Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation. Ramzan Kadyrov’s Private State and Vladimir Putin’s Federal “Power Vertical”

SWP Research Paper

Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik

German Institute for

International and Security Affairs

Uwe Halbach

Chechnya’s Status within the

Russian Federation

Ramzan Kadyrov’s Private State and Vladimir Putin’s

Federal “Power Vertical”

SWP Research Paper 2

May 2018

In the run-up to the Russian presidential elections on 18 March 2018, the

Kremlin further tightened the federal “vertical of power” that Vladimir Putin

has developed since 2000. In the North Caucasus, this above all concerns the

republic of Dagestan. Moscow intervened with a powerful purge, replacing

the entire political leadership. The situation in Chechnya, which has been

ruled by Ramzan Kadyrov since 2007, is conspicuously different. From the

early 2000s onwards, President Putin conducted a policy of “Chechenisation”

there, delegating the fight against the armed revolt to local security forces.

Under Putin’s protection, the republic gained a leadership which is now

publicly referred to by Russians as the “Chechen Khanate”, among other

similar expressions. Kadyrov’s breadth of power encompasses an independ-

ent foreign policy, which is primarily orientated towards the Middle East.

Kadyrov emphatically professes that his republic is part of Russia and

presents himself as “Putin’s foot soldier”. Yet he has also transformed the

federal subject of Chechnya into a private state. The ambiguous relationship

between this republic and the central power fundamentally rests on the

loyalty pact between Putin and Kadyrov. However, criticism of this arrange-

ment can now occasionally be heard even in the Russian president’s inner

circles. With regard to Putin’s fourth term, the question arises just how long

the pact will last. The price that Moscow was willing to accept for Chech-

nya’s “pacification” by Kadyrov and his supporters include serious human-

rights violations. Since 2017 these have increasingly moved back into the

focus of international politics and reporting.

SWP Research Paper

Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik

German Institute for

International and Security Affairs

Uwe Halbach

Chechnya’s Status within the

Russian Federation

Ramzan Kadyrov’s Private State and Vladimir Putin’s Federal “Power Vertical”

SWP Research Paper 2

May 2018

und Politik, 2018

SWP Research Papers are

peer reviewed by senior

researchers and the execu-

tive board of the Institute.

They reflect the views of

the author(s).

SWP

Stiftung Wissenschaft und

Politik

German Institute

for International

and Security Affairs

Ludwigkirchplatz 3–4

10719 Berlin

Germany

Phone +49 30 880 07-0

Fax +49 30 880 07-200

ww.swp-berlin.org

[email protected]

ISSN 1863-1053

Translation by Tom Genrich

(English version of

SWP-Studie 1/2018)

Table of Contents

5 Issues and Conclusions

7 The Development of the “Vertical of Power”

13 “Pax Ramzana”: The “Pacification” of Chechnya in

Kadyrov’s Private State

16 Kadyrov’s Cultural Policy:

Back to Chechen Tradition?

19 Conflicts between Kadyrov and the

Russian Security Services

21 Human-Rights Violations

24 Reconstruction and Economic Boom,

or Façade of Stability?

26 Chechnya as a Cross-Border Actor

30 Prospects and Conclusion

32 Abbreviations

Dr Uwe Halbach is a Senior Associate in the Eastern Europe

and Eurasia Division

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

Issues and Conclusions

Chechnya’s Status within the

Russian Federation.

Ramzan Kadyrov’s Private State and

Vladimir Putin’s Federal “Power Vertical”

The current head of the Chechen republic, Ramzan

Kadyrov, has ruled for over a decade, during which

period Chechnya’s relationship with the Russian

Federation has become ambiguous. Kadyrov makes

strenuous efforts to proclaim that the republic is part

of Russia, to link Chechen nationalism with Russian

patriotism, to portray Russia’s president in the

Chechen capital Grozny as a state icon, and to present

himself as “Putin’s foot soldier”. Yet he has turned

the federal subject of Chechnya into a private state to

such an extent that the Russian President’s entourage

is asking itself to what degree the federal “vertical

of power” developed by Vladimir Putin extends to

Chechnya. Among Russians, expressions such as the

“Chechen Khanate” or “Kadyrov’s caliphate” have

gained currency. From a historical perspective, Chech-

nya’s position within the Russian Federation has been

compared to the Central-Asian Emirate of Bukhara,

which enjoyed a maximum of autonomy within the

power structure of the Tsarist Empire in the late 19

and early 20

century.

Kadyrov’s self-arrogated powers also encompass

a foreign policy that is primarily orientated towards

the Middle East and the Islamic world as a whole. No

other regional leader has claimed a comparable role

for himself, extending beyond his own administrative

area and beyond Russia’s borders. Here too the above-

mentioned ambiguity is in evidence. On the one

hand, the Kremlin welcomes the division of diplo-

matic labour vis-à-vis the Islamic world between Mos-

cow and Grozny. On the other hand, this situation

creates contradictions, as was shown for instance

in Moscow’s and Grozny’s divergent statements

regarding the persecution of the Rohingya ethnic

group in Myanmar.

In the 1990s, Chechnya became the epitome of

separatism in post-Soviet Russia. Within the renegade

republic, a national movement invoked a historical

continuity of anti-colonial resistance to Russian do-

minion. In 1991 Dzhokhar Dudayev, the then-leader

of the Chechen secessionist movement, demanded

a peace treaty to put an end to “the 300-year war

Issues and Conclusions

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Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

between the Russian Empire and the Chechen people”.

Moscow’s response to these efforts consisted of

massive military operations. According to the official

interpretation, in the first war (1994–1996) Russian

forces in Chechnya combated ethno-territorial sepa-

ratism; in the second war, which began in 1999 and

officially ended in 2009, they fought international

Islamist terrorism. The two wars are the most violent

events in the post-Soviet space. In terms of casualties

and the extent of town and settlement destruction,

their consequences easily eclipse the secession wars

in the Southern Caucasus (1991–1994), the civil

war in Central-Asian Tajikistan (1992–1997) and

the battles in East Ukraine from 2014 onwards. Nowa-

days, the Kadyrov republic portrays itself as an ad-

vocate for Russian multiethnic unity, but in fact it

has long been Russia’s “internal abroad”. The clearest

expression of this development is its particular legal

situation, which combines Islamic and traditional

common-law rules with the whims of the head of the

republic, and contradicts Russian legislation.

By delegating the fight against the insurrection to

Chechen security forces as of 2002, President Putin

attempted to end the period of large-scale acts of war

in the Caucasian republic. Critics of this “Chechenisa-

tion” claim that Akhmat Kadyrov and his son Ramzan

were using it to bring about de facto secession, all

the while proclaiming untiringly that Chechnya was

a constituent of the Russian Federation. In so doing,

critics say, the Kadyrovs were more successful than

the armed separatist resistance to which they had

both previously belonged. The Chechnya policy

during Putin’s first term in office is the more remark-

able because it was contemporaneous with his devel-

opment of the so-called federal power vertical: events

in and around Chechnya caused the Kremlin to re-

centralise political structures within the Russian

Federation. Even some Russian experts now critically

refer to this as “hyper-centralisation”. President Putin

derived legitimacy for the recentralisation from the

conflict with the Caucasian republic of Chechnya.

A major step in this direction was the (temporary)

abolition of regional gubernatorial elections follow-

ing the hostage crisis in the North-Caucasian town

of Beslan in September 2004. More than 300 people

were killed when Russian security forces stormed a

school occupied by terrorists.

Scholarly literature is divided on the merits of

the “Chechenisation” policy. Some observers point

to the transition from the period of large-scale armed

violence to a more selective, more targeted and ulti-

mately more successful fight against the armed under-

ground by local security forces. For them, this tran-

sition succeeded in removing Chechnya from the

top position in the North-Caucasus violence statistics.

Others consider that the local political price of this

security-policy victory was too high. The “stabilisation

costs” that President Putin was willing to accept in

this context include widespread human-rights viola-

tions in the Kadyrov republic, which Russian author-

ities have done nothing to check. The persecution

and murder of homosexuals in Chechnya in 2017

and the arrest of the national representative of the

human-rights organisation Memorial in early 2018

have brought these violations to the forefront of

international politics and reporting as rarely before.

The loyalty relationship between Kadyrov and his

“feudal lord” Putin plays a decisive role in Chechnya’s

position within the Russian Federation vis-à-vis the

central-government level, which has been strengthened

since the early 2000s. With regard to Putin’s fourth

term in office, the question arises whether the Putin-

Kadyrov pact will continue to hold.

The Development of the “Vertical of Power”

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Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

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On 31 March 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet

Union, a federation treaty set out the division of power

in post-Soviet Russia between the centre and the re-

gions or federal subjects. During his visit to the Tatar

capital Kazan in the summer of 1990, Boris Yeltsin,

the president of the then-Soviet Russian Federation

(Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, RSFSR),

had proclaimed: “Take as much sovereignty as you

can digest.” In the period that followed, republics

that had been Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics

(ASSR) declared themselves sovereign political enti-

ties. They demanded autonomy and resolute feder-

alisation. The 1992 federation treaty sealed this

process. A year later, Russia’s post-Soviet constitution

was adopted; even then, it contained no explicit

mention of the treaty. Moreover, two autonomous

republics, Chechnya and Tatarstan, had not signed

the treaty. Hardly anyone in Russia remembers that

document today.

At the dawn of the post-Soviet era, the Russian

Federation consisted of 89 regional entities. In the

years that followed, mergers of several regions

reduced that number to 83. Today, the multinational

federal state consists of 85 federal subjects (including

the Crimea, annexed in 2014 in violation of inter-

national law, and the city of Sevastopol). They are

represented at the central government level by del-

egates on the federal council. The regions, including

the autonomous republics, differ widely in socio-

economic development, size of economy and popu-

lation, ethnic composition, financial dependence on

the federal budget, and other criteria.

The majority

Vadim Shtepa, The Devolution of Russian Federalism

(Washington, D.C.: Jamestown Foundation, 4 April 2017),

https://jamestown.org/devolution-russian-federalism/.

Alexander Libman, Russische Regionen. Sichere Basis oder

Quelle der Instabilität für den Kreml?, SWP-Studie 19/2016

(Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, November 2016);

Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, Regionale Diskrepanzen in Russ-

of regions is currently reliant on annual financial

support. Only 14 regions count as net contributors.

Among the net beneficiary regions (dotacionnye

regiony), the largest autonomous republic in the North

Caucasus, Dagestan, is first and Chechnya fifth.

Among the federal subjects, 22 republics have

non-Russian titular nationalities. In some cases, these

populations are smaller in number than the ethnic-

Russian populations. However, hardly any Russians

still live in Chechnya or Dagestan. The areas of the

Russian Federation that have attracted the attention

of Russia specialists in the West are the North Cauca-

sus with its seven autonomous republics, from Ady-

gea near the Black Sea to Dagestan on the Caspian

Sea; the Volga region including the autonomous

republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan; and the

Far East.

President Vladimir Putin has initiated a process

of recentralisation and expanded a “power vertical”

limiting the federal subjects’ leeway for independent

policy-making. An example of this interlocking with

the central government is the dominant position of

the governing party United Russia (Yedinaya Rossiya)

in the regional parliaments. Putin’s power vertical

contrasts with his predecessor’s time in office. The

early Yeltsin years in particular were characterised by

a sometimes chaotic process of decentralisation and a

“sovereignty parade” of autonomous republics and

autonomous regional entities.

Recentralisation began in 2000, when the govern-

ment created seven federal districts, which were

land: Politisch verursacht (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische

Bildung, 14 April 2014), http://www.bpb.de/internationales/

europa/russland/182692/analyse-regionale-diskrepanzen-in-

russland-politisch-verursacht.

“Dagestan i Chechnja popali v pjaterku vysokodotacion-

nych regionov” [Dagestan and Chechnya came in the top five

of the highly subsidised regions],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 12 October

2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/310951.

The Development of the

“Vertical of Power”

The Development of the “Vertical of Power”

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May 2018

Map: Northern Caucasus

The Development of the “Vertical of Power”

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Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

compared to the General Governorates of the Tsarist

Empire. Two others have now joined: in January 2010

the Northern Caucasus, which previously belonged to

the larger Southern Federal District, was promoted to

its own federal district; in 2014 annexed Crimea was

also added to this category. The federal districts are

run by special representatives of the Russian presi-

dent. Their main tasks include ensuring the concord-

ance of federal and regional legislation and control-

ling the federal authorities that are active regionally,

such as tax authorities, the police or the domestic

secret service, the FSB.

