Republic of Kalmykia

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov about Communism in Soviet Union. We students had free access to many western publications. A number of articles on UFOs, on they way in which a person’s individuality manifests itself in their handwriting, on the experience of clinical death, on clairvoyance and bio-energy, aroused my interest and I became an avid reader of everything dedicated to these enigmatic phenomena. I spent my evenings translating articles and notes from the foreign press and in the mornings I hurried back to the institute.

That is not to say that I was a total square, who poured over books constantly, diligently took notes in lectures, was never late for class and never played truant. I was a normal Soviet student; I liked to go dancing, I had been known to spend all my monthly grant at one sitting in a cafe or restaurant to show off to a girlfriend and then live on bread and water for the rest of the time. I was full of unrestrained youthful energy which coursed turbulently in my veins. Within a short time I made lots of friends, and Moscow no longer struck me as a cold, aloof capital. I had become a part of that contradictory, crazy, revelatory city and caught onto its fast jazzy rhythm.

40 Somehow I had time enough for the institute as well as the theater, parties and friends. It was there, in the FRI, that I was given the chance to see the world with my own eyes. Boys returning from training trips in various countries described their impressions to one another. As a result of this kind of access no amount of propaganda, however sophisticated, could suppress the question: why? Why is everything so bad in our country?

Take Korea for example. Superficially it is one country, made up of the same people with the same ethnic roots and religion. However North Korea and South Korea are incomparably different. The same went for East and West Germany, China and Taiwan, South and North Vietnam. As for their living standards they were as different as night and day! Where did the errors, the miscalculation in the system, lie?

I studied the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. I read them not so as to pass my exams, but in order to understand where the theoreticians of Communism had gone wrong. Was it their substantiation of future equality or fraternity? Or maybe the abolishment of private property? Could it be that mankind was not yet ready, either morally or economically, for building Communism?

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, President of Kalmykia