Book Review: WINTER IS COMING, Garry Kasparov, Public Affairs, 291 pgs.

      Would you play chess with Garry Kasparov?   Probably only if he paid you.   But Mr. Kasparov has been "playing" chess with Vladimir Putin since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.  Since that time, he has been an advocate for democracy in the former USSR.  In a piece by Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in the area of intelligence and national security, the efforts of the retired chess world champion were directed at promoting democracy among the liberated Russyians.  Mr. Schoenfeld says the book "Winter Is Coming" presents a picture  of the internal forces propelling Russya's descent  into aggressive authoritarianism.  And it offers a scathing analysis of the contribution of the West to that outcome.
      Mr. Kasparov allows that after the collapse of the USSR, no real effort was made to expose the truth of what went on under Stalin and the Communist regime he ran for generations.  Without this exposure, the security apparatus remained intact.   Vlad Putin was a part of this apparatus and continues to govern in this vane.   Having served in the KGB from 1975 until the collapse, Mr. Putin is steeped in the methods and psychology of the state security system, now called the FSB.   He knows how to use subterfuge, propaganda, and violence.
     Mr. Kasparov was a victim of these characteristics when he began to enter the political realm of Russya:  he was beaten by thugs of the government; endured confinement in a Moscova prison cell; and then,  self-imposed exile in the West.    Mr. Kasparov traces events in Chechnya; the plundering of the economy by Putin and his cronies; the murders of Sergei Magnitsky and Boris Nemtsov; the invasion of Crimea; the assault on Ukraine and active support of rebels in that country; and includes many other minor international 'gambits'.
      This is a must read for citizens of the West who wish an understanding of what is happening in Europe's other country.   As long as Mad Vlad is at the helm of the largest country on the globe, it will bear watching, closely.   Any man who murders his own people for more power can never be accepted as a model world citizen.  Now he is in the country of Syria with his bombers supporting a dictator who murders his own people to hold on to power.  He is also courting Iran, another tin pot country of prehistoric Neanderthals.  Only Pres. Obama has him figured out:  let him bluster and thunder about the Middle East for soon, another "Afghanistan plague will land in Moscova.