The fact that Chechnya largely

eludes such control makes it a true exception.

Nineteen governors were forced to

resign in 2017, in the largest wave of

dismissals of the past five years.

After the Beslan hostage crisis of 2004, direct

elections of governors and heads of republic were

abolished. Since then, they have been appointed by

the Russian president. After mass protests against

alleged fraud during the December 2011 elections to

the Duma, the principle of direct regional elections

was reintroduced, albeit with serious restrictions.

Becoming a candidate for gubernatorial elections is

now complicated by a “municipal filter”: prospective

candidates first have to submit a set number of

signatures of delegates from local and district coun-

cils and mayors in their favour. Moreover, the elected

governor or head of republic can still be deposed by

the Kremlin. Before regional elections in 2017, there

were demands that the municipal filter – which had

ensured the dominance of the governing party at the

regional level – be made more democratic. Neverthe-

less, in September 2017 the filter once again served as

an administrative tool to prevent independents from

registering as candidates for gubernatorial elections

in 16 regions.

Martin Russell, Russia’s Constitutional Structure. Federal in

Form, Unitary in Function, (Strasbourg and Brussels: European

Parliamentary Research Service [EPRS], Members’ Service

Research, October 2015), 4.

“In 8 out of 16 regions, non-systemic candidates failed

to overcome the ‘municipal filter’ because of obstruction by

local and regional authorities.” European Platform for Demo-

cratic Elections (EPDE),

Analytical Report on the Administrative

Control over the Procedure of Collecting Signatures of Deputies and

Heads of Municipal Entities in Support of Candidates (“Municipal

Filter”), Newsletter (Berlin, 10 August 2017), 1, http://

newsletter.epde.org/tl_files/

EPDE/RESSOURCES/2017%20

Within several months to go before the presiden-

tial elections in March 2018, Moscow further tightened

its grip on governors and regional finances as part

of a staff policy focusing on a generational change

among the regional elites by replacing older “terri-

torial princes” with younger, easier-to-control tech-

nocrats from central institutions. Moscow has also

tied the loans that it grants to the many indebted

regions to conditions that restrict the latter’s leeway

to decide their own financial policy.

Nineteen gov-

ernors were forced to resign in 2017, in the largest

wave of dismissals of the past five years.

Simulta-

neously, Moscow has increasingly recruited non-local

cadres to lead regions and republics. A striking

example was in Chechnya’s neighbouring republic

Dagestan. In October 2017, Ramazan Abdulatipov,

the 71-year-old head of the republic, who had been in

office since 2013, was replaced by Vladimir Vasilyev,

a former high-ranking police officer from Moscow

and deputy speaker in the Duma. For the first time

since 1948, this placed a non-native at the helm of the

largest republic in the North Caucasus.

This move was

rationalised not least by arguing that the new head

of republic had no obligations to any one ethnic

group or clan in Dagestan and would therefore be

better able to lead the fight against corruption and

clanish nepotism, which are particularly present

there. However, some commentators see in this cadre

policy the idea favoured by Russia’s patriotic circles

of returning to the Tsarist practice of appointing gov-

ernors.

Golos%20Reports/Report_Russian_Election_Municipal_

Final.pdf.

Fabian Burkhardt and Janis Kluge, Dress Rehearsal for

Russia’s Presidential Election. Mosow Tightens Grip on Regional

Governors and Budgets, SWP Comment 37/2017, (Berlin:

Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, October 2017), https://

www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/dress-rehearsal-for-

russias-presidential-election/

Maria Domańska, The Kremlin’s Regional Policy – a Year

of Dismissing Governors, OSW Warsaw Commentary no. 257

(Warsaw: Centre for Eastern Studies [Ośrodek Studiów

Wschodnich, OSW], 15 December 2017).

Denis Sokolov, “Pervyj prokurator Dagestana” [Dagestan’s

first procurator],

Vedomosti, 4 October 2017, http://www.

vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2017/10/04/736464-prokurator-

dagestana.

“Russian Pundit Puts New Dagestan Appointment in Con-

text”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union Politi-

cal File, 11 October 2017.

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The Kremlin has declared the defence against sepa-

ratism one of the greatest challenges for its national

security policy. It is risky in today’s Russia to advocate

real federalism and the right to regional self-deter-

mination: the authorities could interpret it as an

appeal for separatism. In 2014 a law entered into force

that encouraged this equation by prohibiting “calls

to harm the territorial integrity of the Russian Federa-

tion. It has already led to criminal proceedings.

During the Second Chechen War, the fight against

terrorism and Islamist extremism served to justify

a renewed, large-scale military operation. At the

regional level, the threat of ethno-nationalistic sepa-

ratism had declined by then. Sibirian regionalism,

Finno-Ugric national movements in Karelia, and de-

mands for autonomy in Tatarstan never turned into

serious secession movements. The Russia expert

Marlène Laruelle doubts that the nationalisms of non-

Russian ethnic groups are still a “force for change” in

today’s Russia, for the following reasons: in the North

Caucasus, the region with the highest initial potential

for secession, ethno-territorial separatism was over-

taken by Islamist dynamics within the armed under-

ground. In her assessment, the “sovereignty parade”,

which had emerged at the dawn of the post-Soviet era

through various national movements and popular

fronts, is now largely a part of Russia’s past; today’s

regional faultlines tend to be characterised by socio-

economic rather than ethnic differences.

At the military level, the National Guard (Ross-

gvardiya) created by President Putin in 2016 is seen as

the most recent and striking institution of the power

vertical. It reports directly to the president and groups

existing structures of the security agencies, including

the troops of the interior ministry and special units

such as OMON and others. This kind of Pretorian

guard had already been considered in the Yeltsin era,

but was not established until recently.

It now has

a staff of about 400,000 men under the command of

Putin’s close confidante, Viktor Zolotov, who was also

appointed head of counterterrorism for the North

“Putin Signs a Law Criminalizing Calls to Separatism”,

The Moscow News, 30 December 2013.

Marlene Laruelle, “Is Nationalism a Force for Change

in Russia?”,

Daedalus 146, no. 2 (2017): 89–100 (90).

Margarete Klein, “Russlands neue Nationalgarde. Stär-

kung der Machtvertikale des Putin-Regimes”, Osteuropa 66,

no. 5 (2016): 19–32; Pavel Luzin, “The Ominous Rise of

Russian National Guard”, Intersection (Security), 21 July 2017,

http://intersectionproject.eu/article/security/ominous-rise-

russian-national-guard.

Caucasus in August 2017. In this context, there has

been some discussion over whether the National

Guard with its posts in Chechnya limits the (conspic-

uous) independence of the Chechen security bodies –

and if so, to what extent.

Some observers have inter-

preted this measure as a move against Kadyrov’s in-

clination to act on his own authority. Others see no

limitations on his power since Chechen soldiers

serving in the National Guard continue to be loyal

to their territorial sovereign and are not deployed

without his approval. They are led by Sharip Delim-

khanov, a younger brother of Adam Delimkhanov,

who is considered Kadyrov’s right-hand man in the

federal Duma in Moscow. The Delimkhanovs are

Ramzan Kadyrov’s cousins.

In 2017 the question of whether fed-

eralism can develop in Russia, and to

what extent, gained in importance in

domestic political discourse.

In 2017 the question of whether federalism can

develop in Russia, and to what extent, once more

gained in importance in domestic political discourse.

One trigger was the confrontation over extending the

accord that gave the autonomous republic of Tatar-

stan a special relationship with the central govern-

ment. In the early 1990s, the Russian leadership had

been challenged not only by the Chechen independ-

ence movement pushing for separation from Russia.

Moscow was also confronted with emphatic demands

for autonomy from the Tatar nationalist movement

in the Volga region. The Tatars are the largest non-

Russian ethnic group in the Russian Federation. Like

Chechnya, Tatarstan had not signed the 1992 federa-

tion treaty. However, unlike Chechnya, the autono-

mous republic – located not on the periphery but

in the centre of Russia – focused on separate power-

sharing negotiations with the central government,

rather than on secession. In 1994 an accord was

signed to that end. It was extended for ten years in

2007 and expired in July 2017. This special accord

guaranteed Tatarstan a certain measure of political

and economic autonomy, which has since been re-

stricted by Putin’s power vertical, but not eliminated

Dmitry Shlapentokh, “The Kremlin’s Last Resort:

Kadyrovtsi in Russia’s National Guard”,

Central Asia-

Caucasus Analyst, 3 March 2017, http://www.cacianalyst.org/

publications/analytical-articles/item/13430-the-kremlin-last-

resort-kadyrovtsi-in-russias-national-guard.html.

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completely. Tatarstan has remained the only federal

subject to have a president; all other autonomous

republics have had that title replaced by the desig-

nation “head of republic”. Ironically, it was the auto-

cratic head of the Chechen republic, Kadyrov, who

inspired this terminological change in 2010 by point-

ing out that there could only be one president in

Russia, namely Vladimir Putin.

Like Chechnya (but

unlike other regions), Tatarstan also demanded the

right to have its own foreign policy and foreign eco-

nomic relations. In the dispute between Russia and

Turkey (2015-16), it was thus able to take a stance

against the economic sanctions that Moscow had

imposed on Ankara and insist on having its own

relationship with Turkey.

Before the power-sharing agreement expired in

July 2017, demands were made for a renewed exten-

sion and a strengthening of federalism. There was

talk of a new form of power-sharing and a “budgetary

federalism” that would allow Tatarstan, which is eco-

nomically powerful compared to the North Caucasus,

to keep the majority of its revenues. Against this

background, there were also calls for compulsory

teaching of the Tatar language at schools in Tatarstan

and a Tatar-language TV channel to be broadcast

nationwide since many Tatars live in other parts of

Russia. These language-policy demands resonated to

some extent with non-Russian titular nationalities in

other regions.

At the Tatar World Congress in early

August 2017, which was attended by a thousand del-

egates from 40 countries, the first elected President

of Tatarstan (1991–2010), Mintimer Shaimiev, gave

a speech. He reminded his audience of the power-

sharing agreement, which he believed influenced

“Chef ohne Präsidententitel: Kadyrov legt Treue-

bekenntnis zu Moskau ab – ‘Iswestija’”, Sputnik Deutschland,

13 August 2010, https://de.sputniknews.com/politik/

20100813257098749/.

Paul Goble, “Tatarstan’s Pursuit of Power-Sharing

Accord with Moscow Energizes National Movements across

Russia”,

Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, 13 April

2017; Ramazan Alpaut, “Stanet li tatarskij vtorym gosu-

darstvennym jazykom Rossii?” [Will Tatar become Russia’s

second official language?], Kavkaz.Realii, 8 April 2017,

http://www.kavkazr.com/a/stanet-li-tatarskiy-vtorym-

obshenatsionalnym/28416275.html?mc_cid=344420573e

&mc_eid=9eaa49374d; Ruslan Gorevoj, “Iskushenie sepa-

ratizmom” [Temptation through separatism], Versiya,

12 February 2017, https://versia.ru/tatarstan-mozhet-

sprovocirovat-rossijskie-regiony-na-novyj-parad-suve-

renitetov?mc_cid=344420573e&mc_eid=9eaa49374d.

“the entire fate of Russia” and of Russian federalism.

Its extension was a “historical necessity”; the parties

needed to sit at the negotiating table to resolve legal

issues and harmonise the regional and federal con-

stitutions.

To date, the Kremlin has only granted one of these

demands. It has allowed Rustam Minnikhanov, the

head of the republic since 2010, to use the title of

President until 2020, but rejected any extension to

the special agreement with Tatarstan. Even the

Tatar government only accepted some of the above-

mentioned concerns, and that cautiously. Russian

organisations in the autonomous republic, 40 percent

of whose population of 3.8 million (according to the

2010 census) are ethnic Russians, indignantly rejected

the cultural and linguistic demands.

These demands

certainly contradict the strengthening of the Russian

language that President Putin has called for at all

levels of the Federation.

In late November 2017,

Tatarstan ceded to Moscow’s pressure: being taught

the Tatar language at school was not made compul-

sory.

The wave of resignations and new

appointments of governors moved

regional affairs into the spotlight.

There were also disturbances below the national-

territorial level with its autonomous republics. The

wave of resignations and new appointments of gov-

ernors moved regional affairs into the spotlight.

