He has done far better than his predecessors did.

With the notable exceptions of Gorbachev and Kruschev, Little Hawk. Of course it wasn't his fault he inherited such a mess of rampant capitalism: America's favourite, Yeltsin, was responsible for that. Kasparov incidentally is, or was, a candidate for the Russian presidency, representing The Other Russia which is an amalgam of some of the opposition parties. Naturally he had/has no hope of winning.

I would apologise for thread drift except that the thread has been in drift mode from the start: I don't think Fischer ever played Kasparov at any level. So I will continue the drift in case someone finds it interesting.

Fischer's opponent in the famous clash of Titans at Reykjavik was Boris Spassky, and that was the only true world championship in which he played.

Fischer had wanted the 1972 match to be in Belgrade but Spassky's preference was Iceland. How Spassky won on that point I don't know, since many Fischer conditions, some bizarre, were met without argument. For the rematch 20 years later, the venue was indeed Belgrade and the match was played in defiance of US sanctions then in effect against Yugoslavia. As a result Fischer finished up either indicted or persona non grata in the US and settled in .... Iceland.

He was supposed to play Karpov (not to be confused with Kasparov) in another world championship in 1975, but not all of his 64 conditions (one for every square of the board) were met and he resigned the match. One condition was that the match should continue until one player had won 10 games, which meant it could have gone on for ever. A first-to-six championship in the 1920s took 34 games to complete. Draws have bcome ever more likely in subsequent years, encouraging a theory that the realistic possibilities in chess are close to exhaustion. As I am myself after that little discourse.