but the players were the regulars, the enthusiasts. They were, in some cases, a peculiar lot. Alexander Pachulia, a plump and friendly teacher who is the deputy director of the club, told me, “Usually, chess people are not very attached to their regular careers. They are almost uninterested in anything other than chess. If we didn’t close up at ten, people would play until ten in the morning and die of hunger right in their chair.” The club is open year-round except for New Year’s Day and the Orthodox Christmas and Easter.

After the collapse of the Soviet system—and, with it, the subsidized Soviet chess system—many players pursued their careers abroad. As players from the former Soviet Union started showing up at tournaments under new flags, he said, “there was a feeling of loss.” Like several other denizens of the club, Pachulia acknowledged Kasparov’s genius as a player but was cool to him as a person and as a politician. “I rooted for Kasparov against Karpov in the eighties because of Kasparov’s anti-Communism and Karpov stood for Soviet power,” Pachulia went on. “But now we live in a different world. We need to be more assertive in the world. If NATO includes Ukraine and Georgia and other states on our border developing so-called democracy, that tells us that you”—the United States—“are putting arms on our borders. Democracy! Nonsense!”

Pachulia, like the majority of Russians, would prefer to see Putin remain President for at least another four years. To elect anyone else, he said, even one of Putin’s handpicked protégés, would be a risk that the country could ill afford. “Russia is gigantic and needs a strong hand,” he said. Kasparov’s politics and language were too foreign, and it made the players at the club dubious not only about his capacities as a politician but even about his loyalty to the Russian state. “The West needs someone to run Russia for them, someone to order around as their instrument, and they want to do that with Garry Kasparov,” Pachulia said. “The West is worried about the strength of Vladimir Putin.” ♦