A Society for Russian Culture in Tatarstan complained

to the minister of education and science in Moscow about

the call for compulsory lessons in the Tatar language for

all of the republic’s inhabitants. At least 50 percent of the

region’s children, it said, would have to suffer through a

useless subject – the Tatar language – at the expense of

the Russian language and culture. “Russia: Tatarstan Media

Highlights 28 August–3 September 2017”,

BBC Monitoring

Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union Political File, 10 September

2017.

“He has encouraged both ethnic Russians and Russian-

speaking members of other nations to come out in open oppo-

sition to non-Russian republican policies of language” Paul

Goble, “Language Fight in Tatarstan Set to Ignite Political Ex-

plosion Across Russia”,

Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily

Monitor, 19 September 2017.

“Squeeze on Tatarstan Underlines Putin’s Bid to Central-

ise Control of Republics”,

Financial Times, 26 January 2018.

Andrey Pertsev, Russia’s New Old Wave of Technocratic

Governors (Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center, 3 March 2017),

http://carnegie.ru/commentary/?fa=68169.

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Regional elites, for example, complained about

their loss of influence and decision-making powers.

According to a study by the Centre for Applied Stra-

tegic Research, whose director is the former Russian

finance minister Alexei Kudrin, these are exclusively

administrative elites behind the “political elites” able

to influence political decisions and the “veto elites”

able to correct such decisions. The importance of re-

gional economic elites has also decreased.

Following

the latest regional and gubernatorial elections in

autumn 2017, Russian historians, economists and

political scientists warned against “hyper-centralisa-

tion”, a division of Russia into “Moscow and Not-Mos-

cow” carried out in the name of safeguarding terri-

torial integrity.

There was resistance to the draft bill “On the

State’s National Policy”, initiated by President Putin

in 2016, and the binding definition of the “Russian

nation” (rossiyskaya naciya). A definition had been

needed since the start of Russia’s post-Soviet history.

Policy had oscillated between three interpretations

of national statehood: civic nationalism; ethno-

nationalism (here referring to Russianness); and neo-

imperialism.

While Moscow pays lip service to civic

nationalism, it has been more attached to the third

variant during the Putin years. The definition was

therefore supposed to be settled by legislation. De-

spite President Putin’s support and encouragement,

however, the draft bill was shelved until further

notice after five months of discussions. Its (provi-

sional) failure was due to the resistance of Russian

nationalists, who wanted the law to set out the

dominant status of ethnic Russians, and of non-Rus-

sian elites, who sensed an attempt to rob them of

their privileges.

Ideological and cultural tensions

between the centre and the regions

also exist concerning the

representation of history.

Ideological and cultural tensions between the

centre and the regions also exist concerning the

“Regional’nye elity priznali svoju otstranennost’ ot

politiki” [Regional elites have noticed their alienation from

politics],

Vedomosti, 16 March 2017.

Cf. Paul Goble, “Hyper-Centralization of Russia Threat-

ens Its Development and Survival”,

Jamestown Foundation

Eurasia Daily Monitor, 19 October 2017.

Igor Torbakov, “What Is To Be Done about the ‘Russian

Question’?”,

EurasiaNet, 27 October 2017.

representation of history. In a return to the past, that

representation is increasingly steered by state author-

ities, who are directing it towards a unitary narrative

that exalts Russia as a great power. At a meeting in

March 2015 with regional North Caucasus politicians,

Moscow’s special envoy for the federal district accused

local universities of falsifying history and questioned

historical terms such as “anti-colonial resistance”. He

also disapproved of exhibits in local museums dedi-

cated to native life before the region became part of

Russia, supposedly glorifying that period.

In recent

years, there have been “monument conflicts” between

the centre and periphery, in which ethnic Russians

pay homage to Tsarist generals such as Aleksey Yer-

molov while North Caucasians commemorate their

resistance fighters, including Imam Shamil.

During

Putin’s mandate, the policy on history has tended to

challenge the notion of Russian colonialism, effec-

tively saying: We were never a colonial power like the

Western powers, which attacked overseas territories

and exploited them. In Ocober 2016, Russia’s security

council called for a Centre to be established to protect

against falsifications of Russian history, which it

claimed were circulating in the West and former

Soviet republics, for example “speculations on the

colonial issue”.

Chechnya, which only two decades ago forged its

place in the anti-colonial resistance to Russian domin-

ion, now corroborates the historical narrative sup-

ported by the Kremlin. Since 2011, for example, the

Kadyrov regime no longer supports the commemora-

tion of the deportation of entire ethnic groups from

the North Caucasus ordered by Stalin in 1943–1944,

such as the Chechens and Ingush.

Valery Dzutsati, “History Widens the Divide between

the North Caucasus and the Rest of Russia”,

Jamestown

Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, 30 March 2015.

Paul Goble, “Russian Regions Erecting Statues to Those

Who Resisted Muscovite Expansion”,

Jamestown Foundation

Eurasia Daily Monitor, 14 March 2017.

Cf. Alexander Morrison, “Russia’s Colonial Allergy”,

EurasiaNet, 19 December 2016.

Cf. this study’s chapter “Kadyrov’s Cultural Policy:

Back to Chechen Tradition?”, below, p.

16.

“Pax Ramzana”: The “Pacification” of Chechnya in Kadyrov’s Private State

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

At the regional level, another power vertical was

developed in Chechnya by the Kadyrov dynasty,

particularly Ramzan Kadyrov. It seems limitless and

is thus an exception within Russia. The mayor of the

republic’s capital Grozny, Muslim Khachiyev, has

said: “Everything of any real significance that hap-

pens [in Chechnya] happens on Kadyrov’s watch. He

is accountable for everything to the people, to God,

and to the president [of Russia]”.

The head of the Chechen republic has repeatedly

pointed out that except for President Putin nothing

and no-one could limit or control his authority –

neither parliament nor the media nor judicial mecha-

nisms, let alone the opposition. “We have no oppo-

sition. That’s a system to undermine state sovereignty

[vlast]. I don’t allow anyone to play games with the

people.”

No political parties exist in Chechnya other

than the governing party, United Russia. Consequently,

as the governing party’s candidate in regional elec-

tions, Kadyrov receives almost 100 percent of the

vote. The same is true of his feudal lord Putin. Chech-

nya occupies first place among the so-called electoral

sultanates, i.e. about 15 regions in which the results

obtained by Putin and the governing party in presi-

dential and parliamentary elections are far above the

national average.

As a reward for his loyalty to Putin, vassal Kadyrov

gets to treat Chechnya as his personal fiefdom. He

has threatened to open fire on police units from other

parts of Russia if they operate in Chechnya without

Quoted in “Chechen Strongman Builds Cult of Personality

through Sport”, Financial Times, 4 August.

Quoted in Il’ja Jashin, Ugroza nacional’noj bezopasnosti.

Nezavisimij expertnyj doklad [Threat to national security.

Lecture by an independent expert] (Moscow: Open Russia,

February 2016), 12, https://openrussia.org/post/view/12965/.

his authorisation. He uses collective punishment

against his adversaries and persecutes them even out-

side of Chechnya. He also pursues a cultural and

religious policy that, according to his critics, amounts

to transforming the republic into an Islamic state.

Born in 1976, Ramzan Kadyrov fought on the side

of the separatists against Russian troops in the first

Chechen War (1994–1996). Thereafter, he served as

body guard to his father Akhmat, who was the acting

mufti of the de-facto independent republic. At the

start of the second war in autumn 1999, both father

and son defected to the side of the Russian security

forces. During the chaotic phase from 1996 to 1999, it

had become clear to the Kadyrovs that Chechnya was

highly unlikely to win a renewed war against Russia.

Once Russian troops had regained control over the

renegade autonomous republic, President Putin pro-

moted Akhmat Kadyrov to be its ruler. The young

Ramzan headed his father’s security apparatus, which

became known as “Kadyrovtsy” and now numbers

over 30,000 men. In March 2003 a new Chechen con-

stitution was passed by referendum, and entered into

force a month later. It guarantees a measure of

autonomy for the republic, but subordinates it to the

Russian Federation and central government. During

the questionable presidential election in the republic

in October 2003, Moscow’s candidate Akhmat Kadyrov

was elected with 80 percent of the votes cast. On 9

May 2004 he was assassinated. His successor was in-

terior minister Alu Alkhanov, since Kadyrov’s son was

still too young for the presidency. However, as Putin’s

protégé, Ramzan climbed rapidly to become the de

facto ruler. In March 2006 he was made prime minis-

ter and proceeded to fill most government and ad-

Georgy Bovt, “Will Moscow Allow Polygamy in Chech-

nya?”,

The Moscow Times, 13 May 2015.

“Pax Ramzana”:

The

“Pacification” of Chechnya

in Kadyrov’s Private State

“Pax Ramzana”: The “Pacification” of Chechnya in Kadyrov’s Private State

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

ministrative positions with his acolytes. In 2007

Alkhanov resigned as president, and the office was

assumed by Ramzan Kadyrov.

A fundamental reason for the special status of

the republic’s ruler is that the Kadyrovs, on Putin’s

orders, helped to transform the phase of full-scale war

violence in Chechnya into a more selective and more

targeted fight against the adversary. The Second Che-

chen War was, like the First, characterised by devas-

tating violence. After Russian troops took Grozny

in March 2000, the armed resistance withdrew to in-

accessible mountain regions and launched a partisan

war against Russian forces. The Russian troops in turn

proceeded with disproportionate force against entire

cities and settlement areas, bombarding them with

artillery, bombing them from the air, and carrying

out massive punitive operations.

However, their

methods were ultimately unsuccessful. A Russian

general reported from the battlefield in Chechnya

as late as 2004 that the Russian army was primarily

occupied with keeping its own troops safe and was

unable to counter the guerrillas effectively.

Since 2002 the Kremlin has in-

creasingly relied on pro-Russian local

paramilitary units under the ultimate

command of the Kadyrovs

Since 2002 the Kremlin has increasingly relied on

pro-Russian local paramilitary units under the ulti-

mate command of the Kadyrovs, who have had first-

hand experience of guerrilla warfare as former

resistance fighters against Russia. These local units,

which integrated growing numbers of defectors from

the insurgency,

had more detailed knowledge than

the Russian troops of the sociocultural terrain and

of their adversaries’ modus operandi. Gradually, the

Second Chechen War turned into a local civil war.

Emil Aslan Souleimanov and Huseyn Aliyev, How Socio-

cultural Codes Shaped Violent Mobilization and Pro-insurgent Sup-

port in the Chechen Wars (Cham: Springer/Palgrave Macmillan,

2017), 38. On Russian warfare, cf. Mark Galeotti, Russia’s

Wars in Chechnya 1994–2009 (Oxford, 2014).

Emil Aslan Souleimanov, The North Caucasus Insurgency:

Dead or Alive? (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The United States Army

War College, Strategic Studies Institute, February 2017), 35.

According to the then-ruler of the republic, Alu Alkha-

nov, in October 2005 half the local security forces already

consisted of (about 7,000) former insurgents, who had de-

fected. John Russell,

Chechnya – Russia’s War on Terror (London

and New York: Routledge, 2007), 88.

The Kadyrovtsy largely replaced the Russian troops

as the leading force in fighting terrorists. Their main

tool was collective punishment, which was not lim-

ited to close relatives of the remaining insurgents and

terror suspects. The most common practice was to

burn down houses. Ramzan Kadyrov’s punitive and

deterrent measures also targeted the Chechen dias-

pora in Europe.

According to a study from 2010, the targeted

counter-insurgency practised by local security forces

resulted in a 40 percent decrease in violent activities

by the armed guerrillas compared to the Russian

army’s methods.

In 2009 Moscow officially lifted

Chechnya’s special status as a counter-terrorism loca-

tion. In February 2010 a British delegation visited the

Caucasian republic. It was led by Frank Judd, former

rapporteur for the Council of Europe on the human-

rights situation in Chechnya. The delegation reported

that people living in Chechnya were noticeably safer

than during the war, but that the human-rights

situation continued to be precarious.

Once the fiercest phase of military confrontation

had come to an end, violence levels in Chechnya

did decline. However, simultaneously the Islamist

revolutionary movement spread to other parts of

the North Caucasus. In 2007 the last Chechen under-

ground president, Doku Umarov, proclaimed the so-

called Caucasus Emirate. While it never ruled over a

compact territory, it did make efforts to coordinate

local underground cells (jama’at) in various parts of

the North Caucasus and motivate them ideologically.

Fighting throughout the entire region has only de-

clined since about 2013, with markedly fewer casual-

ties. This was primarily due to many jihadi fighters

moving from the Caucasus and other parts of Russia

to combat zones in Syria and Iraq.

