A King, His Castle and His Pawns

With a burst of flags and gleaming glass, a hodgepodge of turrets and candy-colored eaves rises from the barren hillside like a postmodern version of Dorothy’s Emerald City.

Outside, the compound’s gates are guarded by police in camouflage. Inside, a five-story yurt coated in mirrors is ringed by pastel townhouses and new lawns studded with sculptures. Some depict Mongolian-looking shepherds and warriors. Others are based on chess pieces: kings, queens, knights, pawns.

The complex is part Disneyland, part subdivision, part Oz. And its wizard is Kirsan N. Ilyumzhinov, the chess-mad, power-grabbing president of the republic of Kalmykia and the World Chess Federation.

Over the past five years, Ilyumzhinov has succeeded in the improbable mating of two unrelated cultures--Buddhist shepherds and world-class chess--and from it has bred a freakish personal empire.

“The political intriguers in Moscow are jealous,” Ilyumzhinov says. These days, with Moscow fettered by economic and political crises, Ilyumzhinov and other leaders among Russia’s 89 regions and republics are largely free to run their domains as they see fit.

In some cases, regional leaders have used their de facto autonomy to leap ahead of Moscow in pursuing reform and attracting foreign investment. More often, they have built private fiefdoms that operate largely outside Moscow’s control. Ilyumzhinov is an extreme example of the latter. This week, he even threatened that Kalmykia might consider seceding from Russia.

“The fact that I am independent--financially, economically and politically--makes many people angry,” he says with evident pride.

Despite such boasts, observers say there’s something rotten in the Kingdom of Kirsan. Kalmykia remains one of Russia’s poorest regions, with an average income of less than $6.70 a month--placing it in the lowest 10% of regions nationwide. State farm workers haven’t been paid in five years.

Meanwhile, Ilyumzhinov builds houses for his friends and he jets around the world. By his own count, he visited 80 countries last year.

The president spent at least $30 million to build the magical mystery complex known as Chess City. It was here that he hosted a chess Olympiad this fall, drawing more than 1,500 internationally ranked players from 120 countries--including the United States--and lavishing caviar, vodka and prizes on them.

He says all the money comes from his private funds--an assertion that many, including federal investigators, doubt. And Ilyumzhinov plans to take his show on the road early next year, holding a world chess championship in, of all places, Las Vegas. To raise the stakes, he has personally funded a $3-million jackpot.

Ilyumzhinov has had audiences with Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Pictures of those meetings are plastered on billboards around Elista, his once dusty but now whitewashed capital.

The only people he doesn’t seem to consult are his constituents.

Nina Tsedevena, a 69-year-old pensioner, can see Chess City from the end of her street. She’d like to take a look inside, but she’s not allowed. Neither is her son, who lost his job as a truck driver three years ago. The two live on her pension of $26 a month.

In other places, she says, the money spent on Chess City might have been used to help citizens, to pay wages or to build hospitals.

“But here, that doesn’t happen,” she says, shaking her head. “Kirsan does what he likes. He doesn’t ask us.”

A People Descended From Genghis Khan

The 36-year-old Ilyumzhinov is a slight man with delicate hands, a wide smile and a soft voice. He seems at times too mild-mannered to be a descendant of Genghis Khan’s fearsome horde.

The Kalmyks are a remnant of the Mongol leader’s forces, which swept across Europe in the 13th century and subjugated Russia for 240 years. In the 1600s, some of the Mongols wandered back and eventually formed an alliance with Peter the Great, who gave them a homeland on Russia’s arid southern steppe.

These days, Kalmykia is a swath of near-desert about the size of South Carolina. Its population of 300,000 is divided about equally between Kalmyks and ethnic Russians. It is the only Buddhist republic in Europe.

The way Ilyumzhinov describes it, Kalmykia is an oasis of prosperity. It is pumping oil, selling sheepskins, harvesting caviar and pouring so much tax money into the federal budget that each resident supports 10 of Russia’s citizens. In fact, Ilyumzhinov said Tuesday, unless more money starts coming back from Moscow, his republic will have to consider whether it is really a part of Russia at all.

