Russian politics: chess or judo?

This is an interesting weekend interview in the WSJ with Garry Kasparov, who is apparently taking very seriously his role as ‘moderator’ for the “Other Russia” coalition (moderator so far; as the editor notes, Kasparov does not necessarily exclude representing the “Other Russia” as its presidential candidate, with hopes of checkmating Putin). The only major problem is, I think, that despite Vladimir Putin’s invisibility in chess, relative to Mr. Kasparov, he does have a hell of a comparative advantage over the chess grandmaster, in judo. And guess who gets to make the rules and choose which way to combat… I’d suggest therefore that they find a top judoka (I am not so sure Mikhail Kasyanov is -or can be- one, though he probably knows Putin’s Harai Goshi technique much better than Kasparov does… ) if they want to be a serious challenge to Putin (or to Putin’s to-be-protégé, since it is rather unlikely that Putin would candidate himself for a third time- that would require some fixes to the current Russian Constitution that even a black belt 6 dan judoka President might have a hard time justifying…).
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