Field studies have raised doubts about the loyalty

of the Chechen people to the head of their republic –

and even of some Kadyrovtsy to their commander.

Jean-François Ratelle and Emil Aslan Souleimanov

Jean-François Ratelle and Emil Aslan Souleimanov,

“A Perfect Counterinsurgency? Making Sense of Moscow’s

Policy of Chechenisation”,

Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 8 (2016):

1287–1341 (1289); Jason Lyall, “Are Coethnics More Effec-

tive Counterinsurgents? Evidence from the Second Chechen

War”, American Political Science Review 104, no. 1 (2010): 1–20.

Quoted in “British MPs ‘Disturbed’ by Chechnya Visit”,

The Moscow News, 25 February 2010.

Uwe Halbach, Russland und der Nordkaukasus im Umfeld

des globalen Jihadismus, SWP-Aktuell 23/2017 (Berlin: Stiftung

Wissenschaft und Politik, April 2017).

“Pax Ramzana”: The “Pacification” of Chechnya in Kadyrov’s Private State

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

conducted interviews from 2008 to 2013 in which

some interlocutors complained, for example, that

only towns and localities linked to the Kadyrov clan

had profited from the reconstruction programmes

in Chechnya.

At the same time, the two researchers

concede that Putin’s Chechenisation policy and his

alliance with the Kadyrov family have been remark-

ably successful. For them, the Russian president has

attained three fundamental objectives: first, war

casualties among the population declined. Second,

transferring the counter-insurgency fight to the Kady-

rovtsy helped Moscow to distance itself from the

battlefield of Chechnya and the violence committed

against local civilians, and thus to avoid accusations

of human-rights violations. Third, Kadyrov actually

managed to drive back the insurgency – unlike, for

example, the leader of the neighbouring republic

of Dagestan. Moreover, they believe that Kadyrov,

despite taking the law entirely in his own hands in

Chechnya, has remained loyal to the Russian presi-

dent.

Whether it is possible to thereby derive lasting

stability is questionable. Two instruments used by the

Kadyrovs in fighting the insurgency make this par-

ticularly doubtful, namely collective punishment and

vendetta, which have historically played a role in tri-

bal Chechen society.

Chechen society is still traumatised

by the two wars; there were casualties

in almost every family.

Russian human-rights activists and regional ex-

perts, such as Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, Svetlana Gan-

nushkina and Aleksei Malashenko, believe that ele-

ments of Chechen youth are receptive to Islamic State

(IS) propaganda because Chechnya is not at all lastingly

“Moscow has managed to maintain control over the

Chechen state in general and Chechen elites in particular.

[…] Unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, where sectarian division

and the empowerment of local ethnic allies have delivered

mixed results for the US Army, Chechenisation represents a

model where Moscow has been able to find the right balance

between autonomy and control.” Ratelle and Souleimanov,

“A Perfect Counterinsurgency?” (see note

33), 1310.

Ibid.

“Krovnaja mest’ – kak teper’ ubivajut na Kavkaze”

[Vendetta: How murders are carried out in the Caucasus

today],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 26 December 2017, http://www.kavkaz-

uzel.eu/articles/296137/.

pacified, as the official interpretation suggests.

Chechen society is still traumatised by the two wars;

there were casualties in almost every family. Even

though today’s minors did not experience the wars

themselves, the trauma is being passed down to them

by their parents’ generation. The shiny new facades

in the capital Grozny cannot belie the fact that a large

part of the population lives at or below the poverty

threshold. Kadyrov’s acolytes, on the other hand, can

display their wealth and luxury unhindered. “There

are those for whom everything is allowed. And there’s

the mass of the people who have no rights at all, [...]

who have to gather in public to support the govern-

ment, who have to follow their religion in the way

prescribed by the regime.”

The experts emphasise,

however, that even under these circumstances there

is no large-scale support for IS. They stress that the

limited potential followers are recruited not only

from underprivileged social strata, and instead have a

more complex social and educational profile. Accord-

ing to statements by the Chechen interior minister,

in 2017 there were eight IS “sleeper cells” discovered

and 18 underground fighters killed.

“Eksperty nazvali prichiny interesa chechenskoj mo-

lodezhi k ideologii IG” [Experts give the reasons for Chechen

youths’ interests in IS ideology],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 15 March

2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/299244/.

Quotation by Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya, ibid.

“Russia: Chechnya Media Highlights 15–28 January

2018”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union

Political File, 1 February 2018.

Kadyrov’s Cultural Policy: Back to Chechen Tradition?

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

Ramzan Kadyrov insists that Chechnya is part and

parcel of the Russian Federation and, more than any

other regional leader, promotes a cult of President

Putin, whom he has asked to remain in power for life.

In Grozny, Putin’s birthday is celebrated by a mass

parade. Ramzan Kadyrov has promoted the Russian

President (alongside his father Akhmat and himself)

to a state icon. In Chechen society, this tripartite

iconology is satirically known as “Father, Son and the

Holy Spirit”. The father, Akhmat Kadyrov, is at the

pinnacle of this personality cult – comparable to

Heydar Aliyev in Azerbaijan, the father of the current

president Ilham Aliyev. Azerbaijan and Chechnya are

the two political entities in the post-Soviet area in

which authoritarian ruling families have established

themselves as dynasties. The largest mosque in the

whole North Caucasus stands in the Chechen capital

Grozny. Not only the mosque has been named after

the former mufti and head of the republic, Akhmat

Kadyrov, but so have streets and buildings in Grozny

and other localities in the republic. In 2017 the

father-figure cult was further bolstered: the Chechen

football club RFK Terek Grozny, which plays in the

top Russian league, was renamed FK Akhmat Grozny.

The 66

birthday of its namesake was celebrated in

the capital on 22 August 2017 – with the participa-

tion of former colleagues and representatives from

parliament, public organisations and the muftiate

clergy. The guest of honour from Moscow was the

Minister for North Caucasus Affairs, Lev Kuznetsov.

During the celebrations, Ramzan Kadyrov addressed

the Islamic world: prominent Islam scholars from

dozens of countries had acknowledged that his father

had sacrificed his life for God and the salvation of

the Chechen people. However, international terrorists

were preparing to sacrifice the Chechen people to

A ministry specifically dedicated to North Caucasus

affairs (Minkavkaz) was established in Moscow in March

2014.

bring about the breakup of Russia.

In the past few

years, Kadyrov has repeatedly claimed that Western

actors are undermining his republic’s stability and

Russia’s territorial integrity.

Ramzan Kadyrov organises his own personality cult

through manliness rituals, martial-arts performances

in which his sons occasionally participate, and other

bizarre means. In February 2013 he set up his own

Instagram page, on which he posted comments on

Chechnya, Russia and the rest of the world. His on-

line audience grew to over 4 million visitors. How-

ever, as of 23 December 2017, access to Kadyrov’s

Instagram and Facebook pages was no longer pos-

sible. They were blocked three days after the US gov-

ernment had put Kadyrov on its sanctions list under

the Magnitsky Act for human-rights abuses.

The

measure triggered indignant reactions not only in

Chechnya, but all over Russia.

Kadyrov cultivates the image of a helper to those

in need not only in his own territory but all across

Russia. He has boasted of helping free Russian jour-

nalists held in Ukraine, and members of the Russian

marine imprisoned in Libya. In 2017 he became in-

volved in the repatriation of Russian women and

children stranded in IS territories conquered by Iraqi

and Syrian troops. From August to October 2017 alone,

Kadyrov’s special envoy to the Middle East and North

Africa, Ziyad Sabsazi, brought back about 50 of them

“Russia: Chechnya Media Highlights 21–27 August

2017”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union

Political File, 3 September 2017.

The “Magnitsky Act” was passed by the US Congress

in 2012 and signed by President Obama. It placed Russian

officials on a sanctions list whom it held responsible for the

death of the tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who had been

arrested in 2009 and died in prison.

“Chechen Leader’s Social Media Ban Causes Outrage

in Russia”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union

Political File, 25 December 2017.

Kadyrov’s Cultural Policy:

Back to Chechen Tradition?

Kadyrov’s Cultural Policy: Back to Chechen Tradition?

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

from the war zones.

Kadyrov’s carefully cultivated

image is popular in Russia’s interior, even though

its inhabitants have reservations about Chechens and

other North Caucasians. In an opinion poll carried

out by the WZIOM Institute among 1,800 citizens

of Russia in April 2017, 55 percent of those polled

believed that Kadyrov’s activities benefited the entire

country. The institute’s director, Valeri Fedorov, sum-

marised the poll results as follows: “The head of the

Chechen republic is viewed by the majority of Rus-

sian citizens as a successful and patriotic leader who

guarantees the security and development of his re-

public within the Russian population. Critical objec-

tions to Ramzan Kadyrov barely resonate in the mass

consciousness.”

Within his sphere of control, Kadyrov rigidly steers

his course in religious and cultural policy under the

motto “Back to Chechen tradition”. This “Kadyrovism”

builds bridges between different groups, including

some that were previously hostile to each other, with

different interpretations of “Chechen identity”: tra-

ditionalists who want to revive the norms of the com-

mon law (adat) that has been valid for centuries with-

in a tribal society; Islamic purists who only recognise

sharia as a legal system; nationalists who insist on

Chechnya’s sovereignty, basing themselves on the

tradition of anti-colonial resistance; and autonomists

who prefer a self-determined Chechnya within great-

power Russia.

In this context, Ramzan Kadyrov

presents himself as the national and religious leader;

as the intermediary between Russia and the external

Islamic world; as the symbol of Chechen self-deter-

mination and simultaneously as the guarantor of the

republic’s affiliation with Russia; as an active fighter

against terrorism and religious extremism who never-

theless employs violent methods himself and dictates

strict religious prescriptions to his own society.

“Russia: Chechnya Media Highlights 31 July–6 August

2017”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union

Political File, 7 August 2017; Grozny-Inform, 21 October 2017.

On Kadyrov’s activities abroad and his special envoy Sabsazi,

cf. this study’s chapter on “Chechnya as a Cross-Border

Actor”, p. 26.

“Ramzan Kadyrov: Portret Politika”, press release

no. 3372,

VCIOM, 12 May 2017, https://wciom.ru/index.php?

id=236&uid=116195.

Cf. in particular Marlène Laruelle, Kadyrovism: Hardline

Islam as a Tool of the Kremlin?, Russie.Nei.Visions no. 99 (Paris

and Brussels: Institut français des relations internationales

[Ifri], March 2017), 9.

Kadyrov emphasises the proximity

of Islamic morals and tradition to

Russia’s Christian-Orthodox

traditionalism.

These contradictions are particularly visible in his

religious policy. On the one hand, Kadyrov emphasises

the proximity of Islamic morals and tradition to Rus-

sia’s Christian-Orthodox traditionalism and vehement-

ly demarcates this link from “Western decadence, un-

godliness, and hostility to tradition and the family”.

Here he resembles his patron Putin, who since 2012

(during his third term as president) has increasingly

underpinned Russian patriotism with references to

traditional values, and stressed their importance for

Russia’s security and stability.

Kadyrov supports the

concept of “spiritual security”, which has been inte-

grated into Russia’s national security doctrine, elevat-

ing a specific “Russian civilisation” into an object to

be defended against external interference.

He main-

tains contacts with Patriarch Kirill and has opened

new Russian-Orthodox churches in Chechnya despite

the fact that the ethnic Russian section of its popu-

lation has shrunk to a tiny minority. Simultaneously

Kadyrov supports ultraconservative forces in Moscow,

such as the deputy Natalia Poklonskaya and orthodox

hardliners that even the Patriarch considers suspect.

They include groups that campaigned against the film

Matilda in 2017, whose theme is the love affair be-

tween Tsar Nicolas II and a ballet dancer, for allegedly

violating the religious sentiments of “real Russians”.

Chechnya’s policy towards non-traditional faith

communities is just as repressive as Moscow’s. Russia

passed a law in July 2016 that places the missionary

activities of non-Orthodox, non-traditional denomina-

tions under suspicion of terrorism. In 2017 Jehovah’s

Witnesses in particular were criminalised as “reli-

gious extremists”. In Chechnya, the attribute “non-

traditional” is likewise used to demonise undesired

religious activities. Ramzan Kadyrov calls for “tradi-

tional Islam” in line with his father Akhmat’s beliefs,

invoking in Marlène Laruelle’s words “an often gro-

Cf. Irina du Quenoy, “Russia: The Stability Implications

of State Policies Toward Religion and the Russian Orthodox

Church”, in

Religion, Conflict, and Stability in the Former Soviet

Union, ed. Katya Migacheva and Bryan Frederick (Santa

Monica: Rand Corporation, 2018), 159–80 (171–75).

