Russia keeps buying the FIDE presidency

"You wouldn't believe the blatant breaking of rules and FIDE's written statutes. … There wasn't even a pretence of fairness and free speech."

— CJ de Mooi, then president of the English Chess Federation, describing the 2010 FIDE presidential vote to the Guardian

A billionaire takes the crown

On 26 September 2026, in a conference room in Samarkand beside the 46th Chess Olympiad, delegates of 196 national chess federations elected Timur Turlov president of FIDE, the International Chess Federation. In the first ballot Turlov took 96 votes, the German businessman Wadim Rosenstein 76 and the German investor Jan Henric Buettner 20 (192 votes cast). Two hours later Turlov beat Rosenstein 110–85 in a run-off. At 38 he is the second-youngest president in FIDE's history (FIDE, 26 September 2026).

Turlov is a Russian-born billionaire who took Kazakh citizenship in 2022. He runs Freedom Holding Corp, a financial firm listed on Nasdaq with a market capitalisation of about $11 billion; he has led the Kazakhstan Chess Federation since January 2023, and Freedom Holding has been FIDE's main commercial partner for roughly four years (FIDE, 26 September 2026; DW, 24 September 2026). His running mate was Viswanathan Anand, the Indian former world champion, who becomes deputy president. Buettner, eliminated in the first round, endorsed Turlov for the run-off.

The campaign around it was, in the words of the chess site World Chess, "backstabbing and bitchy": billionaires, "allegations of bought votes", lawsuits, a reported bet of a Bentley between two candidates on a vote total, an hourly iPhone raffle at one campaign's party and a hired Boney M Experience playing "Rasputin" at the other (World Chess, 26 September 2026).

A system built for money

FIDE's president is not elected by chess players or by the public. The vote belongs to roughly two hundred national federations, one vote each, whether the nation is India, Iceland or the Solomon Islands (World Chess, 26 June 2026). This time round Russia did not even vote: its Chess Federation, suspended in June 2026 after the CAS showdown over occupied Ukraine, had no ballot in Samarkand (Reuters via CNN, 12 June 2026; World Chess, 26 June 2026). The job is won by persuading federation officials one by one, and for decades that has meant money. The same explainer puts it plainly: "allegations of vote-trading, diplomatic pressure, political alliances, last-minute defections and bitter personal rivalries have become almost as much a part of the process as the ballot itself."

In the 2026 race, Buettner alleged to World Chess that votes in FIDE elections were effectively being bought, citing a going "price" of $40,000 in Europe and $5,000 in Africa. He gave no names, offered no evidence, and the claims were not independently verified (World Chess, 26 September 2026). Africa is the largest bloc in the FIDE assembly, with about 48 votes (World Chess, 25 September 2026).

The Soviet decades

FIDE was founded in 1924, but the Soviet Union stayed out until 1947, then joined and dominated the game at every level. "Russia … was for decades the dominant force in the game," as Reuters put it in June 2026. Soviet players, playing under Moscow's instruction, kept the strongest chess in the world; blocs of allied federations voted as blocs (Reuters via CNN, 12 June 2026).

The presidency itself was contested within these politics. Max Euwe, the Dutch world champion who ran FIDE from 1970 to 1978, repeatedly crossed the Soviet federation — over the defector Gennadi Sosonko, over the defector Viktor Korchnoi, over holding the 1976 Olympiad in Israel. After the Israel decision, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party began plotting to remove him; he was not re-elected in 1978. Euwe's own judgement of his tenure, quoted in the standard biography, was that flooding FIDE with small developing members had been "a very serious error"; former champion Anatoly Karpov called the result "a leadership vacuum at the head of the world of chess", and Garry Kasparov spoke of "a FIDE practically under Soviet dominance" (Max Euwe biography assessments, collated on the English Wikipedia's Max Euwe and FIDE articles). In the same spirit the Soviet grandmaster Yuri Averbakh said the many weak member federations made decisions "easy to manipulate".

Ilyumzhinov: the man who bought chess

From 1995 to 2018 FIDE was run by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the autocratic ruler of Kalmykia, a small Russian republic. He took office on a handshake: in 1995 the besieged Filipino president Florencio Campomanes stood down on condition that his successor be Ilyumzhinov (Guardian, 29 October 2006). Ilyumzhinov had made his fortune in the privatised wreckage of the USSR, campaigned for office in a stretch limousine promising free mobile phones, believed chess was sent from space aliens, and set out to buy world chess outright. The Guardian, after he staged the 2006 world championship in Elista in Kalmykia, called its portrait "The man who bought chess".

The elections Ilyumzhinov won were the model for everything since. In 2010 he beat Karpov 95–65 in Khanty-Mansiysk in scenes his opponents described as a "farce", with up to 56 federations voting by proxy — Zambia for Kenya, China for Burma, the UAE for Kuwait — and with delegates alleging "intimidation, bully-boy tactics" and "blatant corruption". The Kremlin worked the same machine: when the Russian Chess Federation nominated Karpov, the then Kremlin adviser Arkady Dvorkovich overruled its decision and backed Ilyumzhinov instead (Guardian, 29 September 2010). In 2014 Ilyumzhinov beat Kasparov 110–61 in Tromsø (New York Times, 12 August 2014). Kasparov had run against the vote-buying machine and lost heavily.

