A guard of the hostel Aunt Masha helped. She read all the ads in newspapers and pointed out to the fifth-year student Ilyumzhinov that Mitsubishi was looking for specialists with knowledge of Japanese in the USSR. Kirsan passed tests in English and Japanese. And a week later... became a manager of the Mitsubishi division! He got a salary of $ 300 and 0.6% finder’s fee on every car sold. He also offered to sell cars of German automakers and opened a vehicle inspection station for foreign cars. And in the autumn of 1990, he became the first official dealer of cars imported from Korea.
Sales to embassies and trade missions were going so well that before the New Year the president of the parent company paid him a bonus of one million roubles in cash. As Ilyumzhinov recalled, "in a big and fat bag." And his party membership fee paid to the Gagarinsky district committee amounted to 20 thousand. Two years later, Kirsan becomes the youngest of the presidents of republics in Russia. And two years later, he became the youngest head of the International Chess Federation (FIDE). He played chess with Gaddafi, built Chess City and the Central Buddhist Temple in Elista. He was the president of the Uralan football club.
30 years ago, the law "On Property in the RSFSR" was adopted. For the first time since 1917, it legalized private property in Russia. By that time, the law on cooperation was already in force and the first legal millionaires were making huge money. "Komsomolskaya Pravda" wrote about Artyom Tarasov, Ilya Medkov, Alexander Smolensky, German Sterligov and, of course, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.
The first president of Kalmykia and the sixth head of FIDE was born into the family of an employee of the Elista city committee of the CPSU. After the army, Ilyumzhinov studied at MGIMO. As he recalls, it was there that he got the idea of how to make the first million.