Cf. Veera Laine and Iiris Saarelainen, Spirituality as a

Political Instrument. The Church, the Kremlin, and the Creation of

the “Russian World”, Working Paper (Helsinki: Finnish Insti-

tute of International Affairs [FIIA], September 2017).

Kadyrov’s Cultural Policy: Back to Chechen Tradition?

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

tesque reinterpretation of Sufi tradition”.

While

pilgrimages to the tombs of local saints and Sufi

leaders were tolerated in Soviet times as an expres-

sion of national-religious folklore, they are now

deliberately being revived. At the centre of these

efforts is the tomb of Kunta-Haji Kishiev who has

been elevated to the shining light of Chechnya’s

religious history. This 19

-century leader of the

Qadiriyya order had opposed Imam Shamil’s call to

fight the Russian army “to the last man”, advocating

a return to religious contemplation instead.

Kadyrov has decreed rigid norms of

behaviour that could be borrowed

straight from the cultural repertoire

of his adversaries in the Islamist-

Salafist underground.

On the other hand, Kadyrov has decreed rigid norms

of behaviour that could be borrowed straight from

the cultural repertoire of his adversaries in the Islam-

ist-Salafist underground. At the centre of this policy

are prescriptions – for instance regarding dress

codes – that especially restrict the personal rights

of women. As early as 2006, when he was still prime

minister, he launched a morality campaign that

contained the obligation to wear a headscarf as well

as general dress rules for women, approved Islamic

polygamy and justified “honour killings”. The con-

sumption of alcohol is strictly controlled; Western

music has been banned from local TV channels since

2008; and a liberal approach to sexual minorities

(Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, LGBT), whose

existence in Chechnya is simply denied, is seen as

an expression of “Western decadence”.

Ilya Yashin, an ally of the murdered oppposition

politician Boris Nemtsov made an exaggerated criti-

cism of this “Islamisation from above” within Chech-

nya in a lecture in February 2016: “Few people have

noticed that in the past few years we have had our

own local Islamic State take shape on Russian terri-

tory. A ‘Chechen caliphate’ operates according to its

own traditions and laws, all the while receiving bil-

lions in subsidies out of the federal budget. Chech-

nya’s ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, indulges in a luxurious

lifestyle and steers a policy in which a few sharia

Laruelle, Kadyrovism (see note 48), 20.

Cf. this study’s chapter on “Human-Rights Violations”,

21.

norms have gained the upper hand over Russia’s

laws, and he is expanding his military might.”

However, a few of Kadyrov’s cultural and historical

measures intended to embed Chechen nationalism

in Russian patriotism have irritated Chechens. In

2011 in accordance with the Kremlin’s history policy,

he declared 23 February a national holiday. In Russia,

this is the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland, when

the armed forces are celebrated. However, Chechens

link it to a different event. During Stalin’s Reign of

Terror, 23 February 1944 saw the start of the depor-

tation of hundreds of thousands of Chechens and

Ingush to Kazakhstan. Many deportees died on the

way. Kadyrov moved the memorial service dedicated

to this historical trauma to 10 May, the anniversary

of his father Akhmat’s death. Moreover, he ques-

tioned the significance of commemorating the depor-

tation by making confusing remarks, including the

claim that the deportees were in part to blame for

their fate.

Il’ja Jashin, Ugroza nacional’noj bezopasnosti. Nezavisimij

expertnyj doklad [Threat to national security. Lecture by an

independent expert] (Moscow: Open Russia, February 2016),

12, https://openrussia.org/post/view/12965/.

“Zhiteli Chechni ne soglasny vosprinimat’ 23 Fevralja

kak prazdnik” [The inhabitants of Chechnya do not agree

with 23 February as a national holiday],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 23

February 2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/298193/.

Conflicts between Kadyrov and the Russian Security Services

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

During the past few years, some security personnel

(siloviki) within Putin’s entourage, and especially with-

in the domestic secret service FSB, have criticised

Chechnya for its lawlessness and for thwarting inves-

tigations by federal authorities.

In 2013 several FSB

officers went on hunger strike in protest against the

release of three Chechen policemen accused of kid-

napping and torturing a man living in Moscow.

April 2015 the Stavropol police pursued a Chechen

national in Grozny whose name was on its wanted

list, but did not inform the Chechen authorities

of their operation. In response, Kadyrov authorised

his security apparatus to shoot anyone who was

operating on the republic’s territory without prior

permission from the local authorities. Chechen

representatives in the State Duma and the Federal

Council in Moscow supported their republic’s leader

and accused the Russian interior ministry of provo-

cation. However, the ministry justified deploying the

Stavropol police, leaving Kadyrov to backtrack and

signal that there was no conflict. “I am a Kremlin

man, I am Putin’s man, I am a servant of the people.”

Commentators who are sceptical about the person-

al loyalty pact between President Putin and his “foot

soldier” in Chechnya have pointed to a series of mur-

ders of Kadyrov’s critics and opponents that have

never been solved by Russian law-enforcement agen-

One of the best-known Russian experts on the Caucasus,

Alexei Malaschenko from the Carnegie Moscow Center, com-

ments: “From what I can see, there has always been friction

between Kadyrov and the federal forces, because Kadyrov

only answers to Putin. This has irked people, especially since

Putin awarded him the Order of Honor.” Quoted in Ivan

Nechepurenko, “Nemtsov Probe Exposes Widening Rift

between Kadyrov, FSB”,

The Moscow Times, 11 March 2015.

Ibid.

Mairbek Vatchagaev, “Why Kadyrov Has Fought

with Bastrykin”,

North Caucasus Weekly, 30 April 2015, https://

jamestown.org/program/why-kadyrov-has-fought-with-

bastrykin/.

cies. These include the assassination of the journalist

Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, human-rights activist

Natalya Estemirova in 2009, and Ruslan Yamadayev,

shot dead in his car in central Moscow, in 2008. There

have also been assassinations abroad, for example

Sulim Yamadayev, who was killed in Dubai in 2009.

The Yamadayev brothers were some of Kadyrov’s

fiercest rivals. One of Kadyrov’s former body guards,

Umar Israilov, who had reported human-rights viola-

tions, was killed in Vienna in 2009 after fleeing there

with his family. “The FSB hate Ramzan because they

are unable to control him”, said Aleksei Malashenko

from the Carnegie Moscow Center. “He does whatever

he wants, including in Moscow. Nobody can arrest

members of his team if there is no agreement with

Putin.” The prominent Russian opposition politician

Boris Nemtsov joined this criticism.

The most spectacular episode is the events sur-

rounding the murder of Nemtsov, who was shot on

27 February 2015 near the Kremlin in Moscow. There

was evidence pointing to Chechnya. Shortly after

the assassination, five Chechens were arrested and

a sixth, who resisted arrest, was shot dead. Kadyrov

defended the suspects on Instagram and blamed

“enemies of Russia” for masterminding the murder.

On his website, he described one of the main suspects

as a “true patriot”. Ruslan Geremeyev, suspected by

Moscow of being involved in the attack, was kept

away from investigators in Chechnya. He is allegedly

close to Kadyrov’s most important ally and relative

in Moscow, the Duma deputy Adam Delimkhanov.

Given these events, it is interesting that only a few

days after the assassination of Nemtsov, Kadyrov was

awarded two medals. On 9 March Putin bestowed on

him the Order of Honor, Russia’s highest state deco-

ration; and on 16 March he received the Medal for

Loyalty and Performance of One’s Duties from the

authorities in Crimea (which had been annexed by

Russia the previous year).

Conflicts between Kadyrov and

the Russian Security Services

Conflicts between Kadyrov and the Russian Security Services

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

On 14 July 2017 the Moscow Military District Court

delivered its verdict in the Nemtsov case. It sentenced

the five Chechens to long terms in prison and catego-

rised the attack as a contract killing. However, it

shone no light on the motive or on who might have

backed or ordered the killing. According to an expla-

nation popular in Chechnya, the man who allegedly

fired the fatal shot, Zaur Dadaev, was deeply religious

and very upset by the caricatures of the Prophet pub-

lished in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo

and by those defending freedom of opinion after

the terror attack on the magazine’s editorial office

in January 2015. However, it remains unclear which

statements by Nemtsov are supposed to have provided

the motive for the killing. His fellow activist Ilya

Yashin has clarified that Nemtsov “never said a bad

word about Islam” and only criticised terrorists.

Furthermore, a number of human-rights activists

doubted that the evidence was sufficient to convict

the five accused, who were reportedly mistreated

in detention and later withdrew their confessions.

Friedrich Schmidt, “Ein passendes Geständnis”, Frank-

furter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 March 2015, 5.

Human-Rights Violations

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

European institutions and international human-rights

organisations view the situation of civil and human

rights in Russia as problematic overall. This is true,

for instance, of the European Union’s annual report

“Human Rights and Democracy 2016” published in

October 2017, which Russia’s foreign ministry typi-

cally rejected as “not objective” and “Russophobic”.

Reports by international organisations on the human-

rights situation in the Russian Federation and specif-

ically in the North Caucasus highlight Chechnya

in particular.

Since it has been ruled by Ramzan

Kadyrov, the systematic documentation of human-

rights violations has been prevented there. Two

prominent human-rights activists were murdered in

Chechnya in 2009: the internationally known Natalya

Estemirova, who worked for the non-governmental

organisation Memorial, and Sarema Sadulaeva from

the humanitarian organisation Save the Next Gene-

ration. Any available information on human-rights

abuses and violations committed by the state is con-

sequently unclear. What sparse information there is

comes from those affected, who have contacted the

Internet portal Kavkazkii Uzel (Caucasian Knot) or

organisations such as Memorial.

The most common human-rights violations include

the “disappearing” of alleged members of the armed

underground and their relatives, torture in prisons

and secret locations, arbitrary violence against Kady-

rov’s adversaries and their persecution abroad, as well

as large-scale infringements of women’s rights. From

1999 to 2017 approximately 3,000 people disappeared

without trace in Chechnya. Between January and

October 2017, there were 43 cases of family members

“Moscow Condemns ‘Russophobic’ EU Rights Report”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union Political File,

27 October 2017.

See, e.g., Manarsha Isaeva, Sergej Prokopkin and Sarah

Reinke, Die Menschenrechtslage in den nordkaukasischen Republiken

Dagestan, Tschetschenien und Inguschetien, Menschenrechtsreport

no. 68 (Göttingen: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, Novem-

ber 2012).

Ibid., 21.

reporting the kidnapping of relatives to the police.

In Dagestan and Ingushetia, there are active human-

rights organisations, and the families of kidnap

victims go to local law-enforcement agencies for help.

In Chechnya, by contrast, people only rarely dare to

report the disappearance of relatives to the police.

The Russian Federation’s Commissioner for Human

Rights, Tatyana Moskalkova, travelled to Chechnya

in 2017, but was unable to obtain much reliable

information on kidnapping cases.

In March 2017 there were reports of a wave of

persecutions against homosexuals in the Kadyrov

republic. Hundreds of people were arrested, some

murdered. Not one of those arrested had publicly

come out as homosexual. Yet in a society that has

close family ties within village and clan communities,

it is almost impossible for an individual to conceal

that his or her sexual orientation diverges from tra-

ditional norms. According to the Russian newspaper

Novaya Gazeta, this was a “prophylactic cleansing”

following a request by representatives of the Russian

LGBT community for authorisation to hold demon-

strations for the rights of sexual minorities in four

locations in the North Caucasus. A Kadyrov spokes-

man denied the reports, saying it was impossible to

arrest people that did not exist in the republic. If such

people existed in Chechnya, he continued, their own

relatives would send them to places from which they

could never return.

Kadyrov reacted similarly to the

case of the Chechen singer Zelimkhan Bakaev, who

disappeared without a trace in 2017, for which some

sources blame state agencies. At a meeting with local

officials in January 2018, Kadyrov said Bakaev was

“Pochishcheniya ljudej v Chechne prinjali sistemnyj

charakter” [The kidnapping of people in Chechnya has

become systemic],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 27 October 2017, http://

www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/311657/.

Andrew E. Kramer, “Gay Men in Chechnya Are Killed,

Paper Says”,

The New York Times, 2 April 2017; “‘Hundreds’

Detained for Homosexuality in Chechnya”, BBC Monitoring

Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union Political File, 1 April 2017.

Human-Rights Violations

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

probably homosexual and therefore killed by his

relatives or men from his village.

