Lindsborg ? Lindsborg authorities have been gearing up for this weekend’s visit of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

“Like any good police work, you prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” said Lindsborg Police Chief Tim Berggren. “We’ve had weekly meetings for well over a month. We’ll be ready by this weekend.”

Berggren heads security for the Chess for Peace events, which begin at 10 a.m. Saturday. But he’s getting help from the McPherson County Sheriff’s Office, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, Kansas Highway Patrol and Bethany College security.

Gorbachev will spend Friday and Saturday nights in Lindsborg at the Rosberg House Bed & Breakfast. Earlier Friday, he will speak at Kansas State University in Manhattan, delivering a lecture in the series named for former Kansas Gov. Alf Landon.

“We always need to be very careful with dignitaries of this caliber,” said Mikhail Korenman, Chess for Peace director.

Korenman also runs the Karpov International School of Chess in Lindsborg. The school’s namesake, Anatoly Karpov, a seven-time world chess champion, established Chess for Peace to promote understanding around the globe. He and Gorbachev are friends and will appear together in Lindsborg.

Gorbachev is bringing his own security guards and an interpreter, said Wes Fisk, Lindsborg, the Chess for Peace publicity chairman. The former president is expected to make a brief appearance at the parade.

He will speak and answer questions at an 11 a.m. press conference in the Burnett Center on the Bethany College campus, with Korenman and former world chess champions Karpov and Susan Polgar.

Gorbachev also will appear at the chess match between Karpov and Polgar at 3:30 p.m. in Presser Hall on the Bethany campus and at a 5:15 p.m. fundraising dinner at the Sandzen Memorial Art Gallery.

At 7:30 p.m., he will make an address in Presser Hall with Alan Murray, assistant managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. No backpacks will be allowed at the address, Berggren said.

Only the security officials know for sure how Gorbachev and his group will make their way around the town of 3,300.

“I think they take the attitude that probably the fewer people who know what plans are, the better,” Fisk said. “There’s definitely no set format.”