Sergei Mitrokhin’s blog at the Ekho Moskvi website, 13.08.2014

The day before yesterday Russia’s corruption once again showed to the whole world the part of the body one sits on. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was re-elected president of FIDE in Tromsø, Norway.

He won past election over genius chess player Anatoly Karpov, and this time he beat over another chess genius Garry Kasparov.

What a strange organisation. Every school pupil knows what these two persons did for chess. But what about Kirsan? Virtually he did not manage to surpass Ostap Bender [a fictional con man who first appeared in the novel The Twelve Chairs written by Soviet authors Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov and boasted of creating a Chess City out of a small village in the middle of nowhere]. Kirsan even immortalized this protagonist by creating a monument to Ostap Bender in Elista [the capital of the Republic of Kalmykia].

Ilymzhinov’s fondness of this character is very symbolic. Despite Ostap Bender’s charm, he was a cheater, but not an ordinary one, as he had very ambitious plans.

Ilymzhinov is also a cheater, those who do not know him well may say that he is charming and not only has far-reaching ambitious plans but even implemented some of them. Therefore the ‘student’ put a monument to his ‘teacher’ he had excelled.

The first person who revealed a cheater in Kirsan Ilymzhinov was Larissa Yudina, Editor-in-Chief of the Sovetskaya Kalmykia newspaper. On the eve of the first presidential elections in the republic in April 1993 she wrote, “The candidate proposes to “take the budget money and capitalize on the interest rate on the amount” as a universal method for solution of all the problems in the republic and implementation of his promises made as candidate”.

And his promises were ambitious, for example, to turn Kalmykia into a new Kuwait in the shortest possible term.

It’s interesting to note that for the 20 years the cheater’s style of Ostap Bender has not changed at all. At the elections of FIDE President Ilyumzhinov won a victory by promising to make chess an Olympic sport, as well as by the statement “… not TOMORROW but TODAY I guarantee 20 million dollars!” (met with a storm of applause and laughter in the audience at the same time).

Certainly, the day before yesterday on 11 August, 2014, nobody saw the money. Kirsan learned from Ostap Bender that the crowd likes brave bluffing, even if it knows that it is all cheating (applause and laughter at the same time). Since Kirsan has been enjoying special favour from Russia’s V.V.P. (Ed. A wordplay, as V.V.P. in Russian means either GDP or the first letters of the full name Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin), it is clear that he is going to take the money from the Russian state budget. And then according to the pattern already used by him: “to take budget money and capitalize on the interest”. That’s it. If FIDE wants to turn into [a miracle village of] New-Vasuki [from the book about Ostap] let it be.

We have old scores with Ilymzhinov not because he is a fan of Ostap Bender. In contrast to Kirsan, Ostap respected the Criminal Code and there was no blood on his arms.

Larissa Yudina wrote a lot about Ilymzhinov. Her articles were not only about petty fraud by President of Kalmykia but about huge corruption and the merger of the power and criminality.

Larissa was the first journalist who in April 1997 wrote about [Ilyumzhinov’s] huge fraud with the offshore zone in her article “Storerooms Full of Air”. [According to the offshore regulations] businessmen were allegedly released from all the taxes, however, they had to make “transfers to the Presidential Programmes Fund –
USD 1250 per a quarter. The Kommersant-Vlast magazine assessed the revenues of this fund as USD 20 million per year. The scheme had been working until 1998, when auditors from the Audit Chamber came to Kalmykia with inspection due to YABLOKO’s demand. The fund was liquidated on the threashold of the auditors’ arrival (together with the archives), and all the banking documents of the fund were “destroyed” due to the “break of sewerage”. It is a quotation the Vedomosti newspaper which in 2012 was investigating how Ilymzhinov had got rich.

Kirsan did not leave liquidation of such a great feeder without response. BEFORE that there had been endless reprisals against Sovetskaya Kalmikia newspaper, pogroms in its office and threats by telephone calls.

AFTER Ilymzhinov realized that articles by journalist Larissa Yudina could have real consequences, obviously there was taken a decision to cross the border between Ostap Bender and Rodion Raskolnikov (Ed. The latter is a protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishement” who committed a murder to test his own hypothesis that some people allegedly had the right to kill other people.).

On the evening of June 6, 1998, Larissa Yudina received a phone call from someone who promised to give her the documents about corruption in the top echelons of power in Kalmykia, and on June 7 her body with multiple knife wounds was found in a pond.

Answering journalists’ questions on the details of this crime Ilymzhinov claimed that the court “confirmed the version of the domestic violence in this crime”. At the same time, one of the murderers found by court was S.Vaskin, Ilymzhinov’s LEGAL ADVISOR. According to the definition of the court, Vaskin committed the crime “aiming to stop Yudina’s professional activities”.

Despite this the search for those who ordered the crime was stopped. Ostap Bender followers were badly needed in the federal structures then and have been in demand now too.

We tried different ways and means to make the information known to FIDE members through our contacts in the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe party.

As we can see, FIDE members were much more interested in the amount of money Ilymzhinov promised them, rather than in the candidate’s reputation.

“Money has no smell”, said Emperor Vespasian imposing payment for toilets. And for those who voted for Ilymzhinov chess also have no smell.

Anyway, Ilf and Petrov were genius writers. In the image of Ostap Bender they portrayed the future invader of not only Russia but the whole world.

In USSR the “ceiling” of such a person would be the post of a manager over a block of flats, and in 1990s such people were creeping from everywhere to the governmental bodies in Russia, and in 2010s they begin reaching top international posts.

Such persons have only become tougher and gained powerful “protection” from the Criminal Code, and this “protecting force”, by the way, congratulated Ilymzhinov right after his election FIDE President.

So, on this photograph you can see crystal honest Larissa Yudina challenging not only Kirsan but the whole Russia’s and the world’s elite, which blended Kirsan so well in its ranks.