Chechen security agencies have reportedly estab-

lished secret prisons in at least two locations for

“people of non-traditional sexual orientation”. Rus-

sian journalists have filed critical reports about

human-rights violations against homosexuals in

Chechnya, resulting in threats from those in power

there. The republic’s mufti, Salah Meshiev, and a

member of the Chechen parliament demanded that

the journalists be held to account. The Minister for

Nationalities Policy, External Relations, Press and

Information, Dshambulat Umarov, described the

reporting as an “insult to the Chechen people” and

called on the journalists to apologise in writing. As a

result, more than 60 writers from Russia – including

such world-renowned authors as Lyudmila Ulitskaya

and Vladimir Voinovich – sided with the journalists

and appealed to the country’s law-enforcement agen-

cies to react to the threats from Chechnya.

Of all

the serious human-right violations committed under

Kadyrov’s reign of violence, this event created the

most waves on the international stage. The foreign

ministers of five countries expressed their concerns

in a letter to their Russian colleague Sergey Lavrov.

The President of the European Parliament, Antonio

Tajani, and the OSCE also criticised the human-rights

violations against sexual minorities in Russia and par-

ticularly in Chechnya.

German Chancellor Angela

Merkel addressed the abuses during her meeting with

President Putin in early May 2017.

In response to

the protests, Moscow for the first time examined the

accusations against Chechen security forces. However,

an investigative committee responsible for the North

“Chechen Leader Defends Detention of Rights Activist”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union Political File,

18 January 2018.

“Pisateli prizvali k rassledovaniju ozvuchennych v

Chechne ugroz zhurnalistam” [Writers call for investigation

of the threat against journalists coming from Chechnya],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 17 April 2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/

articles/301165/.

“Glava Evroparlamenta prizval vlasti Chechni projasnit’

situaciju s gejami” [The President of the European Parlia-

ment calls on Chechnya’s authorities to take a stance on

the situation of homosexuals],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 6 April 2017,

http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/300533/.

“Merkel’ poprosila Putina zashchitit’ prava men’shinstv”

[Merkel asked Putin to protect the rights of minorities],

Kav-

kazkii Uzel, 2 May 2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/

302040/.

Caucasus encountered resistance from the Chechen

authorities.

Chechnya’s human-rights ombudsman

insisted in his in remarks from 23 May 2017 that

homosexuality did not exist in the republic. He

claimed that the whole dispute over the alleged per-

secution of homosexuals was the result of a conspiracy

by foreign powers intending to undermine Chechen

society.

His counterpart in Moscow, Tatyana Moskal-

kova, pointed out that she had not yet received any

requests for help from the victims and made clear

that the victims’ families would need to be guaran-

teed maximum protection. This was the precondition,

she said, for any serious investigations to be carried

out in Chechnya at all.

In early 2018 the precarious human-

rights situation in Chechnya once

again made the headlines in

international politics.

In early 2018 the precarious human-rights situa-

tion in Chechnya once again made the headlines in

international politics. In January the human-rights

activist Oyub Titiev, who had been running the Groz-

ny office of the organisation Memorial since Natalya

Estemirova’s murder, was arrested for alleged posses-

sion of drugs. This is a favourite regime pretext for

silencing its critics. In 2014 a court sentenced the

activist Ruslan Kutaev to four years in prison for

alleged possession of heroin. He had organised a con-

ference for the 70

anniversary of the deportation

of Chechens and Ingush against Kadyrov’s wishes. In

2016 a journalist from the Internet portal Kavkazkii

Uzel (Caucasian Knot), who had posted reports criti-

cising the Kadyrov regime, was sentenced to three

years’ imprisonment for alleged possession of mari-

juana.

The German government, Council of Europe and

EU expressed their concern about this renewed state

interference in the reporting on human rights in

Chechnya. The State Department in Washington de-

scribed Titiev’s arrest as “the latest in a string of

reports of alarming recent human rights violations

Ann-Dorit Boy, “Tschetscheniens Polizei sabotiert Unter-

suchung”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 May 2017.

“Chechen Ombudsman Rejects Gay Abuse Allegations”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union Political File,

23 May 2017.

Boy, “Tschetscheniens Polizei sabotiert Untersuchung”

(see note 68).

Human-Rights Violations

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

in Chechnya”.

Prior to that, in December 2017, the

US government had added Kadyrov to the sanctions

list under the Magnitsky Act, citing various human-

rights violations in his territory. Kadyrov responded

to the criticism by vilifying Memorial employees as

agitators steered by the US and defaming human-

rights activists in general as persons “without family,

nation or religion” and as “enemies of the people”.

Concerns grew over the human-rights situation in

Chechnya and the North Caucasus more generally

when, shortly after Kadyrov’s response, an arson

attack was carried out on the Memorial office in

Nazran in the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia.

Human-rights activists in Ingushetia had previously

not had the same problems with the authorities as

in Chechnya. The Dagestani capital Makhachkala also

saw attacks on Memorial. This fed speculation as to

whether the Kadyrovtsy’s repression reached beyond

the borders of Chechnya.

Human-rights organisa-

tions such as Memorial are currently under increasing

pressure in Russia in general.

Quoted in Sophia Kishkovsky, “Chechen Arrest Reflects

Crackdown, Activists Say”,

The New York Times, 11 January

2018.

Quoted in Benjamin Triebe, “Offensive gegen Bürger-

rechtler in Tschetschenien”,

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22 January

2018; “Evrosojuz osudil presledovanie PC ‘Memorial’ na

Severnom Kavkaze” [The European Union condemned the

persecution of the human-rights centre Memorial in the

North Caucasus], Kavkazkii Uzel, 19 January 2018, http://

www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/315346/.

Cf. this study’s chapter on “Chechnya as a Cross-Border

Actor”, p.

26.

Reconstruction and Economic Boom, or Façade of Stability?

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

The most visible sign of the changes that Chechnya

has undergone in the past decade is the appearance

ofthe capital Grozny. Its magnificent avenues, such as

Putin Boulevard, and islands of modernisations, such

as Grozny City with its luxury hotels and boutiques,

are in sharp contrast to the town reduced to rubble at

the end of the intense fighting. However, as in a few

other Caucasian metropolises, this boom façade con-

ceals the socioeconomic realities in each country or

area. In the case of Chechnya, this also masks the fact

that the revival on display here was funded less by

its own economic power than by subsidies from the

federal budget.

In May 2004 President Putin visited Grozny to

attend the funeral of the murdered head of the repub-

lic, Akhmat Kadyrov. At the time, he voiced his horror

at the devastation in the city. About 154,000 houses

and apartments in Chechnya had been wholly or

mostly destroyed. In Grozny that comprised 70 per-

cent of all apartments and houses.

A year earlier

the United Nations had described Grozny as the most

destroyed city in the world. At that time, Chechnya

was the weakest economic region in the entire Rus-

sian Federation. Fourteen years later, in October 2017,

Ramzan Kadyrov gushingly praised the reconstruction

during a ceremony for “Grozny Day”. Grozny, he

claimed, was a glorious example for the whole North

Caucasus, whose beauty was lauded the world over;

multitudes of tourists visited it. Chechnya’s second-

biggest town, Gudermes, has also witnessed a remark-

able reconstruction. There are now plans to demon-

strate, through elaborate tourism projects, just how

acute the contrast is to the previously war-devastated

Chechnya. For example, in one of the mountain

regions that saw the heaviest fighting 15 years ago,

Musa Basnukaev, “Reconstruction in Chechnya: At the

Intersection between Politics and the Economy”, in

Chechnya

at War and Beyond, ed. Anne le Huérou et al. (New York:

Routledge, 2014), 76.

the Veduchi ski resort is being built at a cost of poten-

tially up to 500 million US dollars.

When Ramzan Kadyrov came to power, unemploy-

ment in Chechnya stood at over 70 percent. By late

2014, this had allegedly been reduced to 21.5 percent,

although statistical data from Chechnya are extreme-

ly questionable.

In principle, this is true of all socio-

economic data from the North Caucasus, as was most

recently emphasised in October 2017 by Natalya

Zubarevich, an expert on economic development in

Russia’s regions. Her assessment was made when

great numbers of governors and representatives of the

regional power elites in this part of Russia were dis-

missed due to their weak economic performance.

Such data are unreliable, Zubarevich points out, if

only because of the sprawling underground economy.

On 19 April 2017, President Putin received Kadyrov

in the Kremlin and emphasised a series of socio-

economic successes. He stated that decrees passed by

him (Putin) in May 2012 for development in Chech-

nya had been implemented; unemployment had

already sunk to 9.2 percent; wages were being paid

regularly; and pre-school education was now avail-

able for 100 percent of children.

Despite the Kadyrov regime’s insistence on inde-

pendence, Chechnya’s economy is largely dependent

Andrew E. Kramer, “Where Islamists Reigned, a Ski

Resort Rises”,

The New York Times, 1 February 2018.

Hannah Salyers Kibler, Ramzan Kadyrov: Russia’s Vanguard

of Security or Long-Term Liability? (Tallahassee: Florida State

University, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy,

2016), 52.

“Zubarevich: dlja serii otstavok na Severnom Kavkaze

net ekonomicheskich osnovanij” [Subaryevitch: There are

no economic reasons for the wave of dismissals in the North

Caucasus],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 6 October 2017, http://www.kavkaz-

uzel.eu/articles/310642.

“Russia: Chechnya Media Highlights 17–23 April 2017”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union Political File,

27 April 2017.

Reconstruction and Economic

Boom, or Façade of Stability?

Reconstruction and Economic Boom, or Façade of Stability?

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

on both Russia and the local power elite and local

state bodies. The private or market-based sector is

largely underdeveloped.

The minister for the econo-

my in Grozny objects that Chechnya has created a

favourable climate for investment and that in 2014

private investments totalled 79 percent of all invest-

ment in the republic. Independent observers, how-

ever, including economists at Chechnya’s State Uni-

versity, are sceptical. They point out that there are

hardly any jobs in the private sector, but almost

exclusively in the state apparatus and administration.

And salaries are exceedingly low, except in the higher

ranks of the security agencies. One of the few excep-

tions is the Rodina Complex, in which the Chechen

oligarch Abubakar Arsamakov has invested. The com-

plex encompasses large farms and garden centres,

for which fallow land in part contaminated by mines

was made arable.

The foreign investment which was

used to nurse Grozny back to health and give it its

magnificent façades partly came from the United Arab

Emirates, with which the regime maintains good rela-

tions. Additional resources came from a fund created

by Ramzan Kadyrov, bearing his father’s name, and

administered by his mother. The Akhmat Kadyrov

Fund is stocked using compulsory levies that are de-

ducted from state employees’ pay in a “parallel tax

system”.

Moscow made it clear that Chechnya

would increasingly have to grow its

economy on its own strength.

In Soviet times, the budget of the autonomous

republic (which at the time consisted of both Chech-

nya and Ingushetia) was already more than 50 per-

cent dependent on subsidies from Moscow. In the

post-Soviet era, that share has risen to more than 80

percent. Such high levels of dependence are charac-

teristic for many other federal subjects, not just in the

North Caucasus but in other areas as well. Under the

Kathrin Hille, “Chechnya’s Economic Recovery Tested by

Slowdown”,

Financial Times, 28 April 2015, http://www.ft.com/

content/8233d33c-ecd0-11e4-a81a-00144feab7de.

Hannah Salyers Kibler, Ramzan Kadyrov: Russia’s Vanguard

of Security or Long-Term Liability? (Tallahassee: Florida State

University, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy,

2016), 64.

Cf. the detailed treatment in “Fond Kadyrova: kak tratjat

‘dengi ot Allacha’” [The Kadyrov Fund: How to spend ‘Allah’s

money’],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 6 October 2017, http://www.kavkaz-

uzel.eu/articles/310518/.

umbrella of a federal programme started in 2002,

Moscow took care of the reconstruction of houses,

schools, hospitals and roads in the war-ravaged Chech-

nya with lavish payments. Even after the programme

ended in 2012, Moscow continued to grant ample

subsidies, but made it clear that Chechnya would

increasingly have to grow its economy on its own

strength. At the time, it was not yet apparent that

Russia would slide into an economic crisis driven

by sinking oil prices, sanctions and other factors.

“Against a troubled economic backdrop, the federal

authorities are less and less apt to give in to Grozny’s ex-

travagant financial demands. The republic’s restoration

programme drew to a close in 2012, for instance, whereas

Kadyrov hoped that it would continue until 2017: instead of

$3 billion, Chechnya has had to make do with $350 million.”