In November 2015 the US Treasury sanctioned Ilyumzhinov over alleged dealings with Syria's government, and FIDE effectively froze his powers while he kept the office. In July 2018 he was pushed out entirely (Reuters, 14 July 2018; BBC, 3 October 2018).

Dvorkovich: the Kremlin's man with a modern face

The 2018 election showed the pattern continuing in newer clothes. Arkady Dvorkovich, Russia's former deputy prime minister, won in Batumi 103–78 over the Greek incumbent deputy president Georgios Makropoulos. The British candidate Nigel Short withdrew at the last moment and backed him; Short called the process "rigged" but argued Dvorkovich could root out corruption in chess (BBC, 3 October 2018).

On 1 September 2026, less than a month before the Samarkand vote, the Ukrainian Chess Federation published a recorded conversation attributed to Mark Glukhovsky, the Russian chess official who ran Dvorkovich's 2018 campaign and advised Turlov's 2026 one. In it, the speaker describes working the ~200 delegates in 2018: "You need to talk to some people, send the program to some, bribe some, and connect some in an alliance with someone else." (quoted in The Times of Central Asia, 7 September 2026; audio published 1 September 2026). Glukhovsky acknowledged the conversation was secretly recorded but said the released material was edited and partly reworked with AI. No independent verification of the audio or its authenticity has been published; treat the bribery claims as allegations — below 50% confidence, in our view. The Ukrainian federation's own statement said the recording shows "how Russians conducted — and how they intend to conduct, including now in Samarkand — the election for FIDE president" (NV, 1 September 2026).

Dvorkovich's presidency ran into the war. In 2022 he was re-elected 157–16 over a Ukrainian opponent in Chennai (Reuters, 7 August 2022), months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In June 2024 FIDE's ethics commission found both the Russian Chess Federation and Dvorkovich in breach of the ethics code over chess in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory — rulings they disputed. In December 2025 delegates restored Russian players' full competitive rights over English-led procedural objections; the dispute reached the Court of Arbitration for Sport. In March 2026 the Court of Arbitration for Sport ordered Russia's chess federation to stop organising chess in occupied Ukrainian regions within 90 days or face suspension; when Russia missed the deadline, FIDE suspended it in June 2026 (Reuters via CNN, 12 June 2026). On 23 July 2026 the EU added Dvorkovich himself to its sanctions list, and he stepped aside, handing the presidency to Anand as interim head (Guardian, 24 July 2026).

A new president, the same machine

Turlov's victory then is less a break than a handover. The man Dvorkovich wanted as his deputy won the top job after sanctions removed Dvorkovich; Turlov's commercial firm had been FIDE's principal backer, and Dvorkovich publicly endorsed him the day before the vote (World Chess, 26 September 2026). The continuity extends to personnel: a former Russian sports minister, Pavel Kolobkov (minister 2016–2020), was elected a FIDE vice-president with 78 votes at the same congress, over Ukraine's objections, and promptly declared his votes recognition of Russia as "a great chess power" (World Chess, 27 September 2026).

Turlov's first acts suggest the machine can produce signals in both directions: he told the assembly FIDE "must follow the CAS decisions" on Russia's suspension, and delegates voted down a Russian-Belarusian-Cuban-Nicaraguan attempt to restore Russia's membership (World Chess, 27 September 2026). He has rolled out a development fund that pays federations directly and funds junior chess across Africa (World Chess, 25 September 2026).

The steelman

Before concluding, the counter-arguments. First, the one-federation-one-vote system is structurally neutral; any rich patron — American, German, Indian — could in principle assemble the same majority, and the accusation "they bribed the bloc you lost" has been thrown at every side in every cycle. Second, most members vote for whoever funds their chess, and much of what looks like vote-buying is ordinary sponsorship that small federations genuinely need; Ilyumzhinov and Turlov both spent heavily on developing chess in poor countries for years before standing. Third, the direct bribery claim in the 2026 cycle rests on a contested recording and an unverified price-tag claim; no court has found him guilty of anything. And Turlov is not Dvorkovich: he has taken the Ukrainian federation's side on Russia's suspension and on a Ukrainian vice-president candidate.

None of that changes the record. The president of world chess has now been a Soviet-aligned or Russian-connected figure — through Soviet bloc politics, Ilyumzhinov, or Dvorkovich — for every term since the USSR joined in 1947, and the 2026 result preserves that run in the person of a Russian-born billionaire who is FIDE's own main sponsor. Where the democratic input into FIDE elections is one vote per federation and roughly half the votes sit with poor developing federations, the cost of a presidency is what it is worth, and the buyers have consistently been the ones with Russian money to spend. In that sense the 2026 election changed nothing, and that is the story.

Sources

Primary reporting and official statements:

Historical reporting and accounts:

Election mechanics and campaign colour (trade outlet; treat accordingly):

Historical collation (for the Soviet-era section and the 2024–2026 FIDE-internal proceedings: the June 2024 ethics rulings, the December 2025 Russian reinstatement vote and its procedural challenge; the original interviews are collected in the standard Max Euwe biography): the English Wikipedia articles Max Euwe, FIDE and 2026 FIDE presidential election. These are navigation aids, not our primary evidence; every figure we quote in the body is sourced above.

In 2026 the world chess federation FIDE elected Timur Turlov for president. From the Soviet bloc to Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, Arkady Dvorkovich and now Turlov, the faces change; the mechanism does not.