On 12 April 1993, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was elected as the first president of the Republic of Kalmykia, and remained president until 2010. Soon after his election, Ilyumzhinov introduced presidential rule, concentrating power in his own hands. He called early elections on 15 October 1995 and was re-elected unopposed—this time for a 7-year term. He won re-election in 2002. Ilyumzhinov's election platform for the presidency of Kalmykia included promising voters $100 each and a mobile phone for every shepherd—much of the population of Kalmykia living from agriculture. He once campaigned under the slogan "a wealthy president is a safeguard against corruption." He also pledged to introduce what he called an "economic dictatorship" in the republic, as well as to continue to promote chess in Kalmykia, in Russia and to the wider world. After his re-election in 1995, Ilyumzhinov reportedly told a journalist from the Russian daily Izvestia, "Irrespective of what I tell people, I give them instructions on a subconscious level, a code. I do the same thing when I communicate with Russian citizens from other regions. I am creating around the republic a kind of extra-sensory field and it helps us a lot in our projects."