The Republic of Fear

In Tsenteroi, men in camouflage wave us on as our car sweeps into the Kadyrovs’ walled compound. Bizarrely, the inner courtyard is dominated by a large purple plastic castle. From a doorway on the far side of the yard comes a low, rhythmic hubbub. We are beckoned inside. Ten big men with beards and skullcaps sit on their knees in a circle on a richly decorated carpet. They sway in unison, crashing their hands together in great thudding claps. One leads the ceremony, the others reply in chorus.

Beyond the circle, an elder jumps gleefully on the spot, pounding his feet on the floor. To one side is Ramzan Kadyrov, dressed all in black and bathed in sweat. Just as they appear on the point of entering a trance, the seated men rise and begin to trot around the room, continuing the chant. A crescendo is reached; all eventually slip into murmured prayers. Part religious ritual, part dance, this is the zikr, a touchstone of Chechen culture. It’s a stunning display of controlled power and a sharp reminder that – despite the veneer of Russian language and Kremlin diktats – Chechnya is another world, another culture.

Looking on, our escort from the foreign ministry in Moscow, an urbane former diplomat with fair hair called Yevgeny, seems like a creature from another planet. As the room falls silent, Kadyrov pads forward in his socks and extends a hand. “Welcome,” he says in Russian, with a thick Caucasian accent. “Call me Ramzan.”

Whether you see him as a politician, militia leader, thug or national hero, Ramzan Kadyrov is the Kremlin’s great new hope for stability in Chechnya, Russia’s war-torn southern republic. A Chechen who once fought with the rebels against Russia’s federal forces, he is now Moscow’s stooge and de facto leader of the republic. His father, Akhmad, was president until he was assassinated in a bomb blast in 2004. Ramzan, a boisterous hard man who used to run his father’s bodyguard service, was installed as prime minister this March.

Keen to erase his brutish image, Kadyrov has agreed to allow me and a Sunday Times photographer to shadow him for three days. It is the first time that western journalists have been granted such access. A squad of six heavily armed special-forces policemen have been assigned to protect us everywhere we go. Yevgeny, the foreign-ministry chaperone, must always be nearby. At night we will sleep at Kadyrov’s compound in Gudermes, Chechnya’s second city, near an annexe where off-duty militiamen play shoot-’em-up games on computers.

Tonight we are guests at the prime minister’s fortified home in Tsenteroi, his undisputed power base. After the zikr ritual, he serves dinner to us in his modest kitchen. “We gather here to pray every Thursday since my father died,” Kadyrov explains. “It’s a way of letting your emotions wash out.”

Short but well built, with a beard and cropped hair, the young leader has a powerful physical presence. In parliament he resembles an overgrown schoolboy, chafing at his collar and tie. But on the streets, in jeans and a leather jacket, he is in his element. Every night the news bulletins show him dispensing largesse like an oriental prince: opening roads and schools, handing out new apartments. There seems little doubt that after he turns 30 – the legal age to become president – in October, he will take that post.

Why do people love him, I ask. He laughs. “Because I’ve got things moving and because I want peace. The only ones against me are those who hate peace.” It’s a nice sentiment. Just one problem: Kadyrov is a thug. His militia, the Kadyrovtsy – now partly absorbed into official security units – have kidnapped, tortured and killed his opponents and their innocent relatives. Although full-scale fighting has ceased, corruption and violence are still rampant.

Kadyrov’s populist touch has won admiration from some Chechens. In truth, a degree of stability is returning, abductions have decreased and parts of devastated Grozny are being rebuilt. But there are gnawing fears that Kadyrov is becoming so powerful that he could slip Moscow’s leash. Putin’s plan to “Chechenise” the conflict by putting loyal locals in charge is in danger of backfiring. Analysts say Kadyrov has carved out an autonomy in Chechnya that his separatist rebel opponents in the hills could only dream of. Splits have emerged between his men and forces backing his supposed boss, the Kremlin-appointed president Alu Alkhanov.