He flatly dismisses talk of the republic’s poverty.

“I have never seen a poor Kalmyk. Not one,” he insisted in an interview.

One presumes, then, that he has never met Larisa Doda, a 22-year-old former garage worker who lives in the hamlet of Tselinnyi, 25 miles north of Elista, with her two small children. She and her husband, a cowherd, haven’t been paid since 1993.

She leans on the rickety fence in front of her cottage, cuddling her son, Vova, who has the glassy-eyed languor of malnourished children. He is 3 years old, though he looks much younger. It has been months since he last drank milk.

“This morning, I gave him some bread and some water. That’s all I had,” she says. “Even if I had any money, there’s no milk in the store.”

In other parts of Russia, people feed themselves out of their gardens. But most of the land in Kalmykia is too arid--Tselinnyi has so little grass that no one worries about brush fires--and there hasn’t been a drop of rain since spring anyway.

Doda accuses Ilyumzhinov of willful neglect.

“The president has his own cares,” she says. “He has his chess games, his Olympiads. Of course, it’s not bad to do those things. But he really ought to think about the people who live here.”

Tselinnyi, center of a large state farm, is not an exception. Visits to two other state farms reveal similar conditions--unpaid workers, dwindling herds, unplanted crops, malnourished children. And perhaps most painful, in the past two years this republic of shepherds has lost half its sheep and a third of its cows, many stolen by either corrupt officials or hungry workers.

“Kalmykia has been receiving subsidies from the federal budget to shore up its dying agricultural sector,” says Sergei B. Prokopov, the spokesman for federal investigators looking into the republic’s alleged shady dealings. “But the money was being channeled through the presidential administration. Can you imagine what happened to it? It’s not hard. Not a penny ever made it to the poor farmers.”

President Promised Voters Cell Phones

When Ilyumzhinov was campaigning for president in 1993, he promised to turn Kalmykia into a second Kuwait, where every shepherd would have a cell phone. He had several plans up his sleeve.

First, he made Kalmykia into an “offshore zone” inside Russia. Companies that register here--about 5,000 to date--are exempt from most local taxes, so their tax bills amount not to 30% of profits but 13%.

In return, the businesses make donations to Ilyumzhinov’s off-budget President’s Fund, which he can use as he likes. It is this money that pays for his pet projects, including Chess City.

Second, he said he would exploit what he calls Kalmykia’s vast oil deposits. He claims that the republic pumped 300,000 tons of oil last year, all of which was exported, and is sitting on many millions more.

Russian officials dispute his assessment. They say Kalmykia has only a few wells of dubious commercial value and no reserves to speak of.

“No one has ever contemplated seriously tapping Kalmykia’s oil,” says Yuri S. Nogotkov, a spokesman for the Fuel and Oil Ministry in Moscow. “Maybe we will decide to drill for oil there in the future, but only as a last resort if the country completely runs out of oil.”

Perhaps the most audacious of Ilyumzhinov’s plans was to make his republic of shepherds into the world capital of chess.

It may have been an odd match, but he encountered little resistance in the chess world. While chess may be the most cerebral of games, it is less than discriminating regarding politics.

“There’s a lot of moral relativism in the chess world,” admits Larry Christiansen, who was captain of the U.S. team at the Olympiad. “Most chess players want to leave politics to the politicians.” The reason chess can’t be choosy is that it’s not a moneymaker. The World Chess Federation, known by its French acronym, FIDE, has held tournaments wherever sponsors can be found--in Nazi-occupied territory during World War II, in Argentina in 1978 under the military junta, in Armenia in 1996 during street riots.

That year, FIDE was at a particularly low point. World champion Garry Kasparov had defected three years before to form his own organization, and most of the money left with him. When the young Kalmykian leader turned up with his millions, few asked questions. He was elected the organization’s president.

