Yevgeny Gontmakher, an economist who worked as a senior adviser to the Cabinet until 2003, told me, “Even Putin doesn’t know what he’s going to do yet. He is just reacting to events, day by day. You might see him make some democratic-seeming moves toward the end of the year. He wants to legitimatize his power in the eyes of the West. There won’t be a third term. He wants to join the club of former Presidents: Bush, Chirac, and all the rest. At the same time, there are a lot of problems that are coming due and there is always the chance that the price of oil will drop. Winning the Olympics for Sochi marked the peak of his popularity. So why hang on?”

Yet stories persist that Putin may yet do so. According to a report in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, a Kremlin working group is examining scenarios for constitutional change to allow Putin more terms. The pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, has well in excess of the two-thirds majority needed to alter the law. In the end, though, Putin will almost certainly prefer to maintain the patina of democratic procedure—“I have no intention to reduce everything I’ve done to zero”—and preserve a strong influence over his successor. When he was asked earlier this month about his desire to continue in public life, Putin, with characteristic vagueness, said, “I hope to be fit enough and I have the desire to do so. Any future President will have to reckon with that.”

Living in Moscow in the late nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, I spent many weekend mornings at various halls around the city—the House of Film, the Architect’s Union, the Writer’s Union—listening to Moscow intellectuals make speeches demanding that Gorbachev push reforms forward, faster. Kasparov’s political education took place at these meetings. He was at the zenith of his celebrity as a chess champion. Within a few years of Gorbachev’s rise to power, in March, 1985, political groups called nyeformali, or “informals,” were created, first in Moscow and then throughout the Soviet Union. The most important of these early groups was Moscow Tribune, a “discussion group,” dominated by former political dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Larisa Bogoraz, and Sergei Kovalyov and a range of shestidesyatniki, intellectual members of the sixties generation, who came of age after the death of Stalin. With Kasparov often sitting in the audience, they discussed history, economics, democratization, human rights, and ethnic problems in the Caucasus, the Baltic States, and Central Asia.

“The environment was different in 1987, 1988, 1989 than it is now,” Kasparov said. “There was consensus in Soviet society that the game was over. There was a demand for change. People were opposed to the old Soviet system, from the feudal republics in Central Asia to the Baltics, which were essentially part of Europe. The system had outlived itself. But there was no clear plan. There was a demand. Everyone recognized that oil prices were going down and the Soviet system would collapse. . . . Today, the majority of people don’t like what they feel and see, but there is a defensive layer: what if something else is worse? They remember it could be worse like it was when the economy collapsed in 1998, or when the Union collapsed, in 1991.”

One of the earliest ethnic conflicts under Gorbachev was the dispute in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. In those days, Kasparov split his time between his home town, Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, and frequent trips to Moscow and matches abroad. On January 13, 1990, he and his team of chess trainers were at a resort north of Baku, preparing for a match. The atmosphere throughout the region was tense. There had already been violence against the minority populations, especially against Armenians in the town of Sumgait. That evening in Baku, gangs stormed through Armenian neighborhoods, beating men, women, and children. They torched apartments and houses; there were rapes and stabbings.

Kasparov wanted to help his friends and relatives in Baku, but he was stuck; there were rumors that the gangs were headed to the resort where he was training and to other towns in the republic. A few days later, he was able to go to his apartment in Baku but had time only to grab some family pictures and childhood chess notebooks. The Azerbaijanis, together with the K.G.B., had shut down most flights, trains, and other transport out of Baku. Kasparov, however, was somehow able to arrange a chartered plane from Moscow. On the seventeenth, he filled all sixty-eight seats with other Armenians and left for the Soviet capital. When the violence subsided, almost all of the Armenians who still lived in Baku had fled. On January 20th, the Soviet Army, under Gorbachev’s command, moved into Baku not to save Armenians—it was too late for that—but to protect the leadership of the Azerbaijani Communist Party against a growing opposition. Kasparov, whose privilege allowed him to stay at the Regency Hotel in New York and the St. James Club in Paris, had become a refugee. He has never returned to Baku.

“I always believed that a city is not the stones, a city is the people,” he told the magazine New in Chess. “Baku is no longer the Baku where I was born and where I used to live. There are some gravestones at the cemetery. My father, my two grandfathers, and one grandmother were buried there. But it is just a matter of stones.”