In private, Kadyrov is said to despise the Russians, admitting to one interviewer: “We should keep away from them.” Already there are ominous signs. He put the wind up Moscow earlier this year by banning gambling, calling for women to wear headscarves, and promising polygamy would be tolerated in the republic – a clear breach of Russian laws. He argues that Chechens are “patriots of Russia” and piles praise on Putin for his respect for Islam. (He used to admire Saddam Hussein, and says: “I don’t recognise Bush. He’s a war-initiator.”)

But Kadyrov is far from kowtowing to Moscow. His henchmen allegedly control much of the republic’s illegal oil trade. To some, he has begun to resemble the very Islamic extremists he was supposed to eradicate. When riots broke out across the globe over a Danish cartoon of the prophet Muhammad, Kadyrov fanned the flames. He effectively stopped the work of the Danish Refugee Council, one of the largest groups providing aid to Chechnya. “That cartoonist needs to be buried alive,” he says with relish. Such impulses are thought to have alarmed Putin. Relations with the Russian leadership can be tense. Is the federal government allocating enough money to rebuild Chechnya, I ask. “No, it’s not,” he replies baldly. “Absolutno, ne khrena ne vydelyayut nam!” This is a crude phrase for a politician to use. The best translation is: “They’re giving us absolutely dick-all!” (Khren means horseradish, a euphemism for penis.)

In the kitchen, the conversation soon turns to Shamil Basayev, the radical Chechen warlord who claims he ordered the assassination of Kadyrov’s father. Three months after our meeting with Kadyrov, Basayev will be killed in Ingushetia, the Russian republic adjoining Chechnya that has seen a spill-over from the conflict. A week short of the G8 leaders summit hosted by Russia in St Petersburg, it is a coup for Putin. But although claimed by Russian forces as a “special operation”, Basayev’s death will remain cloaked in mystery. The rebels confirm his death, but it is unclear how he died. Unidentified security sources tell Russian media that he was most likely killed using a satellite-guided detonator triggered by an agent, who was guided by video pictures beamed from an unmanned Pchela (“Bee”) spy plane.

Some reports say the detonator was planted in a consignment of explosives that the rebels were buying from middlemen in Ingushetia by a mole among Basayev’s men who was paid £250,000. Others claim the detonator was put in place with the connivance of a foreign arms dealer. But local police officials and Basayev’s allies claim that the explosion was simply an accident caused by the rebels’ truck, full of explosives, running over a pothole. Critics suggest that version fits better with the fact that Basayev managed to evade capture for over a decade, bribing security forces with ease to travel widely in the Caucasus.

Greater mystery is added by the fact that Russian experts are unable to formally identify Basayev’s remains. Part of his skull and his prosthetic leg are recognised by Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB) operatives. However, no police records can be found to compare with five fingerprints from his decapitated corpse. And no DNA match can be made because all of Basayev’s close relatives have been killed or are in hiding.

At the time of our interview with Kadyrov, Basayev, a hardened fighter who lost one of his legs to a landmine, is still at large, probably somewhere in southern Russia, although not necessarily Chechnya. “It’s 50-50 that he’s in the republic,” says Kadyrov. “If I knew 100% where he was, I would get to him. I would walk. I would crawl…” Basayev is public enemy No 1 after organising the Beslan school siege, which ended with 331 people dead – more than half of them children. After the death of the moderate rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in 2005, all chances for negotiation evaporated and the guerrilla leadership was passed into the hands of Basayev and other extremists.

Basayev’s demands are clear: a withdrawal of Russian “infidels” and their “puppets” from Chechnya, and recognition of the republic’s full independence. Kadyrov admits that Basayev is a “strong opponent” but dismisses the rebels’ claim of a legitimate shadow government that includes the envoy Akhmed Zakayev, who lives in exile in London. “Where are these ministries?” he scoffs. “Where are these people, where is their government? I’m kind of having trouble seeing them. I’d give them a job too,” he laughs. “Ha! What government? What people? Devils!”

When we meet Kadyrov, Basayev – who, with his usual black sense of irony, heads the shadow government’s “anti-terrorist centre” – is under increasing pressure. Kadyrov says thousands of security forces are seeking him out in the mountains. “When we find him, I want to lead that operation and kill him myself. It’s our way, revenge.” Later, after Basayev’s death in Ingushetia, Kadyrov will express bitter regret at not achieving his dream of killing his enemy.

