Word: kalmykia
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...story of Ilyumzhinov's rise to power reads like a James Bond movie scripted by Vladimir Nabokov. Like many other chess players, Ilyumzhinov was a prodigy. At 9 he was the chess champion of his native Kalmykia, a tiny, impoverished Russian republic populated by the descendants of Genghis Khan. But his talents went beyond pushing pawns. In his 20s he made millions running a string of banks in the early wildcat years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism. At the tender age of 31 the dapper Ilyumzhinov (he has a fondness for white capes and vintage Rolls-Royces) was elected President...
Ilyumzhinov also launched a campaign to make chess an Olympic sport, a process that will involve, as per International Olympic Committee regulations, mandatory drug testing. In Kalmykia's capital city of Elista, he erected a $30 million chess coliseum called Chess City, a bizarre extravagance in a place where hot water is still a luxury. Last spring he staged a fashion show featuring flirty chess uniforms modeled by Alexandra Kosteniuk, a curvaceous grandmaster who may be the chess world's answer to Anna Kournikova. Kosteniuk then proceeded to play eight simultaneous matches. On Rollerblades...
...fixer Boris Berezovsky. Primakov would be very happy to see Berezovsky either behind bars or living permanently outside Russia, says a political insider, and has already put the Russian security service on Berezovsky's case. He would also like to remove Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the flashy young millionaire who runs Kalmykia, a tiny republic on the Caspian Sea. Ilyumzhinov has been accused in the Russian media of involvement in the murder four months ago of his republic's only opposition newspaper editor. In both the Berezovsky and Ilyumzhinov cases, say friends, Primakov will stay his hand until he is certain...
...precedence over local legislative acts, and natural resources are subject to joint federal and local control. Anticipating trouble in the hinterlands, which have exploited tensions in Moscow to go their own way, last week Kremlin advisers bluntly told local leaders in the ethnic republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva and Kalmykia to refrain from "irresponsible remarks," hinting that the Kremlin might take measures to bring them into line...
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