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Originally posted by z00tI'd be interested to research some published articles about the FIDE president Kirsan Ilumjinov, (who is also the current President of the Russian internally self-governing republic of Kalmykia) when I can find some time. Here is a taster for starters:
Who posted the following :-
- "The governing body is chaired by a flipping dictator for crying out loud!!!"
- "This game is so corrupt it's just pathetic, i despair!!"
Can you show me any chess magazine/article or column which substantiates those words? If you post insults to the chess community expect to be repaid in kind.[/b]
From memory here are some considerations that stand out: A journalist who was investigating him received an anonymous call by someone who claimed to have information about him...the journalist went to meet this caller and was murdered (see quote below).
Another claim is that because FIDE has so many countries with equal voting rights (irrespective of how many chess players they represent) it is makes relatively easy to buy votes by bribing officials from poorer nations. It has also been said that Kirsan Ilumjinov (who has adopted the title "His Excellency"😉 makes no distinction between state funds and his own.
At great expense he has built a city called "Chess City" while many in Kalmykia live in poverty - here is a quote from a web journal:
However, when you step out of Chess City, with its comfortable carpets and modern interiors, the reality of Elista (the capital of Kalmykia) hits you: Most people live in poverty without even having access to clean drinking water. Water is "imported" from the neighboring Stavropol region by the truckload. Not a single town in Kalmykia, with the exception of Elista, has proper toilets. In administration buildings outside the capital, the toilets are just holes in the ground.
Another article - this was from the Columbia Journalism Review - an academic publication providing coverage and analysis of journalism:
On the night of June 7, Yudina, 53, received a phone call from a man offering documents that would help in her latest investigation into government corruption in Kalmykia, which is ruled by a flamboyant 36-year-old millionaire, Kerson Ilyumzhinov. She walked down the stairs to the entrance of her building in her slippers, perhaps navigating the seven flights in pitch black, as I had done after my meeting with her a few weeks earlier. She got into a car. The next morning, her body was found in a pond, her skull fractured and her torso pierced with multiple stab wounds. Russian authorities in Moscow, doubtful that the local government would properly investigate, took over the case. So far, two former aides of President Ilyumzhinov have confessed to the killing, and two others are thought by the authorities to be involved as well.
This from chessninja.com: I met Michael Specter, who wrote the excellent long piece on Ilyumzhinov for the magazine (The New Yorker) in April. Interesting guy who lived in Russia for over five years. He said that in his decades as a reporter the most surreal interview moment of his life was when, surrounded by the poverty of Kalmykia, he asked Ilyumzhinov about his famous ten Rolls-Royces and Kirsan replied "six, not ten."
And this by Dominic Lawson in The Independent (A British daily newspaper)
Published: 03 October 2006
You might think, given the celebrated eccentricity of chess grandmasters, that the Kofi Annan of the international game would need to be as sane and balanced as any man alive. You would be wrong. The president of the Fédération Internationale des Echecs (Fide), Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, astounded reporters five years ago by revealing that he had been temporarily captured by aliens: "The extraterrestrials put a yellow spacesuit on me. They gave me a tour of their spaceship and showed me the command centre. I felt very comfortable with them."
The question is: did the extra-terrestrials feel comfortable with Mr Ilyumzhinov? I have met him only once, but I vividly recall the dead coldness of his eyes. Perhaps I was too much influenced by the knowledge that the editor of the newspaper Sovietskaya Kalmykia, Larissa Yudina, was murdered in 1998 while investigating Ilyumzhinov's financial affairs.
There was more than money at stake: the chess-loving Ilyumzhinov had, three years earlier, become President of Kalmykia, a former Soviet statelet bordering oil-rich Kazakhstan. Since then, he has ploughed his money - or Kalmykia's; it's hard to distinguish between the two - into chess. It has bought him the presidency of Fide.
Earlier this year, despite opposition from the likes of Britain's Nigel Short, he was re-elected. When things were looking a bit tricky for the Kalmuk leader, he swung the vote by announcing that he'd persuaded the Fide world chess champion, Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, to play a $1m match against Vladimir Kramnik, the Russian who in 2000 beat the hitherto invincible Garry Kasparov in a match organised by a body derived from the Professional Chess Association (PCA).