Ramzan Kadyrov learnt all about revenge – and war and brutality – at an early age. He was born in Tsenteroi on October 5, 1976, into the largest clan in Chechnya: the Benoi. A tearaway at school, he strove to gain the respect of his father, a severe Muslim priest, or imam. “My father was very demanding,” he remembers. “I did everything I could to please him, so that he would say, ‘Ramzan’s a good boy.’ He never did.”

The desire to emulate his father has been a constant throughout his life, he says. “I can’t put into words what kind of man he was. Only the Almighty knows now. We were always together. I wasn’t just his son, I was always by his side.” In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union splintered into fragments, rebels in Chechnya – a mountainous southern region in the North Caucasus with a Muslim population – launched a bid for independence. Akhmad Kadyrov joined that first war, famously calling for jihad and for every Chechen to “kill 150 Russians”.

Ramzan, then a teenager with a passion for boxing, followed his father into battle, leading a platoon of rebel troops. Like many Chechen men, he had carried a pistol from the age of 14. Coincidentally, during the war he shared a room briefly with Basayev, then a field commander, the man who would become his nemesis. Kadyrov says there was never any love lost between him and Basayev, whose militant Islamism was anathema to many traditionally moderate Sufi Chechens. “Once, there was a meeting of the state council. I was there. He stood up and said I should be killed to establish order. And my father replied, ‘If you’re a man, kill him. He’s standing right there.’ But Basayev did nothing.” Kadyrov gives a look of contempt at this weakness.

As the conflict wore on, Russian planes carpet-bombed Grozny, killing thousands. Yet by 1996 the rebels had managed to force the federal army out of their smouldering city.

Chechnya had earned a shaky de facto independence; Russians withdrew from the republic. But then in 1999, Moscow unleashed a second devastating assault on Grozny.

Within months the rebels had fled to the high peaks of southern Chechnya, keeping up a guerrilla insurgency ever since. Akhmad Kadyrov, by that time completely estranged from the militant wing of the rebel movement, was tempted over to Moscow’s side as the Kremlin’s new head of administration in Chechnya.

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Ramzan also surrendered and took charge of his father’s personal bodyguard. Why did Ramzan and his father betray their beliefs, I ask him. “We didn’t,” says Kadyrov. “We were never against Russia, and we were never for Russia. We were always with the Chechen people. And they changed their minds.”

It’s a cunning answer and not entirely false. Many Chechens were tired of conflict, hoping only for stability, houses and jobs. The extremist Wahhabi form of Islam was unattractive. Akhmad Kadyrov scored some early successes in persuading former rebel allies to give up their arms, and was soon made president, albeit after a dubious election. Ramzan was loyal, but stories of his militia kidnapping and persecution of civilians damaged his father’s reputation.

“A part of society disliked Akhmad Kadyrov but he began to gain popularity,” says Aleksei Malashenko, Russia’s leading expert on the north Caucasus. “Ramzan, on the other hand, was hated, and he is hated now by most Chechens. They think he’s a gangster.”

It is unclear why Kadyrov senior tolerated his son’s behaviour. Probably he considered Ramzan more reliable than his older brother, Zelimkhan, and thought of him as his successor if he died.

On May 9, 2004, that moment came. At 10.35am, as Akhmad Kadyrov watched a Victory Day parade in Grozny, a huge explosion ripped through the stadium in which he sat with other dignitaries. The president was fatally wounded, dying later the same day. Six others were killed. Basayev quickly claimed the attack.

Two years on, Basayev, too, is dead and the rebels are weakened. But their new leader, Doku Umarov, is an experienced field commander, with the power to launch a deadly strike.

A strange scene flickered across Russian television screens on the night of Akhmad’s assassination. At the Kremlin, Putin greeted a tearful Ramzan, inexplicably dressed in a sky-blue tracksuit. Ramzan’s father was “a truly heroic person”, Putin said. The meeting was more than a show of comfort. It was an endorsement everyone understood: you are the leader now.

Then 27, the young man could not legally take his father’s mantle. Alu Alkhanov, a reliable former policeman and interior minister, was made president. But Kadyrov quickly became the power behind the scenes, receiving strong backing from Putin, who awarded him the Hero of Russia medal for his efforts to wipe out the militants.

