THE DICTATOR AND HIS HOBBY
Kalmykian Leader Makes Farce of Chess Championships
By Maik Grossekathöfer
Spiegel Online
Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov, president of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia and of the world chess body, is hosting this year’s world championships. The match, though, threatens to break down amid a bathroom break scandal. The president, critics say, is ruining the game.
The article continues with…
Ilyumzhinov has ruled one Russia’s poorest republics, a dusty strip of land bordering the Caspian Sea, home to 290,000 people, since 1993. He assumed the presidency of FIDE two years later. In 1998, he organized the Chess Olympiad in the Kalmykian capital of Elista, fulfilling yet another of Babushka’s predictions — that people would come to Elista from all over the world in that year.
This year, the focus is once again on Elista, with its population of just over 100,000. The chess world championships are underway, with Russian Vladimir Kramnik and Bulgarian Veselin Topalov battling it out for the title. Entering Thursday’s 12th and final match, the two chess geniuses are tied at 5.5 points a piece — with a pot of $1 million waiting to be split between them.
But regardless of who wins the 2006 title, President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has dragged competitive chess into its deepest crisis ever.
The World Championship this year is a farce. It all started when Topalov, who was behind 3:1, accused his Russian adversary of cheating. It was “odd, if not suspicious,” said Topalov, that in the third match, between moves 15 and 16, Kramnik went to his private bathroom three times within 13 minutes — at 3:55 p.m., 3:57 p.m. and 4:03 p.m. In the ensuing days, objections were filed, bathrooms were closed and then reopened, Kramnik failed to appear for the fifth match, open letters were written and lawsuits announced.
While all this was going on, Ilyumzhinov was shuttling back and forth between Moscow, where he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Elista. At one point he fired the panel of referees, which he had appointed himself, and personally took on its responsibilities. He rules FIDE “in the same authoritarian way he runs his impoverished republic,” chess legend Garry Kasparov wrote in a recent editorial for the Wall Street Journal. “Serious sponsors rarely want anything to do with Mr. Ilyumzhinov and his organization.”
Nevertheless, Ilyumzhinov was reconfirmed as FIDE’s president in June. A quick reference to the millions of dollars of his own money already invested in the game is enough to silence all critics. He quashes opposition from within FIDE.
A gaunt man, Ilyumzhinov is partial to dictators and dictatorship. He wanted to hold the World Championship in Baghdad in 1996 and had already made arrangements with the then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In 2004, he made Libya the venue for that year’s championship. Indeed, Ilyumzhinov likes to refer to himself as a mixture of “Napoleon, Lenin, de Gaulle and Marx.”
His likeness is displayed prominently throughout the republic — from Elista’s airport to the billboards along Kalmykia’s roads — images of the president on horseback, with Putin, with the Russian Orthodox patriarch and with the Dalai Lama.
The president is himself no slouch when it comes to chess. He won the Kalmykian national chess championship in 1976 at the tender age of 14. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Kalmykian came into a great deal of money, though it remains unclear exactly where it came from. He owns a private jet and six Rolls Royces — he has himself chauffeured around Moscow in his black limousine but prefers a white one while at home in Elista. He also sunk $50 million to construct City Chess, a settlement on the city’s outskirts designed to resemble a collection of country houses, complete with a glass palace — the venue for the Kramnik v. Topalov duel.
Ilyumzhinov is an admirer of chess phantom Bobby Fischer and compares him with Isaac Newton, Copernicus and Russian cosmonaut Yury Gagarin. Ten years ago he issued a directive, known as Ukaz 129, to promote chess in Kalmykia. Chess is now part of the curriculum in the first three years of elementary school, and 17 pupils have already placed in the world rankings, an astonishing achievement, especially compared to the Russians.
The rest of the article can be read here. 
Just another standard anti-Ilyumzhinov article in the mainstream press. I presume the author of this article is not much of a chessplayer. The biggest crisis in the history of chess? No way. If people want to blame Ilyumzhinov, isn’t it more correct to say that the people who voted for him again are “ruining chess”? How much blame do the players and the managers receive for the current “crisis”? The UFOs and Babushka psychic stuff are titillation for the average reader of this magazine. Not much here, really.
Chess is for everyone and should not be controled like this…regardless of what one indivitual does.
Chess is a game were two player face each other with everthing exposed in front of them.
What goes on within the FIDE is But True Exposure
Ilyumzhinov seems ok. I would like to see Bush insisting on chess curriculum.
I don’t know what Ilyumzhinov could do more for chess.
Who on hell invested 50 millions in chess?
In CHESS? Do you immagine that?
I love this guy.
“Ilyumzhinov seems ok…I love this guy. “
He agrees with you
He loves himself too
He is a despotic dictator from the last century, ruining chess.
Those who voted for him should be ashamed of their affront to humanity
>He is a despotic dictator
That is right, and it is despicable. On the other hand, somehow, a 12 trillion democratic GDP cannot spend 50 millions on chess, but can spend many billions on NFL or Bible study.
I think Kirsan is a great guy and has given so much to chess… I can’t believe these chess players can complain about him when nobody wants to sponsor chess…. it’s a slow tedious game, and only someone that loves the game is willing to sponsor, very few american corporations with money, unless it’s man versus machine…
Anyway, Kirsan seems like a really cool guy. And all the GM’s complaining about him, are nothing but ungrateful.
Major sponsors want nothing to do with him?
The statement is exactly backwards. Because of him, there are some big-bucks opportunities.
I’m surprise that Susan Polgar posted this on her blog. Whatever the current FIDE president has done or not done for chess doesn’t warrant such an article being circulated. Its reference to psychics and alien seems more like fantasy and a blatant effort to character assasinate this man. Please, lets stick to facts rather than conjectures & hypothesis of his believes and practices. We all agree that topalov’s unproven claim that his opponent is using a computer should be condemned so why this double standards towards the FIDE president?
The best of the article is at the end:
In fact, says Ilyumzhinov, it is quite possible that the world’s population will soon be living in a single, American state. “As long as order and discipline prevail — what’s the problem?”
And what about the extraterrestrials? “The day will come when they land on our planet and say: ‘You have behaved poorly. Why do you wage wars? Why do you destroy each other?'” the president says. “Then they will pack us all into their spaceships and take us away from this place.”
Given his psychic’s success rate so far, we may want to start packing.
At least Kirsan didn’t kill 655,000 Iraqis.
Very amusing article! Susan : thanks for the link!!! I gather Kalmykia is a Buddhist country and Kirsan follows that cultural tradition – with as little concern for the principle of compassion as Westerners have for the principle of Christian love.
Anonymous Frank