The Moscow intelligentsia was ambivalent about Gorbachev. He had freed Sakharov from his forced exile in Gorky and gradually unfettered the press, the publishing houses, and the universities. But by 1989 many had grown impatient with his need to maneuver between the demands of the old élites of the Communist Party and the K.G.B. and the demands of the urban intellectuals who wanted him to abandon the entire Soviet system. Few were more unforgiving of Gorbachev than Kasparov. After the pogroms in Baku, he had met with Gorbachev and found him unmoved and “unimpressed” by his accounts of the bloodshed there. “All he could talk about was some new chief of the Azerbaijani Communist Party,” Kasparov said. “For him, it was all big picture. To sacrifice a single life did not seem to greatly matter.” When Kasparov travelled abroad, and when he wrote for Western newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, he denounced Gorbachev as a liar, a clever and desperate apparatchik, “the last leader of the communist state, trying to save everything he can.” Before the first Gulf War, Kasparov told anyone who would listen that the United States should drop an atomic bomb on Saddam Hussein. During the resistance in Moscow to the 1991 coup attempt, Kasparov took the conspiratorial position that Gorbachev had been behind the plot—that, in an effort to establish a national state of emergency and yet “keep his hands clean,” he had pretended to be under house arrest at his dacha in the town of Foros, in Ukraine.

“I guess I am fifteen years older now, more experienced,” Kasparov told me. “I was young and my political education was Soviet. I saw things in black-and-white, Communist and anti-Communist. Now in the Other Russia I find myself having to compromise with people who were my sworn enemies.” His newfound diplomacy, however, does not prevent him from comparing Putin’s Kremlin to “the Mafia” and “the Stalin regime.”

Kasparov says that he was “dead wrong” to support Yeltsin for reëlection to the Russian Presidency in 1996, even though it was a fairly open secret that Yeltsin, who had started a cruel and senseless war in Chechnya, was too addled to rule effectively. Rather than risk allowing Yeltsin’s opponent, the Communist Gennady Zyuganov, to come to power, Kasparov was one of those who chose to ignore the fact that Yeltsin, supported by oligarchs hoping to maintain their status, returned to power in a crooked ballot.

“We knew it was neither a fair nor a free election,” Kasparov said. “But we so feared a Communist resurrection that I personally went to Communist strongholds—Ulyanovsk, Kursk, Kaluga—and campaigned. Then Yeltsin was elected and the country was looted by these men who put him forward.”

Kasparov is hardly a conventional politician. His appeal is the stubborn purity, almost naïveté, of his politics, the prestige of his former position as chess champion, and the public sense that he is an idealist. Even the leaders of the anti-Putin intelligentsia who argue with Kasparov recognize that he could easily have lived a comfortable life in Moscow or joined the flow of rich migrants to South Kensington, the Seventh Arrondissement, or the Upper East Side.

“The understanding of what an opposition is has been compromised in recent years—it’s a term used ironically or skeptically or dismissed entirely,” said Arseny Roginsky, the chairman of Memorial, a group devoted to human rights and historical memory. “This is the era of exposés and scandals, and everyone is seen to be crawling back to the Kremlin, for funding or whatever. This is the era of complete distrust. And so everyone’s opposition credentials are disdained or dismissed. Except for Garry. He is unique, really. No one doubts that he is in opposition to the Kremlin. He might be a good politician or a bad politician, but no one doubts his sincerity. In Russia today, you need to believe that an opposition exists—the image of an opposition, even. Kasparov is honest. As a little boy, part Jewish, part Caucasian, he had huge responsibilities. Now he plays a different game. And this earns him respect. It’s also important that he is so famous. He belongs to the world.”

“I don’t completely understand Garry, but he has huge reserves of energy and talent,” Ludmila Alexeeva, a sixties-era dissident and a leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a predominant human-rights organization, said. “Russia, historically, has had its share of idealists. And I would say that Garry is in that tradition.”

Kasparov’s demeanor hardly resembles Sakharov’s saintly carriage. After losing a match, he could be dismissive of autograph-seekers, rude to waiters, self-centered in the extreme; sometimes he would humiliate the grand masters who helped to train him, pouncing on a piece of dubious advice and showing them, move by move, just how feebleminded their suggestion was. Like anyone who has been the focus of admiration since kindergarten, Kasparov is ego-driven; people wait on him; friends, family, and wives (there have been three) know that his needs come first. And yet, for the most part, he is as generous as he is intelligent. Despite the single-minded attention he has given to an abstruse game of sixty-four squares, he is interested in everything from sports (soccer, especially) to literature (his favorite novel is Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” a celebrated example of allegory in the Soviet era).

Kasparov was born in 1963 in Baku. His father, Kim Weinstein, was Jewish, and his mother, Klara Kasparova, Armenian. When Garry was around six, he picked up an endgame puzzle in the newspaper and solved it, even though he didn’t yet know the rules of chess. “Since Garry knows how the game ends,” his father said, “we ought to teach him how it begins.”

The next year, Kim Weinstein died, of cancer. Garry started to play chess obsessively. In those days, chess was a Soviet obsession and the regime sponsored an elaborate network of chess academies; Garry started to train at one run by the former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik. At the age of twelve, Garry was attracting national attention in chess, and he took his mother’s family name. “When I began to have public success at chess, it seemed natural,” he said. “My teacher, Botvinnik, himself of Jewish ancestry, added that it wouldn’t hurt my chances of success in the U.S.S.R. not to be named Weinstein.” The next year, he played his first tournament abroad, and by eighteen he was the Soviet champion, surrounded by admirers and under endless pressure to perform.