Michael Specter (The New Yorker): Planet Kirsan

Planet Kirsan
Inside a chess master’s fiefdom
By Michael Specter

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov is not your typical post-Soviet millionaire Buddhist autocrat. He is the ruler of Kalmykia, one of the least well known of Russia’s twenty-one republics. He also happens to be president of the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, or FIDE, the governing body of world chess. Ilyumzhinov functions a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Instead of a balloon, though, he uses a private jet. In Kalmykia, a barren stretch of land wedged between Stavropol and Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, you can’t miss the man: his picture dominates the airport arrivals hall, and billboards all along the rutted road that leads to Elista, the capital, show him on horseback or next to various people he regards as peers—Vladimir Putin, the Dalai Lama, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II. At the local museum, an exhibit called Planet Kirsan displays gifts that he has received from visiting dignitaries. Another exhibit, devoted to his chess memorabilia, is on view at the Chess Museum, which is housed on the third floor of the Chess Palace, in the center of Chess City, which Ilyumzhinov built on the outskirts of the capital—at a cost of nearly fifty million dollars—for the 1998 Chess Olympiad.

Ilyumzhinov was the Kalmyk national champion by the age of fourteen, and he is convinced that, with his authority as the president of FIDE, he can turn a nearly empty desert the size of Scotland into a chess paradise. He sees Kalmykia as the crossroads on a modern version of the Silk Route, with hordes of chess players replacing caravans of Khazars and Scythians. “Everything here comes from my image,’’ he told me, with a shrug, one afternoon not long ago. “I am lifting the republic up.’’

Many people dispute the last part of that assertion, but nobody questions the first. Ilyumzhinov was elected President in 1993, at the age of thirty-one. He immediately abolished the parliament, altered the constitution, and lengthened his term of office. He finds little beauty in democracy and readily concedes that his republic is corrupt. (“Who was it that they arrested last week?’’ he said to me. “Something having to do with the inspection of the lower courts—for bribes, or something. Anyway, while money exists, while there is government, beginning with the Roman Empire, and in the thousands of years since—it’s always been a problem.”)

Ilyumzhinov has clashed many times with the Kremlin—most famously when, in 1998, he threatened to sever ties with Russia and turn Kalmykia into an independent tax haven, like Luxembourg or Monaco. Kalmykia is only a few hundred kilometres north of Chechnya, which has been attempting, bloodily, to secede from Russia for three hundred years. Moscow does not joke about those issues, and in 2004 Putin put a stop to the direct election of regional leaders. The new rules looked certain to end the flamboyant young Ilyumzhinov’s political career. Yet, last June, Putin flew to Elista and spent an hour alone with him. Nobody revealed what was said, but when the two men emerged and posed for pictures a glimmer of delight shone in Ilyumzhinov’s deep black eyes. Putin looked stiff, dour, and paternal. When the time came to name a new leader, Putin nominated the old one. The choice was ratified instantly by the parliament that Ilyumzhinov had created to replace the one that he had dismissed.