In return for providing this supposed stability, Ramzan was given leeway to settle his personal scores with enemies and rivals: Chechens who might have represented alternative power bases, or those who had spoken out against the abuses of his rule, met violent deaths not only in Grozny and Moscow but also in Dubai and Vienna, an extraordinary series of extrajudicial assassinations to which the Kremlin turned a blind eye. Inside Chechnya, Kadyrov's forces were accused of carrying out all manner of crimes against those Chechens who refused to lay down their arms.
Kadyrov did have a real insurgency to fight against, the continuation of the 1990s movement he had once been part of, which with time had lost its focus on local independence and grown closer to the international jihadi cause. Kadyrov's people insisted that the harsh methods were the only way to keep order. A decade earlier, the whole of Chechnya had been engaged in partisan warfare against the Russians; bringing people back to peaceful life meant dealing ruthlessly with those who did not play by the rules. Anyone who broke the stifling codes of silence and questioned the tactics used to fight the insurgency—the ritualized torture to gain information and the punitive house-burning of relatives—was also at risk.
Natalia Estemirova was one of the last of the people trying to exercise some kind of oversight over the human rights situation in the region. In July 2009, she was kidnapped and murdered, with government- linked militias implicated. A month later, I went to Chechnya to write about the atmosphere in the aftermath of her killing. During my visit, Zarema Sadulayeva and Umar Dzhabrailov, recently married charity workers, were kidnapped from the offices of the Save the Generations charity in central Grozny, where Sadulayeva worked. Six men burst into
her office in the broad daylight of a Monday afternoon, four of them in combat fatigues and the other two in civilian clothing, and dragged the pair off. With characteristic impunity, they returned later to seize the couples mobile phones and Dzhabrailov's car. I spent the evening with the region's few remaining human rights activists, brave but terrified, traipsing from one police station to the next in the eerie darkness of the Grozny night, trying to find news. But nobody was talking. The next afternoon, a call came: Dzhabrailov's car had been found, with the bullet-ridden bodies of the newlyweds in its boot.
At the funeral in a nearby village, plain-clothed officials combed the streets keeping an eye on the mourners. Inside the house, female relatives performed the grim task of preparing Sadulayeva's mutilated body for burial, sponging down the naked corpse with wet cloths. Sadulayeva's work could not possibly be considered political. Some suggested her husband might have links to the Islamist insurgency. But the line between those who were legitimate law-enforcement targets for terrorist activities, and those who were targeted simply because they were critics of Kadyrov, grew more and more blurry as the years passed.
The leadership cult, the social contract of prosperity in return for unquestioning loyalty, and the ruthless handling of critics deemed unhelpful to the overarching project of renaissance: what Kadyrov offered Chechnya was a souped-up, more violent version of what Putin offered Russia, without the window dressing of democracy and niceties that the broader Russian project demanded. It was Russia as reflected in a circus mirror.
So it was with memory too. The people had been liberated. Not defeated. That was the official mantra, and that was the deal.
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In locations far from Chechnya, I met with Chechens who had escaped Kadyrov's torture chambers and fled the region. One claimed to have seen a man doused in petrol and set alight. A dignified elderly gentleman, whose sons had been in the insurgency, told tales of awful beatings, of being handcuffed to the radiator in a damp cell for days and nights on end, and of electric shock machines that looked like they came from 1950s black-and-white horror movies, a spaghetti of leads that attached to fingers and toes and delivered a shock that sent your muscles into wild spasms of pain when the torturer pumped the hand- wound lever. Another told me how his captors tied his ankles to his wrists and trussed him up from the ceiling with a belt. They carefully positioned him at an angle that meant when he urinated or defecated, it would run down over his torso and onto his face.
Russian and Chechen officials denied such practices in public; in private, they justified them by the need to prevent terror attacks. The more the insurgency resorted to attacks on civilians, the more Kadyrov and the Russians felt vindicated about their own heavy-handed tactics; the more aggressive the tactics, the more entrenched and depraved the terrorist aims became.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chechen independence movement had called for the establishment of an independent Chechen republic, to be known as Ichkeria. The movement used Islamist rhetoric, but even the appalling hostage takings at a Moscow theatre in 2002 and Beslan's School Number One in 2004 were aimed at putting pressure on Russia to withdraw its troops. The militants showed themselves more than willing to cause civilian casualties, but unlike al-Qaida or ISIS attacks, massacre was a side effect when things went wrong, not the end goal.
Doku Umarov, a ginger-bearded militant who was the self-styled president of Ichkeria, in 2007 announced the establishment of the Caucasus Emirate. Henceforth, the goal was not an independent Ichkeria, but an Islamic emirate that would spread across the Caucasus, with Umarov as its so-called Emir. The militants, on the run in the high mountains and thick forests of the Chechen interior, promised to rain down terror on Kadyrov and his Russian backers. A series of attacks in the Moscow metro in 2010 left dozens dead; the next year a suicide bomber struck at the capital's Domodedovo Airport killing at least thirty-six people in the international arrivals hall. Umarov approved both of the operations, he said, in videos claiming responsibility. Now, the insurgency negotiated' using random slaughter.
Determined to keep attacks inside Chechnya to a minimum, Kadyrov endorsed collective punishment for the relatives of those in the militant underground. Quietly, Russian security services allowed suspected insurgents to leave the country, figuring they would do less
harm outside Russia than inside. Doku Umarov died in 2013 after the FSB managed to poison food that was brought to his hideout by a messenger. In the years that followed, many of the group's members went to fight in Syria for the cause of global jihad, lending belated credence to the Russian claims that they were fighting the evil of international terror rather than a local conflict brewed over many years of grievances under tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet rule. Most Russians knew nothing of the brutal deportation of the Chechens and the role the memories of it had in the demands for post-Soviet independence.
It was clear that with time, many in the Caucasus Emirate had become fully converted to radical Islamism and were willing to use terrorist methods to push their agenda. But on the numerous occasions I met people linked with the insurgency, they always cited very specific grievances about the way they had been treated by Russia throughout history, rather than speaking in the Islamist rhetoric of global jihad.
In 2011, two years before Doku Umarov was killed, I met his brother Akhmed in Istanbul. He was one of many Chechens I interviewed in the offices of an NGO near the city's Fatih Mosque, and the first time we spoke he did not reveal his true identity. When I later put the pieces of his story together, it dawned on me with whom I had been speaking, and I arranged to see him again. He admitted that he was indeed the brother of Russia's most wanted man. He was still in touch with his brother, via secure communication methods, he told me.