Need a Program to Identify the Players?

I knew I should have waited. Just a few days after last week's post, FIDE Presidential Candidates and the World Championship, where I wrote, 'it's too early to expect details about the 2010 Candidates Event', the details started gushing. Since this blog doesn't pretend to be a news site, I'll refer to a TWIC article on the subject -- FIDE Candidates are moved to Kazan -- and come back to the subject after the crude has stopped flowing.

TWIC's Mark Crowther referred to a Russian language article -- In the Chess World Is Coming Revolution -- which makes a fascinating read when submitted to Google's translation service, even though the sentences (like the title I just used) use a twisted grammar that requires some imagination to make sense of them. The story is a followup to a post I wrote in January -- Global Chess, Chess News Corporation, Chess Lane, and FIDE -- along with a few new twists introduced in the context of this year's FIDE election and the no-holds-barred free-for-all featuring Ilyumzhinov, Karpov, and the Russian federation.

I think I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm a fan of Russian historical novels. Since the names of the characters are never second nature to me, one of the tricks I use to follow them is to keep a list of personalities and the pages where they are mentioned. Doing similar for the 'Coming Revolution' piece, I came up with the following list, roughly grouped according to which players belong together.

• Chess Network Company
  
• David Kaplan, Chess Lane
  
• Brothers Magomedov: Ziyavudine (Ziavutdin) & Mohammed (Magomed), Republic of Dagestan, Summa Telecom
  
• Sodbiznesbank, VIP-Bank, CB Diamond; Andrei Kozlov, Alexei Frenkel
  
• Dmitry Medvedev, Arkady Dvorkovich, Alexander Zhukov, Alexander Bach
  
• FIDE Lausanne (Switzerland)
  
• Ilya Levitov (co-author with Bareev of 'From London to Elista'), ST Development, Vladimir Solovyov

Combining this list with Google searches gave me a lot of background info about these same players. I'll share that info whenever I return to the broad subject of contemporary chess in 21st century Russia.