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Financial Times (UK)
11 July 2002
Inside Russia: Of shepherds and cellphones
By Robert Cottrell
"The Dalai Lama's visit to Russia pursues purely religious goals, there are no politics behind his trip", insists Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of Kalmykia, a Russian republic bordering the Caspian Sea.
No, of course not. Politics will play no part in it at all. The fact that Mr Ilyumzhinov will be welcoming the Dalai Lama to Kalmykia in September, then running for re-election in October, is mere chance. The Kalmyks are a Buddhist people who revere the Dalai Lama, but I am sure no politician would exploit the presence of a living god for electoral gain.
I joke, of course. But there again, perhaps the joke is on me. Mr Ilyumzhinov probably has no need to make capital from the Dalai Lama's visit. The last time he ran for election in 1995, he got 86 per cent of the vote. To improve on that in October might smack of immodesty.
And in any event, he should be happy enough to have the chance of re-election at all. He won a first term of office in 1993, then called a snap election - nobody quite knew why - in 1995. That makes two terms by my count, the limit fixed for provincial leaders in Russia's electoral law. But they say the severity of laws in Russia is mitigated by the rarity with which they are enforced, and that seems to be the case here.
This week the Russian constitutional court decided that "two terms" did not quite mean "two terms". It meant "two terms, counting from the date at which the electoral law came into force", which was in October 1999. So Mr Ilyumzhinov and many other two-term governors will be able to run for office a third and even a fourth time.
That may be just as well for Mr Ilyumzhinov, a perpetually smiling man of 40. He does seem to need more time to make good on the promises he issued in order to win his first term.
He was a rich man, he claimed, and he would make Kalmykia rich too. It would be a "second Kuwait". There would be "a cellphone for every shepherd".
I do not know if Mr Ilyumzhinov was indeed as rich as he claimed in 1993. But nine years on he certainly shows every sign of being rich, and he trots the globe in his other job as president of the Fide, the world chess body.
But the people of Kalmykia have remained obstinately poor. Their average cash income was about $50 a month last year, one of the lowest in Russia, though Mr Ilyumzhinov insists the economy is improving this year by leaps and bounds.
As for the shepherds, not only did they get no cellphones, they very nearly lost their flock. The sheep population fell by two thirds in the years 1993 to 1995, apparently thanks to mutton-rustlers from Chechnya.
So how did Mr Ilyumzhinov get 86 per cent of the vote when he ran for re-election in 1995? I am glad you asked that question. The answer is that nobody ran against him. This made the election technically illegal - but then, those were the Yeltsin years for you.
When asked whether he had "squashed" his opposition, the smiling Mr Ilyumzhinov replied: "The opposition is approximately 5-7 per cent of our population. And since 2-3 per cent are always in opposition to any regime, as international experience reveals, well, there was nothing to squash in the first place."
I last saw Kalmykia for myself a year after Mr Ilyumzhinov's re-election, and decided it must be quite the most exotic place in the Russian federation. The Kalmyks - who make up about half the republic's population of 320,000, the balance being ethnic Russians and Dagestanis - are descendants of a Mongol tribe which was driven west in the 17th century and pledged its loyalty to Peter the Great. They are the only European ethnic group professing Buddhism, and their high lama at the time of my visit was a 23-year-old from Philadelphia, the son of Kalmyk emigrants, whose recreation was the music of the Smashing Pumpkins.
Adding to the sense of dislocation, the Kalmyk landscape is half-desert - a consequence, I was told, of sheep imported from the Caucasus which cut up the fragile grassland with their mountain hooves. Camels have since been brought in to cope with the desert, and attempts are periodically made to market their fermented milk as a summer drink. Having tried it, all I can say is that the taste, though not good, is almost irrelevant. The trick is keeping it down at all.
I deduce from recent news reports that the picturesque touches have, if anything, multiplied since. Kalmykia now has a national bard, whose voice sounds like "a Harley-Davidson idling at a traffic light", according to one listener. His main repertoire is an epic cycle of 68 songs dating from the 15th century, but he is currently working with a French record producer on a "remix" version of some lighter Mongol melodies.
But sadly, it is equally clear that there are many less picturesque aspects to Mr Ilyumzhinov's Kalmykia. There is no free media there, save for one relentlessly harassed newspaper whose editor was murdered four years ago by a man who used to work for Mr Ilyumzhinov.
Nobody, including the federal government, seems to understand how the public finances are managed. In May a senior officer in the anti-corruption department of the federal security service was killed in the Kalmyk capital after he had arrested a senior local policeman suspected of involvement in the drugs trade.
Accidents of this sort, coupled with Kalmykia's poverty, might well earn Mr Ilyumzhinov a spot on the list of provincial leaders that President Vladimir Putin would prefer to see replaced. Appalled this week by the poverty he saw in the Volga region of Ulyanovsk, where cash incomes are slightly higher than in Kalmykia, Mr Putin called for a summary means of "dismissing people who let such a situation develop".
But where to find a candidate at such short notice with the name-recognition among Kalmyks needed to challenge Mr Ilyumzhinov? I think Mr Putin has no choice. He should have a quiet talk with the Dalai Lama.
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