Remote Russian republic hosting world chess championship

ELISTA, Russia — The obsessive energy of one man — Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, former car dealer, present-day multimillionaire, Buddhist impresario and president of the Russian republic of Kalmykia — has turned this remote corner of southern Russia into the Caesars Palace of chess. Now he is hosting his dream event, a $1 million bout to determine the undisputed chess champion of the world.

The contest, which is being followed online by chess fans worldwide, has proved as controversial as its sponsor. Replete with trash-talking grandmasters, it was almost aborted over bathroom breaks and allegations of cheating.

But for Ilyumzhinov, who has also been president of the World Chess Federation for 11 years, the uproar has had the side benefit of attracting yet more publicity for his chess kingdom, a desolate expanse of steppe and desert that runs to the Caspian Sea.

"It's a great moment for the chess world," he said in a recent interview that bounced from Buddhism to the $50 million Chess City the 44-year-old president has built here in the capital, Elista, to encounters he claims he has had with UFOs and aliens. ("They wore yellow suits," he said.)

Kalmykia is the only Buddhist region of Europe, the faith having come here with Mongolian migrants. It has the continent's tallest Buddhist temple — built, like so much here, by its president, who glides around town in a white Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit.

"Rolls-Royce is a good car," Ilyumzhinov said, calling the Silver Spirit and the five other Rolls-Royces he owns his only personal indulgence — apart from chess, which in one of his first decrees as president he made a school subject. "It helps children study well in other subjects — math, physics," said Ilyumzhinov, who was a regional chess champion in his teens.

Ilyumzhinov, who said he made his first millions as a car dealer after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, came to power here two years later. He immediately abolished the local parliament and rewrote the constitution. Critics say he assumed almost dictatorial power in Kalmykia, a republic roughly the size of West Virginia with about 300,000 people. In the 1990s, Ilyumzhinov talked about breaking away from Moscow and turning Kalmykia into an independent tax haven along the lines of Monaco. More recently, he has pledged fealty to the Kremlin, after President Vladimir Putin abolished the election of regional leaders and assumed the right to appoint them.

"What is democracy?" Ilyumzhinov asked, brushing aside questions about his rule and pointing instead to the stability he says he has fostered, the roads he has built and his personal philanthropy, underwritten by his extensive holdings in energy, real estate and other businesses.

"One hundred percent — 99 percent — of this is my money. It's a gift," he said. Apart from Chess City, he has built 33 Buddhist temples, including the magnificent $25 million Golden Temple.

"The deeply ingrained profound and receptive morality of the Orient and the technological progress of the West are the two wings that can guide Kalmykia to prosperity," Ilyumzhinov wrote in his memoir, "The President's Crown of Thorns."

Ilyumzhinov has also built 20 Orthodox Christian churches, a mosque and, after a meeting with Pope John Paul II, a Catholic church — for Kalmykia's one known Catholic. He gave $100,000 to the American former world chess champion Bobby Fischer, to compensate for unpaid Soviet royalties on Fischer's book.

Alexander Ledzhinov, who ran against Ilyumzhinov for the presidency in 2002, questions the propriety of the president's projects in one of Russia's poorest regions, as well as the source of his generous gifts.

"For a long time, public and private money have been completely mixed up in Kalmykia," Ledzhinov said. "Ilyumzhinov likes organizing fancy events and building fancy buildings, but what really needs organizing is the economy."

Ledzhinov also noted that a journalist investigating Ilyumzhinov's finances was murdered in 1998 and two of the president's former aides were found guilty of the crime. Ilyumzhinov denied any connection with the killing.

In the 1996 world chess championship, Anatoly Karpov played Gata Kamsky in Elista after Ilyumzhinov was forced to cancel plans to hold the match in Baghdad when his negotiations with Saddam Hussein caused an international uproar.

After that, Ilyumzhinov had the Chess Palace built inside an Olympic-style village in Elista to host the 1998 Chess Olympiad. Squaring off at the chessboard this time are Veselin Topalov, a Bulgarian, and Vladimir Kramnik, a Russian. Ilyumzhinov put up the purse for the 12-game match, which ends Friday.

In the first four games, Kramnik raced to a 3-1 lead. Then Topalov's manager, Silvio Danailov, complained that Kramnik, 31, was making a suspiciously high number of visits to his private bathroom. He filed a protest. Danailov did not say but clearly implied that Kramnik was using a hidden computer to map out moves.

An appeals committee decided both players would use the same toilet. Kramnik objected and refused to start Game 5.

Ilyumzhinov — in the manner that he rules Kalmykia — dictated a solution. He fired the appeals committee and appointed a new one, with himself as temporary head. He reopened Kramnik's bathroom but allowed Topalov's team to inspect it for several hours.

Play resumed.