And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to have with me today.

Gary Kaspirov, the great chess champion, one of the greatest chess players of all time,

maybe many people say the greatest chess player of all time, but I won't ask you to comment on that

one way or the other, a leader of a fight for democracy in Russia.

And there's so much to talk about.

I'm not sure where to begin, but I'll begin where I first heard of you, I think,

which was, as you were a great young chess player,

and then those epic matches with Kpov and in 1984 and 1985 and I remember reading

not just I had a mild interest in chess not just about the chess matches but about your own

biography in the Soviet Union.

Soviet Union was a long time ago now.

It's hard to believe, 25 years.

So what was it like growing up in the Soviet Union?

I mean.

Yeah, I think the reason you looked at this matches probably was not so much the chess factor but so the political element

which was inevitable because in the Soviet Union chess was treated by the Soviet authorities as a very important and useful

ideological tool to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the

Soviet Communist regime over the

Decident West. So that's why the Spaski's defeat, Boris Spaski defeat in

1972 when Bobby Fisher, you know, took the crown from the hands of the Soviet

chess school because since 1948, you know, chess title was strongly in the hands of Soviet players.

This event was treated by people in both sides Atlantic as a crunching moment in the midst of the Cold War.

...