During its first year, the Williamsburg Indivisible Group (WIG) decided that we needed to read important stuff to get smarter about the issues we cared about. The first book we read was Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, which scared the living s**t out of us. You should read this book.
Most of us remember Garry Kasparov the chess master. He was a chess prodigy — starting to play at the age of 7 and rising in the ranks of the chess world to become the World Chess champion in 1985 at the age of 22. He held the title through 2000 when he was 37. In the 2000s, he became active in the Russian opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. He ran against Putin in the 2007 Presidential election, and after a strong initial showing, withdrew from the race when the forces behind Putin made it impossible for him to hold events or meet with his supporters. He continued to work against Putin until 2013, when it became so dangerous for him to live in Russia that he relocated to New York City. He attained Croatian citizenship while living in New York, and he has lived in Croatia since 2020. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)
I don’t know about everyone else, but I had kind of lost track of Russia since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War was over, right? I taught high school Comparative Government for a number of years in the 1990s and 2000s, and Russia was one of the countries we studied. But I focused on Russian history, culture, and the constitutional structure of the Russian government. I didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on in Russia at the time I was teaching about it. Our textbooks were out-of-date (new textbooks cost money), time was short (it always is when you’re teaching) and I missed the real story — that Putin was systematically destroying the Russian democracy that had emerged from the fall of the Soviet Union.
Reading Kasparov’s book as part of our WIG book group was both informative and terrifying. When the Mueller Report summarized the connections of the Trump campaign with Russia, I commented on Twitter about my concerns regarding Russian influence in American politics. Some rando responded, criticizing me by saying that Russia was not the military force it used to be, and I should just relax (or some such thing). Thanks, rando dude. Russia is not the military force it used to be — but it doesn’t need the military when it has social media bots spewing disinformation across the globe. We learned about its troll farm in St. Petersburg during the 2016 election, and we have learned more about its bots and cyberattacks in the years since. Read what the US Senate reported about this here, in case it’s slipped your mind.
Our group also read Rachel Maddow’s 2019 best-seller Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth. In this book, she talked about how dependent the Russian economy is on oil and gas, and how pretty much everything Russia does can be explained by this economic reality. The United States doesn’t emerge from her analysis smelling like a rose, by the way. You should also read this book.
Back to Kasparov. In his book, he provides a behind-the-scenes look at Putin’s rise to power, and warns us all — in no uncertain terms — that “winter is coming.” The reference is to the enormously popular books, TV series, and videogame “Game of Thrones.” The specific meaning in this saga is that the Stark family, the lords of the north, are always aware that the relative ease of summer is always followed by the harshness of winter. Metaphorically, the meaning Kasparov imparts to this phrase is that darkness is coming. He means Putin’s Russia. As I’m writing this, Russia military forces are arrayed on its border with Ukraine, threatening an invasion that could undermine the peace and security of all of the world.
Winter is coming, indeed.
I'm afraid you are right. It hurts my heart to think about those who support obvious and underhanded methods away from representative government and toward authoritarian ideas. The more I read, not just from your sources, but in general and more focused on governments specifically, the more I realize the importance of informed support for not just the freedoms we have, but understanding the ease in which those freedoms can vanish without positive support to declare and maintain liberal internationalism where the ideas of our country: limited division of government, rule of law, and specific rights within our Constitution, are upheld and shared. Order makes our world function in a collaborative and co-operative way where free people can compete and progress. Without it, spring will not follow.