Kadyrov became prime minister of Chechnya, and later president, following the assassination of his father, Akhmat Kadyrov, whom Putin had installed as a pro-Russian president by means of a rigged election in 2003. Both had previously been on the rebel side – the elder Kadyrov was the mufti, or religious leader, of Chechnya under its separatist leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and had even called for a jihad against Russia. I once had tea with him in a house in rebel-held Chechnya in 1995. I recall that he asked rather disarmingly whether the British people were generally converting to Islam. The Kadyrovs later reversed their anti-Russian stance, however, and supported the war launched by Putin against the insurgents in 1999. Ramzan’s militia, known as kadyrovtsi or Kadyrovites, acquired an unsavoury reputation – accused of torture, abductions and murders. Moscow installed first Akhmat, then Ramzan, as ‘quisling’ leaders – Chechens loyal to Moscow – under a new strategy to pacify the republic.
In the wake of the Chechen terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, the Kremlin deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, gave this explanation of Russia’s strategy towards Chechnya: ‘The solution is complex and hard. And we have begun to put it into practice. It entails the active socialisation of the northern Caucasus, the gradual creation of democratic institutions and the foundations of civil society, of an effective system of law and order, and of industrial capacity and social infrastructure, the overcoming of mass unemployment, corruption and the collapse of culture and education.’ In reality, Kremlin policy amounted to the surrender of the republic to the loyal Ramzan Kadyrov, allowing him to enrich himself and run the place as he pleased so long as it was kept inside the Russian Federation. Kadyrov professes ‘love’ for Putin and calls him his ‘idol’. He renamed the main street in Grozny, the capital, Putin Avenue.
The strategy has been partially successful. Despite the continuation of terrorist atrocities, mainly outside of Chechnya, by the remaining Islamic rebels, Kadyrov has restored a semblance of order within the republic. Grozny, totally destroyed in the two wars, has been largely rebuilt, using petrodollars thrown at it from Moscow. It boasts Europe’s largest mosque. It has normal shops and cafés again – something I thought I would never see when I reported from the bombed-out city in the late 1990s. But the strategy is a double-edged sword for Putin. The muscular, bearded Kadyrov is a wayward and ruthless individual. I visited his palace outside the village of Tsentoroy in 2008 and got a taste of his fabulous wealth – the grounds include an artificial lake and a zoo with panthers and leopards – and his primitive way of thinking. Asked what he thought about the death of the rebel leader Shamil Basayev, the mastermind behind most of the recent terrorist attacks in Russia, Kadyrov replied: ‘I was delighted when I heard he was killed… and then sad, because I wanted to kill him with my own hands.’ He has introduced elements of Sharia law in his fiefdom, and congratulated men who sprayed paintballs at women who appeared in public with their heads uncovered.
American diplomats attending a riotous wedding reception in Dagestan in August 2006 witnessed Kadyrov, the guest of honour, dancing with a gold-plated pistol stuck down the back of his jeans and showering dancing children with hundred-dollar bills.5
True to Chechen tradition, Kadyrov is quick to promise retribution and blood vengeance on his enemies. On his watch many opponents have disappeared. His former bodyguard, Umar Israilov, who went public about torture and killings by the Kadyrovites that he had witnessed, was shot dead in Vienna in January 2009. Six months later Natalya Estemirova, who worked for the Memorial human rights centre in Grozny, was abducted and murdered. Kadyrov described her as a woman ‘without honour, dignity or conscience’. As for Anna Politkovskaya, in 2004 she published an account of a terrifying meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov, during which he boasted that his hobbies were fighting and women. The interview included the following comical exchange:
‘What kind of education do you have?’
‘Higher. Law. I’m graduating soon, sitting my exams.’
‘What kind of exams?’
‘What do you mean, what kind? Exams, that’s all.’
‘What’s the name of the college you are graduating from?’
‘A branch of the Moscow Business Institute, in Gudermes. The law faculty.’
‘What are you specialising in?
‘I’m a lawyer.’
‘But is your diploma in criminal law, civil law…?’
‘I can’t remember. I wrote something, but I’ve forgotten. There’s a lot of events going on.’
Kadyrov was later made an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
Politkovskaya was taken back to see him again the next morning, and found him with a Kadyrovite in a black T-shirt who snarled at her: ‘You should have been shot back in Moscow, in the street, the way they do it in Moscow.’ And Kadyrov chimed in: ‘You’re an enemy. You should be shot.’
Politkovskaya described him as a ‘baby dragon, raised by the Kremlin. Now they need to feed him. Otherwise he will set everything on fire.’ She was about to publish another article about human rights abuses and torture in Chechnya when she was killed.
Her murder took place not only on Putin’s birthday but two days after Kadyrov’s. (I know this because I happened to be sitting next to Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in a Moscow restaurant that evening, when he took out his mobile phone and called ‘Ramzan’ to congratulate him fulsomely on turning 30.) Could the murder have been someone’s slightly belated ‘birthday present’ to the Chechen strongman? Or could it have been Kadyrov’s gift to his ‘idol’, Putin? In Russia’s criminal underworld, such an idea is not implausible. Or was the murder designed to discredit one or other of them? Or was there some other motive? One thing was clear: the Kremlin was intensely annoyed by Politkovskaya’s work – particularly some of her more extravagant claims, such as her assertion that the 2002 Moscow theatre siege, which ended with 130 deaths, was stage-managed by one of Russia’s secret services.
Prosecutors brought three Chechens to trial, but they were acquitted in 2009 for lack of evidence. A retrial was later ordered, and a fourth man, accused of being the actual assassin, was arrested. In August 2011 a former police officer, Lt. Col. Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, who had appeared as a witness in the earlier trial, was charged with plotting the murder. As for who might have commissioned the crime – the courts have not even come close to establishing that.
It’s our oil
Russia faced more criticism during 2006 as Putin and the siloviki moved to assert greater control over the country’s energy resources, some of which belonged to foreign companies. We saw earlier that the prospect of Yukos selling out to an American oil major was one of the factors that prompted the arrest of Khodorkovsky and the nationalisation of his assets. Now Putin turned his attention to so-called Production Sharing Agreements which Boris Yeltsin had signed with Western oil companies. Under a PSA, the foreign company finances all the development and exploration, and when the oil or gas comes on stream it is allowed to keep the first revenues to recoup its costs; after that the profits are shared (in agreed proportions) by the government and the company.
Putin believed these were humiliating agreements, the kind of deal a Third World country enters into because it doesn’t have the skills or knowhow to extract the oil itself. The first PSA, signed in 1994, was known as Sakhalin-2: a consortium called Sakhalin Energy, comprising Royal Dutch Shell (55 per cent) and two Japanese companies, Mitsui and Mitsubishi, was developing huge oil and gas fields near the island of Sakhalin in Russia’s far east. The development costs foreseen in the agreement came to $10 billion, so this was the sum that Shell and its partners would be able to recover from the first sales before any revenues would begin to flow to the Russian state.