KIRSAN ILYUMZHINOV

1962 - Current

Likes Chess

President Ilyumzhinov of the Republic of Kalmykia won his first chess championship at 14. Since then chess has kind of been his thing. So much so that despite his small, barren and unusually resource-free nation of 300,000 existing mostly in a state of abject poverty, he has ploughed many millions into developing a neighbourhood sized city of chess worship.

In an interview with journalists in 1997 he revealed that he had once been abducted by aliens. "They took me from my apartment and we went aboard their ship," he said. "We flew to some kind of star. They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist."

SAPARAMUT "TURKMENBASHI" NIYAZOV

1940 - 2006

A year after he gained the presidency Mr. Niyazov declared himself Turkmenbashi or 'leader of all Turkmen' which kicked off an extended period of crazy. An early piece of policy centred around changing the names of anything he liked. The capital's airport, the port city of Krasnovodsk, countless streets and roads throughout Turkmenistan, the month of January and a 670 pound meteorite were all renamed Turkmenbashi. He changed April and the name of the nation's staple bread to Gurbansoltan edzhe, his mother's name and he made it law that his image appear on every single watch, clock and bottle of vodka produced in the country.

Niyazov also banned car radios, recorded music, lip-syncing, dogs, the ballet, opera, long hair or beards, computer games and news presenters from wearing makeup. Read our report here on how Deutsche Bank acted as bankers to his regime, helping him to channel Turkmenistan’s prodigious natural gas wealth directly into his pockets.

RAMZAN KADYROV

1976 - Current

Ramzan Kadyrov is the current president of Chechnya and he's only 30. He started his career early, leading a unit of Chechen separatists in the first Chechen War when he was just 16, but switched to the Russian side when he was 23 going on to use connections from this period to grease his slide into power.

Some of the decenting voices that he has silenced are: Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who reportedly had evidence of Kadyrov's participation in the torture and was found shot dead in her apartment in 2006; a Chechen commander, Movladi Baisarov who was shot and killed in an ambush by Kadyrov's police several hundred meters from the Kremlin also in 2006; and Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard of Kadyrov who was shot to death while he was on the run from his old boss in January this year after testifying against him in a Strasbourg court.

Kadyrov is also an animal enthusiast. He owns a tiger, a bear, a wolf and a lion. He also has a golden gun - see top picture.

LEOPOLD II OF BELGIUM

1835 – 1909

In 1876, sick of all of the other colonial powers having all the fun, Leopold II disguised a private holding company as an international scientific and philanthropic charity, hired famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and went over to the Congo to take a chunk of the pie that was Africa for Belgium. He seized an area 76 times larger than his home nation, renamed it the Congo Free State, and set about exploiting the vast quantities of rubber the region offered. Discipline was barbarous. Leopold's enforcers can be credited with starting the practice of limb amputation as shock tactic that became the hallmark of the more vicious African rebellions of the twentieth century.

After a visit to the land missionary John Harris wrote to Leopold's chief agent saying:

"I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."

The Encyclopaedia Britannica pegs the total number of casualities that resulted from his regime at somewhere between 8 and 30 million. For a sense of scale: the total estimated number of military deaths from all sides involved in World War 2 was 25 million.