“Putin is a real man,” says Kadyrov, shaking his head in admiration. “That kind of person is only born once in a hundred years. He’s very decisive. He’s sure of himself and he trusts people.”

Soon Kadyrov started making populist moves to beef up his image. Last year he laid on a free pop concert and the fund named after his father began building a £3.1m aqua park in Gudermes (many Chechens still have to collect water from standpipes, an irony that seems to have gone unnoticed). Then Kadyrov pulled off a PR coup when he brought the former boxing champion Mike Tyson to Gudermes to promote a tournament. A bemused Tyson, in Russia trying to claw back his lost millions by promoting vodka, lisped “Salaam alaikum” to an audience of delirious Chechen fans before being swept away in a Hummer.

“Tyson said, ‘I really like Chechnya,’” says Kadyrov. “I said, ‘Come back, we’ll give you a little plot, build you a house.’ I got an SMS from him a month ago but then he disappeared.”

In March this year, Kadyrov finally got his reward. He was appointed prime minister of Chechnya. Today he is being held up as a new role model: an observant Muslim – he is married with five children – who doesn’t drink or smoke but sports the latest casual fashions from Moscow.

There’s no doubt his star is waxing. A pretty Russian PR girl called Tanya has been drafted in from Moscow to help polish his image. “It’s all down to Ramzan,” she breathes, as she teeters through the mud in stilettos, showing off his rebuilding projects in Grozny. Another aide paddles at Kadyrov’s head with a hairbrush when the camera heaves into sight.

“Ramzan’s got the dynamism to get things moving,” says Artur Atsalamov, the Chechen singer of the pop group Dead Dolphins, which performs at events organised by Kadyrov.

Kadyrov’s supporters say he has put a Taser gun to the lethargic political elite. Shortly after his appointment, he gave members of his cabinet a stark choice: return their families to Grozny from expensive second homes elsewhere, or give up their posts. “The ministers just wanted to run off to Moscow all the time to have fun and see their wives and kids,” he says. “I told them they should be here, closer to the people. And if they didn’t like it they could stand down.”

Yet the gloss is only so thick. Everyone knows that to get compensation for a house destroyed in the war, you must hand over up to half of the cash as a kickback to government officials, some of them friends or family of Kadyrov. “I was so disgusted I turned down the money altogether,” says Minat, a charity worker in the capital.

Many Chechens are troubled by their leader’s transformation into a pseudo-monarch. “I don’t want to wear a headscarf and be a housewife, I want a career,” says Kheda Akhmatova, 20, a student at Grozny University who dislikes Kadyrov’s conservative attitude towards women.

There are graver worries. Young men suspected of being rebels continue to be abducted at night by masked men who drive military vehicles with hidden numberplates. Torture is routinely used to extract information about rebels’ whereabouts from their civilian relatives.

The Russian rights organisation Memorial said in January that it had recorded 1,799 kidnappings in Chechnya since 2002, with about 1,000 victims yet to be found. In 2005 the US group Human Rights Watch concluded that the “vast majority” of abductions in the previous two years were committed by the Kadyrovtsy – loyal squads of amnestied rebel fighters. This autumn the UN investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, will visit Grozny to examine what he describes as “very, very serious allegations of torture and ill-treatment” in the republic.

“We have evidence that Kadyrov’s men keep secret underground chambers for detainees and that he personally participated in torturing one captured rebel with an open flame,” says Ayut Titiev, a representative of Memorial in Gudermes. “Another man was taken to Tsenteroi, hung up by one arm for 36 hours and beaten with iron bars.” In another recent incident, Kadyrov’s men decapitated an opposition fighter’s corpse and stuck his head on a post as a warning, according to residents in Tsotsin-Yurt.

How does the young leader respond to these accusations? “It’s just journalists who are paid to write that stuff,” Kadyrov jibes, naming one famous reporter who he believes is in the pay of the rebels. “Let’s get in a car and go to any region. If just one person says I’m a bandit, says I kidnap people, then I’ll agree. But you won’t hear it.”