“People are predisposed to support Kirsan because of the money,” says Bill Kelleher, the U.S. Chess Federation’s liaison to FIDE.

Before the Olympiad, a human rights group called the Glasnost Defense Foundation appealed to teams from around the world to boycott the tournament, citing the suspicious death of a Kalmykian journalist.

The U.S. federation debated the issue but decided that Ilyumzhinov should be considered innocent until proved guilty.

“Certain members of the policy board did have reservations,” says Kelleher. “But in the absence of any proof, it was decided the U.S. would attend.”

The Brutal Slaying of a Crusading Journalist

It was in a pond at the base of Chess City in June that they found Larisa Yudina’s mutilated body.

The journalist had left her home a day earlier to meet a man who promised her documents showing that funds from the offshore zone had been mishandled. She was editor of Kalmykia’s one remaining opposition newspaper, and one of the few people who dared to openly oppose the president.

“I’m convinced her death is connected to him,” says her widower, Gennady Yudin.

Four men have been arrested and confessed to the crime. Three were escaped convicts; one was Ilyumzhinov’s official representative to a neighboring region.

Ilyumzhinov himself isn’t a target of the investigation, at least not now. As president of Kalmykia, he is a member of the Russian parliament’s upper house, the Federation Council, and members have immunity from prosecution.

“He can’t be interrogated or questioned by us,” says Prokopov, the spokesman for the federal investigators, who are also looking into Yudina’s death. “No matter how much evidence we unearth against him, we can’t prosecute him right now.”

What happens to the presumption of innocence when a person can’t be prosecuted? “I don’t know,” admits the U.S. Chess Federation’s Kelleher.

Yudin and a handful of other opponents are trying to keep up the fight against Ilyumzhinov. Since the journalist’s slaying, some have been fired from their jobs. Some get threatening phone calls. Those who tried to run for last month’s parliamentary elections were denied registration until the last minute.

These events added human rights abuses to the list of Ilyumzhinov’s alleged offenses.

This fall, seven people who were friends and associates of Larisa Yudina were granted refugee status in the United States. That means the U.S. government has formally recognized that, by staying in Kalmykia, they faced a “well-founded fear of persecution.”

Leader Dismisses Talk of Political Repression

For his part, Ilyumzhinov dismisses talk of political repression. He says he has brought a “rigid, clear-cut system of power” to Kalmykia, where “the president is not at war with the parliament and there is true accord in society.”

And he isn’t bothered by the negative publicity around Yudina’s slaying, which he calls a “purely ordinary household crime.”

“However cynical it might sound, this crime actually turned out to be useful for Kalmykia,” he says. “Attention was finally paid to the republic.”

Ilyumzhinov’s immunity from prosecution will last as long as he’s president.

And he’ll be in office a good while yet. Two years into his first four-year term, he amended the constitution to increase the president’s term to seven years. Then he promptly called new elections and won. He won’t face voters again until 2002.

“Kirsan can’t remain president of Kalmykia indefinitely,” says Prokopov. “He might think he has bought himself an open ticket to heaven, but this is just an illusion that will end together with his presidency.”

Which might help explain Ilyumzhinov’s new plan: He has announced that he will run in 2000 for president of Russia, a job that also would give him immunity from prosecution.

Ilyumzhinov is a persuasive talker; it can be hard to gauge just how much he believes what he says. But it is clear that he both relishes and resents the controversy he stirs.

He invokes a Buddhist teaching: Wind will snuff out a small flame but fan a strong blaze. The bad publicity surrounding Yudina’s death is a wind that will only make Kalmykia’s flame burn brighter, he says.

“The Olympiad graphically showed that this fire of ours has grown only bigger, and the steppe is already ablaze,” Ilyumzhinov says, his voice staying calm and even.

“This fire will now spread all over Russia. Hence our plan--to take the Kremlin over and to annex the rest of Russia to the republic of Kalmykia. There will be no stopping us.”

Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.