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Garry Kasparov played some fierce matches in his 20 years atop the world of chess, but none as intense or as dangerous as the one he is playing now against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

His fierce opposition to Mr. Putin's growing authoritarianism has made him a stone in the Russian leader's boot - and a tempting target for the dark forces that surround him.

Mindful of what happened to journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a Kremlin critic who was shot and killed at her Moscow apartment last fall, he keeps a squad of bodyguards at home in Moscow. After what befell former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died after being poisoned with a radioactive substance in London last November, he never touches the food when he flies the Russian state airline Aeroflot.

To be extra safe, he sent his third wife, Dasha, to New York last year to give birth to their daughter, Aida, in safety.

"I do worry about my personal safety," he said in an interview in Toronto, where he is to deliver a speech at the Empire Club of Canada today. "I know that even bodyguards are not going to guard me against a serious attack. Our activists are facing these assaults every day. No one is safe in Putin's Russia."

But far from being cowed, the native of Baku, Azerbaijan, is fighting back with the same intensity that earned him the nickname "the beast of Baku" when he demolished rival after rival in chess.

Mr. Putin, he said yesterday, has set up a "police state" in Russia. "It's completely undemocratic and it's getting worse every day."

Mr. Kasparov has reason to know. In April, he was arrested along with 170 others when his opposition group held a demonstration in the heart of Moscow.

More than 9,000 police were deployed to handle 5,000 peaceful protesters. Mr. Kasparov was held for several hours on a charge of "walking along the street in a big crowd chanting anti-government slogans."

"That was the official charge," he marvels.

Last month police took away his passport and prevented him from boarding a flight to central Russia, where he planned to stage another protest march at a European Union-Russia summit.

Mr. Kasparov said he decided early on that the first task of his opposition group was merely to survive.

"The Kremlin is getting pretty nervous and they attack us. So the first stage, when they ignore our existence, is over."

Mr. Kasparov is the chairman of the United Civil Front, a group established in 2005 to foster democratic opposition in Russia. He also acts as a strategist for the Other Russia, a coalition of political parties and movements from the political left and right.

The Other Russia is still a minnow against the power of the Kremlin, which has grown steadily stronger as oil revenues pour in and the Russian news media fall more and more under state control.

Though Mr. Kasparov is famous internationally, he is seldom seen on Russian media. The much-seen Mr. Putin, by contrast, continues to enjoy stratospheric approval ratings in opinion polls. In such an atmosphere, Mr. Kasparov can only hope to be a gadfly, not a giant killer.

With the flat nose of a boxer, Mr. Kasparov looks every bit the fighter he is. In person, he is intense and focused, speaking at a machine-gun pace in fluent but accented English.

Despite Mr. Putin's recent blustering about U.S. anti-missile defences in Europe, which brought warnings of a new Cold War, Mr. Kasparov says Mr. Putin's Russia is not a "geopolitical monster."

Unlike the Soviet Union, which had an ideology it tried to export around the world, the current Kremlin's only ideology is "let's steal together," he says.

"It's about profits. They are doing everything they can to increase the profits of KGB Inc."

The key to chess, he says, as in all leadership, is to be objective about your strengths and weaknesses and use that knowledge to adapt.

That is something he doesn't expect Mr. Putin, a martial arts practitioner, to understand.

"What can you expect from a judo fighter," he says.

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From chess champ to Kremlin critic

Born in 1963 in Baku, in what was then Soviet Azerbaijan, Garry Kasparov demonstrated an early talent for chess. He was the USSR junior champion at the age of 13 and an international grandmaster at 17. At 22, he became the youngest world champion in history. By 34, he was considered the greatest player in the history of chess.

But he will be remembered in part for one of his few losses: a 1997 match against IBM supercomputer Deep Blue that was seen by some as a watershed moment in technological advancement. In 2003, Mr. Kasparov averted a similar defeat when he agreed to a draw in the last game of a series against Deep Junior, which could process three million chess moves a second. The six-game series, dubbed Man versus Machine, ended in a 3-3 tie.

Never easygoing, Mr. Kasparov was considered a nuisance to the chess establishment, quarrelling with the official World Chess Federation and breaking away to create a rival group.

In March, 2005, he retired from professional play, but says, "I still remember how to move the pieces."

He plays some exhibition games and also plays on the Internet "just for fun."

In his role as an activist opposed to the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he says he is appalled that Western leaders stand side by side with Mr. Putin at gatherings like the recent G8 summit. "Every time he's recognized as an equal at these summits, the Kremlin propaganda immediately portrays it as a fact that he is one of the democratic leaders. Even the President of the United States says that 'Putin is my friend.' "

Sources: research.ibm.com, Marcus Gee and The Globe and Mail