For those who still remember the Cold War at its height, this weekend’s G8 summit in Moscow will provide a powerful sense of déjà vu. When President Bush arrives at the Kremlin tomorrow, he might well rub his eyes and ask himself: did we really win? Did we throw out the mummified corpse of a totalitarian one-party state, only to replace it with an authoritarian one-party state? Did we force the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into liquidation, only to install the United Russia Party? Is the evil empire dead, or has it merely mutated?

The President’s host is, of course, Valdimir Putin, the cadaverous former KGB colonel. Mr. Putin has been demolishing the jerry-built structures of post-Soviet democracy before our very eyes — so far, with complete impunity. He makes one nostalgic for the days of bumbling Boris Yeltsin, which now look like a brief interlude in the long history of Russian despotism.

True — Russians today are less oppressed than they were during the three quarters of a century from Lenin’s coup in 1917 to the August coup in 1991. But Mr. Putin has not so far needed to imprison or exile many individuals in order to silence his opponents. Instead, he uses the wealth generated by capitalism to corrupt and blackmail them instead. The tax system is a powerful tool in the hands of a tyrant.

In fact, Mr. Putin is now recreating the system of command capitalism that emerged during the First World War. It was the brainchild of a great German-Jewish industrialist, Walther Rathenau, who as foreign minister of the Weimar Republic was the first to end the isolation of the Soviets with the Treaty of Rapallo and was assassinated soon afterwards. Having demonized Rathenau, the Nazis shamelessly imitated both his “war capitalism” and his pact with the Soviets.

Now Mr. Putin is doing exactly the same thing. He demonizes the capitalist “oligarchs,” many of whom are Jews, using thinly disguised anti-Semitic propaganda. Yet the ruthless monopolistic methods of the tycoons he favors are indistinguishable from those of the oligarchs he persecutes. Not only is big business now slavishly obedient to the President, but the public square has become his private space. Mr. Putin might as well appropriate for himself the title that was once the tsars’s: “Autocrat of all the Russias.”

Yet there is one national figure who refuses to bend the knee to Vlad the Imperial — Garry Kasparov. The former world chess champion, together with other courageous opponents of the regime, has done something of unprecedented audacity. This week, on the eve of the G8, he organized a rival summit, entitled “Different Russia.” Despite the warning issued by the Kremlin that attendance at this alternative summit would be regarded as an “unfriendly act,” Mr. Kasparov persuaded the State Department to send two senior American officials and the Foreign Office to send the British ambassador to attend.

This was a diplomatic and political coup for the Russian opposition such as it has not enjoyed in years. The G8 summit is hugely important to Mr. Putin’s prestige, and he will not lightly forgive anybody who rains on his parade. Yet Mr. Kasparov and his friends have stolen the show. The rest of the world has chosen to listen, not only to the regime, but to its critics too.

For more than two years now Russian television, which is now entirely controlled either by the state or by corporations close to Mr. Putin, has not given Mr. Kasparov any airtime at all. Yet this is a man who, besides his illustrious chess career, is a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal and one of very few living Russians to have made his name struggling against rather than profiting from the Soviet system.

Mr. Kasparov, now 43, has spent much of the last 18 months since he retired from chess campaigning in the Russian provinces, where the Russian secret police have done their best to sabotage opposition politics. But he is all the more determined to ensure that the next presidential election in 2008 will pose a real challenge to Mr. Putin, who is not eligible to run for a third term of office.

As in chess, so in politics: you have to analyze the position and work out a strategy. According to Mr. Kasparov, Russian politics at present is all about energy prices. He believes that Mr. Putin is deliberately stalling American attempts to pressurize Iran, because the tension created by the nuclear threat to the Middle East is keeping oil prices high, which suits Russia — the ultimate source of Iranian nuclear technology.

It is also part of this analysis that Mr. Putin is using his control of European gas and oil supplies to manipulate the internal politics of its neighbors, such as Belarus, Ukraine, and even Poland. The European Union, too, is beholden to Russia. The Kremlin has politicians like former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and great corporations such as British Petroleum dancing to his tune.

Russia, in short, has no place in the G8, because its rulers mock democracy, the rule of law and the freedom of the press. Worse, it is using its influence at the United Nations and elsewhere to hinder America in mobilizing the free world against the Islamist threat. Almost the only public intellectual in Russia who dares to point these things out is Mr. Kasparov.

Moscow today is eerily reminiscent of the surreal world depicted by Mikhail Bulgakov in his great satire on Stalinism, “The Master and Maragarita.” In the novel, which was written during the purges of the 1930s but only published posthumously in 1967, the Devil appears in Moscow in the guise of Woland, a suave magician who exposes the twisted morality of a totalitarian society, and especially of its intellectual apologists. Amid the suffocating atmosphere created by Stalin’s Great Terror, Woland’s black magic represents an unfamiliar, anarchical freedom.

Mr. Kasparov has a touch of Woland about him. In a society that has reverted to a state of fear, conformity, and moral cowardice, he is fearless, impish, and outspoken. He lives dangerously, defying Mr. Putin’s fellow spooks to come and get him. He might as well be the Devil incarnate, anyway, for all the difference it makes to the Kremlin. His Jewish father and Armenian mother are enough to demonize him in the eyes of the anti-Semitic “patriots” who insinuate that he is a tool of mysterious foreign interests.

And of course Mr. Kasparov is a kind of magician — on the chessboard, probably the greatest that has ever lived. Whether he can apply his genius to the messier world of politics, so much less calculable and so much more brutal, remains to be seen. But he is a true heir to the dissidents of the past. If Messrs. Bush and Blair are wise, they will give as much encouragement to Mr. Kasparov today as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did to Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky two decades ago.