Laruelle,

Kadyrovism (see note 48), 8.

Chechnya as a Cross-Border Actor

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

Kadyrov’s policies do not stop at his republic’s bor-

ders. They extend primarily to his immediate neigh-

bourhood in the Russian Federation, in the form of

border disputes with Dagestan and Ingushetia. He has

laid claim to areas in neighbouring regions that were

part of Chechnya before the 1944 deportation. A clash

between Chechen and Ingush authorities occurred

in 2012 when Chechen security forces carried out a

special operation in the Ingush village of Galashki.

In August 2012 Kadyrov criticised his counterpart in

Ingushetia, Yunus Bek Yevkurov, for not combating

terrorism in his territory robustly enough: “If Yevku-

rov can’t take care of things, we’ll have to do it. He

doesn’t seem interested at all. Or what else can he

mean when he says that he doesn’t want to describe

terrorists as bandits? As if they’re young people who

have lost their way. For us, they’re bandits, terrorists,

satans, enemies of the Chechen and Ingush people,

enemies of Russia.”

This criticism referred to Yevku-

rov’s attempt to include Islamist groups in his repub-

lic in a dialogue with the official clergy and govern-

ment officials. Even though these events occurred

some time ago, the problem of cross-border discord

has not been resolved. In July 2017, for example,

there were confrontations in Leninaul district at the

border with Dagestan between Chechens and mem-

bers of other ethnic groups.

When fighting his opponents, Kadyrov reaches far

beyond Chechnya. As mentioned above, some of his

adversaries and rivals were murdered in exile – both

in Russia and abroad – and their relatives in Chech-

nya threatened with collective punishment. This led

Quoted in “Kadyrov Ramzan Akhmatovich”, Kavkazkii

Uzel, 22 December 2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/

85366/.

“Zhiteli Leninaula rasskazali o strel’be na granice Dages-

tana i Chexhni” [Inhabitants of Leninaul report on shootout

at the border between Dagestan and Chechnya],

Kavkazkii

Uzel, 8 July 2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/305704/.

to protests outside of Russia as well, for example

in the Chechen diaspora in Vienna, Stockholm and

Berlin. In response, Kadyrov threatened activists in

Europe that any of their relatives still in Chechnya

would be held responsible.

As Putin’s “foot soldier”, the head of the Chechen

republic supplies Moscow with elite fighters for de-

ployment to Syria and Ukraine. However, Chechens

can at times fight on both sides of the respective front.

In East Ukraine, for example, a few hundred Chechens

sided with Ukrainian combatants against pro-Russian

separatists. They had been recruited from anti-Rus-

sian exile groups hostile to Kadyrov and are organised

into two brigades. One is named after Dzhokhar

Dudayev, the leader of the Chechen secession move-

ment in the 1990s; the other after Sheikh Mansur, the

first leader of the Chechen resistance against Russian

invasions into the North Caucasus in the late 18

cen-

tury. On the opposite side, about 300 Chechens loyal

to Kadyrov fought for the separatists in Donbass sup-

ported by Moscow.

Russia’s incursions into Ukraine

are explicitly supported by Grozny. For the third

anniversary of the referendum on the annexation of

Crimea by Russia, Kadyrov organised a sports festival

in March 2017 under the title “Crimea and Russia –

We belong together”.

Shortly before, on 23 January

2017, Kadyrov had finally admitted that Chechen

troops were stationed in Syria. The above-mentioned

Adam Delimkhanov was entrusted with forming the

Chechen units to be sent to Syria. Inter alia they

served for some time with the Russian military police

near Aleppo. After a deployment to Syria lasting

Emil Souleimanov, “Kadyrov Represses Dissent among

European Chechens”,

Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 9 March

2016.

Laruelle, Kadyrovism (see note 48), 17.

“Russia: Chechnya Media Highlights 13–19 March

2017“,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union

Political File, 25 March 2017.

Chechnya as a

Cross-Border Actor

Chechnya as a Cross-Border Actor

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Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

several months, the Chechen military-police troops

returned home in February 2018.

Nevertheless Kadyrov presents himself as a leader

of Muslims in Russia and internationally in such a

way that it challenges Moscow in both its domestic

and foreign policy. This became evident in 2017

in connection with the state violence against the

Rohingya Muslim ethnic group in Myanmar, a vio-

lence with genocidal characteristics. Kadyrov por-

trayed himself once again as an important voice in

the Islamic world. On 4 September 2017 he organised

a mass demonstration with an alleged one million

participants – according to the Russian newspaper

Novaya Gazeta there were only about 100,000 – who

were supposed to express their solidarity with their

persecuted Islamic brothers and sisters in Southeast

Asia. Members of the Muslim Spiritual Administra-

tions (muftiates) of other North Caucasian autono-

mous republics also took part in the demonstration.

President Putin and the Russian government were

urged to take a decisive stance in this foreign affair.

Before the demonstration, in a Youtube video, Kady-

rov criticised comments by Moscow for suggesting

that both the Russian and Chinese leaderships sup-

ported the authorities in Myanmar, pointing to the

existence of rebel groups among the Rohingya.

It is

unlikely that the Kadyrov factor carries much weight

in the Sino-Russian relationship.

Nevertheless,

because there were also demonstrations in other Mus-

lim regions of the Federation against the persecution

of the Rohingya, including in Moscow in front of the

Embassy of Myanmar, Kadyrov did cause the Kremlin

some difficulties with his statement. Russian political

experts such as Fedor Lukyanov see this as the first

serious foreign-policy disagreement between Moscow

and Grozny.

However, in 2012 Kadyrov had already

“Chechnya Holds Massive Rally in Support of Myan-

mar’s Rohingya”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet

Union Political File, 4 September 2017.

“Politologi kritichno ocenili znachimost’ ‘faktora Kady-

rova’ v voprosakh otnoshenij Moskvy i Pekina” [Political sci-

entists gauge the importance of the ‘Kadyrov Factor’ for the

relationship between Moscow and Beijing],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 7

September 2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/309143/.

“Given the growing role and influence of the Muslim

community in Russian politics the authorities can hardly

ignore such sentiments. Especially when they are expressed

by such an influential Muslim politician as Ramzan Kadyrov

[…]. It seems the first time Kadyrov and the authorities dis-

agree so much on an issue, which is even more important as

it puts Russia in a complicated position in its relations with

called on the Russian government to pay more

attention to the repression of the Rohingya.

Five years later, Muslims in different

parts of Russia proclaimed their

solidarity with their persecuted

fellow believers in Myanmar.

Five years later, Muslims in different parts of

Russia – Moscow, Grozny, the Dagestani capital

Makhachkala, the capital of Karachay-Cherkessia,

Cherkessk, and elsewhere – proclaimed their soli-

darity with their persecuted fellow believers in Myan-

mar. Experts believe this shows the “rise of a political

Islam in Russia” headed by Kadyrov.

Anti-Buddhist

slogans appeared during the demonstrations and on

social networks, and even calls for Muslims to go on

jihad to Myanmar and stand by the Rohingya. The

Russian security authorities, however, abstained from

violent measures against the demonstrators.

Transposing the violence in Myanmar – deplored

by the United Nations as a brutal “ethnic cleansing”

– onto a religious level and stylising the conflict as a

faith dispute between Buddhists and Muslims would

first and foremost harm those countries in South and

Southeast Asia where the two faith communities live

as neighbours. However, the multiethnic state of Rus-

sia could also be affected, since Islam and Buddhism

along with Orthodox Christianity are officially con-

sidered its “traditional religions”. The autonomous

republic of Kalmykia has the largest Buddhist-Lamaist

ethnic group in European Russia; it is located close to

the North Caucasus, where there were the strongest

China, Myanmar’s main patron.” Fedor Lukyanow, quoted in

“Russian Press Views Chechen Leader’s Bid for New Status”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union Political File,

6 September 2017.

On 13 August 2012 he wrote on Chechnya’s official

website: “I ask the leadership of our country and the Orga-

nisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to use all available

diplomatic, political and economic means to end the reli-

gious-ethnic cleansing – the genocide – in Myanmar.”

Quoted in “Zajavleniya Kadyrova o M’janme priveli k zader-

zhaniyam v Rossii” [Kadyrov’s declarations have led to

arrests in Russia],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 11 September 2017, http://

www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/309410/.

Sergei Markedonov, Myanmar, Russia’s Muslims, and a New

Foreign Policy (Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center, 12 Septem-

ber 2017); Ridvan Bari Urcosta, “Far Away Myanmar Trigger-

ing Rise of Political Islam in Russia”, Jamestown Foundation

Eurasia Daily Monitor, 13 September 2017.

Chechnya as a Cross-Border Actor

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Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

reactions to the persecution of the Rohingya. And

social networks calling on Muslisms to demonstrate

have already carried hate speech against Kalmyks.

However, the overall attitude of Russia’s population

towards Buddhists has not worsened, as a Levada

Centre survey on relationships with faith communi-

ties showed in December 2017.

Among the Russian general public, there emerged

a number of possible explanations for the outbursts

in parts of the Muslim community. Some employed

well-established propaganda templates and accused

the USA of being behind the wave of protests and

agitating Russia’s Muslims. Others blamed Turkey

and Saudi Arabia for spreading hysteria. Above all,

however, people pointed to the political ambitions

of the head of the Chechen republic, whom they see

as trying to cement his role as “guardian of Islam”

during the crisis. This was not necessarily viewed as

exclusively negative. With Kadyrov’s support, some

say, Russia could also foster “spiritual ties” with the

Islamic world, and capitalise in terms of both domes-

tic and foreign policy. After all, Kadyrov professes his

affiliation not only with Islam but also with Russia

and President Putin.

Indeed, the Chechen leadership portrays itself as

Moscow’s assistant in the latter’s Middle-East policy

– an area which, at the very least since the military

deployment in Syria, has once again played a promi-

nent role in Russia’s foreign policy. In the person of

Ziyad Sabsazi, Chechnya has its very own ambassador

to the Midde East and North Africa. He is currently

employed particularly to repatriate nationals of

Russia and all CIS countries from the war zones in

Syria, Iraq and Libya. Kadyrov’s father Akhmat, who

began a degree in Islamic law in Jordan in 1990,

nurtured relations with statesmen in the Middle East

during his term in office as mufti and later as Chech-

nya’s president. Sabsazi, a Chechen born in Aleppo,

served as his consultant.

Ibid., 3.

Otnoshenie k religiyam [Attitudes to religion] (Moscow:

Levada Centre, 23 January 2018), http://www.levada.ru/2018/

01/23/otnoshenie-k-religiyam/.

“Groznoe preduzprezhdenie” [Warning from

Grozny],

Gazeta.ru, 4 September 2017, http://www.gazeta.ru/

comments/2017/09/04_e_10873592.shtml?mc_cid=

5d6588ce8e&mc_eid=9eaa49374d.

Pavel Luzin, “Ramzan Kadyrov: Russia’s Top Diplomat”,

Intersection (Security), 11 April 2017, http://intersectionproject.

eu/article/security/ramzan-kadyrov-russias-top-diplomat.

Kadyrov presents Chechnya as a significant actor

in Syria due to its participation not only in Russia’s

military deployments, but also in the reconstruction

of the war-ravaged country. For example, the Akhmat

Kadyrov Foundation financially supports the restora-

tion of Aleppo’s main mosque and further mosques

in Homs. Chechen television showed Adam Delim-

khanov at Friday prayer in the courtyard of the

Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo, which was still strewn

with rubble from the many weeks of fighting in the

town. Thereafter, Delimkhanov and Chechnya’s mufti

visited a police bataillon staffed by fellow Chechens

patrolling the streets of Aleppo and Delimkhanov gave

speeches in the Chechen language.

Kadyrov’s Middle-East Policy reaches

far beyond Syria and is mostly

orientated towards Saudi Arabia and

the Gulf States.

Admittedly, Kadyrov’s Middle-East Policy reaches

far beyond Syria and is mostly orientated towards

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, with which Chech-

nya also has economic relations. Kadyrov had already

had links to the Saudi Defence Minister Mohammad

bin Salman before the latter became the new Crown

Prince of Saudi Arabia. However, this cooperation

with the Wahhabite kingdom clashed with a reso-

lution adopted by an international congress of Islamic

theologians in Grozny in 2016. The so-called Grozny

Fatwa condemns “religious extremism in all its forms”,

counting Wahhabism and Salafism as among the

“dangerous currents”. The fatwa created controversy

among Islam scholars and the official muftiate clergy

in Russia.