Row after row of gutted apartment blocks whip past the car window, each smashed asunder as if with a giant sledgehammer. A few still stand, splattered with giant shell holes. Here and there a bulb burns in a window or laundry flutters on a balcony: signs of life amid the ruins. We have been invited to witness one of Ramzan’s acts of charity in Grozny. The car slews to a halt between three high-rises. A crowd is gathering.

Minutes later a fleet of silver Lada saloons with blacked-out windows careens into the yard. Ten men with chiselled faces and Kalashnikovs jump out and take up positions. Kadyrov jumps out from the lead car. The crowd surges toward him. It’s clear they are supplicants rather than fans, looking for crumbs from the table of power: a new home, a job, help for a sick relative.

Today the prime minister is giving an apartment to a returning refugee family. The crowd stampedes inside. “They wrote to me pleading for help and six days later we gave them this,” Kadyrov tells the room, hugging a child and posing for cameras. The crowd sweeps Kadyrov back down to the street, leaving the refugee family in their empty living room. In the yard, he makes a short, rousing speech. “Once we lived like rats in the basements,” he cries, stabbing a finger in the air. “Now we’re on the first and second floors; every year we go higher, rebuilding our city, rebuilding our republic.”

Danger is ever present. Kadyrov’s bodyguards propel him back to his car. He turns, waves and leaps behind the wheel of the Lada. The cortege speeds away in a spray of mud and gravel.

It’s a stunt, but Kadyrov is more than a Kremlin puppet playing at Robin Hood.

In backing him, Moscow seems to have banked on Franklin D Roosevelt’s old adage about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.”

A senior foreign-ministry official explains the logic. “We know he’s young and he says some stupid stuff,” he says, on condition of anonymity. “And we know his guys kidnap people sometimes – it’s a war, after all. What’s important is that he has power and respect and a lot of energy. And he genuinely wants to change things for the better. Let’s give him a chance.”

If he can stay alive, the chance remains that Kadyrov will tame himself and bring real peace to his homeland. Malashenko, the analyst, says he may soon realise his limitations. “Putin is a hostage of Ramzan. But at the same time, Ramzan is unable to survive without Putin. He knows he must do things to please Moscow.”

Later I ask Kadyrov if he is afraid of becoming president. After all, of the five men to serve as Chechen president since 1991, only Alkhanov has not been assassinated.

“I’m afraid of the responsibility, that’s all,” he says. “But if the post is offered to me I will take it. That would be a great honour.”

It is late evening on the day of our visit to Tsenteroi. Kadyrov, who has been friendly throughout, gives us a tour of the village. Without bodyguards, he drives a black Lexus at eye-watering speeds through the tiny streets, singing ditties in Russian. Here is the local school he attended (“Where is the night watchman? Bastard, he’s gone home”), now staffed by teachers specially brought from the Russian heartland. Here is a monument to his father’s allies.

“Want to see my boys, then?” he asks with a sly grin, back at the compound. He steps into a yard, lets out a low whistle and begins to count out loud. In less than a minute, 50 hulking men have poured out from a blockhouse wearing camouflage, black berets and webbing, and clutching assault rifles. They assemble hurriedly in front of their master. Kadyrov parades them around the yard. “Allahu akbar,” he cries. “Allahu akbar,” they roar in return as they march.

As a final party trick, a soldier brings out Kadyrov’s two famous pets: a Siberian tiger and a lion cub given to him by friends. He baits and slaps the pair for the camera, goading them to retaliate. Watching the eager young tiger straining at its leash – a frayed piece of twine that threatens to snap at any moment – seems an apt metaphor for its owner.

On our last day in Chechnya, Kadyrov lays on a banquet for youth workers, at his “Ramzan” sports club in Gudermes. There is no alcohol, but music and comedy sketches. The benevolent prince is wisecracking with his cronies, guffawing and texting on his mobile phone. One young acolyte has such a rictus from grinning at his master’s jokes that it looks like a physical affliction.

“Look,” says Kadyrov, as the evening draws to a close. “They’re not people, those boyeviki [militant fighters], killing old men and breaking babies’ heads against walls. They think they will get into paradise, but Allah is not with them. Allah is with us. And we will win.”