In November 2016 Saudi media reported

that Kadyrov had clarified during a meeting with the

Crown Prince that the statement against Wahhabism

was a misunderstanding.

Relations with Riadh have

not suffered. Kadyrov emphatically categorises Saudi

Arabia as an indispensable partner in fighting inter-

national terrorism. In late May 2017, the Chechen

mufti met the ambassadors of Saudi Arabia and

Kuwait in Moscow and praised Chechnya as “a reli-

Albert Aji, “Chechnya a Major Player in Rebuilding

Syria”,

The Daily Star, 19 July 2017.

Liz Fuller, “Grozny Fatwa on ‘True Believers’ Triggers

Major Controversy”,

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Caucasus

Report), 14 September 2016, http://www.rferl.org/a/caucasus-

report-grozny-fatwa-controversy/27987472.html.

“Kadyrov Ramzan Akhmatovich”, Kavkazkii Uzel, 22

December 2017,

http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/85366/.

Chechnya as a Cross-Border Actor

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Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

able bridge between the Islamic world and Russia”.

100

In early October 2017, when the Saudi king became

the first Saudi ruler to visit Russia since the foun-

dation of the kingdom, Russian media presented his

visit as one of the most significant foreign-policy

events in recent years. Chechnya once again boasted

about acting as a bridge between Russia and the

Islamic world.

Kadyrov reinforces this role with

fiercely anti-Western rhetoric.

Kadyrov reinforces this role with fiercely anti-

Western rhetoric. He likes to issue reminders of what

was probably the biggest demonstration ever to be

held in Grozny, in connection with the international

confrontation over the Islamist terror attacks in Janu-

ary 2015 on the Charlie Hebdo editorial office and

others in Paris. Using the slogan, “We Are Not Char-

lie”, Kadyrov ordered a mass demonstration against

the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed published

in Western media and against the satirical treatment

of religion. Demonstrators differentiated themselves

from the Western response to the attacks and deplored

the violation of religious sentiments by “Western

freedom of opinion”. Kadyrov’s right-hand man as

regards anti-Western ideology is Dshambulat Umarov,

the Chechen Minister for Nationalities Policy, Ex-

ternal Relations, the Press and Information, and

author of a book entitled The KRA Factor: Confrontation,

where KRA stands for Kadyrov, Ramzan Akhmato-

vich. Umarov depicts the Chechen leader as a key

figure in the fight against “Western conspiracies

against Russia” and underscores his role with reli-

gious arguments.

101

During the Temple Mount conflict, which was

sparked by restrictions on access to the Al-Aqsa

Mosque in Jerusalem in 2017, Chechnya also came

into conflict with Israel. In July, the republic’s muf-

tiate published a declaration that was understood

by the Chechen people as almost a call to jihad.

102

100

“Russia: Chechnya Media Highlights, 22 May–4 June

2017”,

BBC Monitoring Global Newsline – Former Soviet Union

Political File, 6 June 2017.

101

Quoted in Denis Grekov, “Kadyrov’s Myanmar Offen-

sive and Its Consequences”,

Intersection (Politics), 25 September

2017, http://intersectionproject.eu/article/politics/kadyrovs-

myanmar-offensive-and-its-consequences.

102

“DUM Chechni poyasnilo svoe otnoshenie k dzhichadu

protiv Izrailya” [The Spiritual Administration of Chechnya’s

Muslims has taken a stand on the jihad against Israel],

Kadyrov then proposed an agreement to guarantee

access for Muslims to their holy sites in Jerusalem and

the security of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and offered him-

self as “guardian of Al Aqsa”. Once the mosque was

openly accessible again, Kadyrov claimed substantial

credit for the Chechen authorities having settled the

dispute.

In the same year, Grozny also offered to host inter-

national conferences on humanitarian aid. According

to the Ministry for Nationalities Policy, External Rela-

tions, the Press and Information the reasons for this

proposal were Chechnya’s authority across the East,

the cordial personal relationships Ramzan Kadyrov

maintains with many leaders of the Islamic world and

the participation of Chechen authorities in a “policy

of people’s diplomacy” and in organising humanitarian

aid abroad.

103

An aid project frequently referenced is

the financial support given by the Akhmat Kadyrov

Fund to Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.

Kavkazkii Uzel, 24 July 2017, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/

articles/306587/.

103

“Gumanitarnuju pomoshch vezut v Groznyj” [Humani-

tarian aid is given in Grozny],

Kommersant, 14 June 2017.

Prospects and Conclusion

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Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

With its secession movement in the 1990s and its

confrontation with Moscow during two wars, Chech-

nya became the pars pro toto for the North Caucasus

in European eyes. In the years that followed, armed

Islamist underground movements also developed in

other parts of Russia’s Caucasian periphery, thus

broadening the European perspective. Since the end

of large-scale hostilities a decade ago, Chechnya has

no longer stood out as the epicentre of violence in

the region. Yet it has not been lastingly pacified. The

same is true of the North Caucasus overall. In the last

three to four years, violent incidents and the fighting

capacity of insurgents have declined so much that the

region hardly registers as a significant problem among

Russians. In December 2017 the Russian domestic

secret service FSB officially announced that the armed

underground in the North Caucasus was now com-

pletely eliminated.

104

Experts on the region have their

doubts about this assessment, since fights between

security forces and insurgents continue. Furthermore,

the return of Caucasian jihad migrants from Islamist

fight formations abroad could become a security chal-

lenge. This is particularly true of the largest republic

in the North Caucasus, Dagestan. In 2013 its ruler,

Ramazan Abdulatipov, announced that he was crush-

ing the armed underground and combating corrup-

tion. However, those goals have not been (wholly)

accomplished. As a consequence, he was replaced

in October 2017 with a former high-ranking police

officer from Moscow, in the most muscular interven-

tion by the Russian central government in regional

affairs in the North Caucasus.

105

In January and

February 2018, Dagestan’s entire government was

dismissed, and there followed the most unyielding

purge to date in an autonomous republic, using

104

“Rossiya vyigrala eshche odnu vazhnejshuju bitvu”

[Russia has won another decisive battle], Vzgljad Delovaja

Gazeta, 19 December 2017,

https://vz.ru/politics/2017/12/19/

900398.html?mc_cid=e7db48683e&mc_eid=9eaa49374d.

105

Cf. Paul Goble, “A Year in Review: For the North Cau-

casus in 2017, Old Problems Remain while New Ones Arise”,

Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, 9 January 2018.

federal-security and law-enforcement agencies includ-

ing the attorney general and FSB. In the run-up to the

presidential elections in Russia, these operations were

meant to signal a further tightening of the “vertical

of power” vis-à-vis problem regions such as the North

Caucasus.

106

With increasing frequency, high-ranking

administrative cadres from other parts of the country

are appointed to Russia’s republics in the North Cau-

casus.

In contrast, Ramzan Kadyrov’s rule as head of the

Chechen republic seems largely protected from such

measures. To date, the loyalty pact between the Rus-

sian president and his liege in this historically exposed

federal subject remains largely intact. President Putin

has accepted the stabilisation price for “pacifying” the

former war zone. These include serious human-rights

abuses in the republic itself; political murders that

remain unsolved; sometimes high-handed foreign-

policy initiatives; and an “Islamisation from above”

creating a legal situation within Chechnya that partly

contradicts Russian legislation. The federal power

vertical has been tightened throughout the whole

Russian Federation, as was demonstrated by the vigor-

ous replacement of personnel within the regional

elites before the presidential elections of March 2018.

Nevertheless, the leadership of Chechnya undaunted-

ly presents itself as a sort of sultanate that ostensibly

will not listen to reason from anyone but President

Putin himself. There is speculation as to whether the

Putin-Kadyrov pact might shift somewhat during the

Russian leader’s fourth term in office. The question

also arises what would happen should Putin ever

exercise his authority after all and demand a per-

sonnel change at the top of the Chechen republic.

Kadyrov himself has repeatedly stated that he will

106

Maria Dománska/Wojciech Górecki, A Purge in Dages-

tan ahead of the Russian Election (Warsaw: Centre for Eastern

Studies [OSW], 14 February 2018), http://www.osw.waw.pl/

en/publikacje/analyses/2018-02-14/a-purge-dagestan-ahead-

russian-election.

Prospects and Conclusion

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

cede his place if President Putin demands it.

107

far, the Russian general public has not expected or

demanded such a measure: according to a Levada

Centre opinion poll published in October 2017,

Kadyrov ranks seventh among ten politicians in

Russia trusted by the public, and is seen as a “strong

leader”.

108

The Russian president’s press spokesman,

Dmitri Peskov, confirmed on 27 November 2017 that

the Kremlin continues to view Kadyrov as the head

of the Chechen republic. Kadyrov’s cousin and right-

hand man in Moscow, Adam Delimkhanov, affirmed

this, saying the future of the republic was unthinka-

ble without Ramzan Kadyrov.

109

Similar statements

are made by the Russian power elite about the cur-

rent president. For instance, Duma Chairman Vya-

cheslav Volodin has issued the slogan “Putin is Russia

– without Putin no Russia”.

110

Nevertheless, it is not

guaranteed that the loyalty pact between Putin and

Kadyrov will endure throughout Putin’s fourth term

in office. There is currently no fierce resistance in

Chechnya to Kadyrov. For the time being, the contrast

with the horrific war period continues to hold sway;

with his references to “pacification” and “reconstruc-

tion”, Kadyrov aims to keep it that way. It is doubtful,

however, whether this contrast can lastingly mask the

frustration caused by his reign of terror and the socio-

economic conditions in the republic.

Regardless of the foreign-policy ambitions of its

ruler, Chechnya and the rest of the North Caucasus

are seen as an internal affair for the Russian Federa-

tion. In contrast to the South Caucasus with its three

independent states and unsolved territorial conflicts,

Russia’s Caucasian region is not open to international

politics. The exception is Chechnya’s economic and

political relationship with Arab Gulf States. Particu-

larly since the Second Chechen War, the influence of

Europe and international organisations on the peace

settlement has been noticeably limited.

111

Prior to

that, the OSCE in particular was involved as a media-

107

“Zajavlenie Kadyrova o gotovnosti k otstavke stalo

vtorym za chetyre mesjaca” [Kadyrov’s statement on his

willingness to resign: the second in only four months],

Kavkazkii Uzel, 29 November 2017, http://www.kavkaz-

uzel.eu/articles/313122/.

108

Ibid.

109

Ibid.

110

Quoted in Andreas Rüesch, “Herrscher über eine

Sackgasse”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 January 2018.

111

Cf. Europa im Tschetschenienkrieg. Zwischen politischer

Ohnmacht und Gleichgültigkeit, ed. Martin Malek and Anna

Schor-Tschudnowskaja (Stuttgart, 2008).

tor in the conflict between Moscow and Grozny. In

1995, after Russian troops marched into the renegade

republic, it founded an assistance group for Chech-

nya; helped (under its leader Tim Guldimann, a Swiss

diplomat) to end the First Chechen War; and kept a

presence in the war-ravaged republic until late 1998.

Because of the dramatic security situation during the

interwar period and the anarchy reigning in Chech-

nya, which was de facto independent as of 1996, the

OSCE was forced to evacuate the assistance group to

Moscow; the lack of an international presence in the

conflict area during the Second Chechen War, as of

October 1999, was conspicuous.

112

In 2001 the OSCE

assistance reinstated itself in Chechnya, in Znamen-

skoye, a location that had been largely spared by the

war. However, its remit was severely restricted and

it was ultimately unable to fulfil its original far-

reaching mandate – mediating between the parties

involved in the conflict, observing human rights,

promoting the rule of law, protecting the population,

and facilitating the return of refugees. In late 2002 its

mandate was not renewed. Its mission, and an inter-

national presence in Chechnya, ended just as Moscow

was initiating its policy of Chechenisation, and the

rise of the Kadyrov clan began.

And yet developments in Chechnya and the North

Caucasus continue to have international importance

and an impact on Europe due to the flow of refugees

and migrants. Since the start of the Second Chechen

War, between 130,000 and 150,000 refugees and

migrants from Chechnya have made their way to the

EU, especially to France, Austria, Belgium and Ger-

many. During the First Chechen War, many inhabit-

ants also fled the large-scale violence, but they re-

mained in their close or extended neighbourhood:

Dagestan, Ingushetia or the Russian interior. A flow

of refugees towards Europe mainly began during

the Second Chechen War. In 1999, only 368 Russian

nationals applied for asylum in Germany; a year later

it was already 3,001 (including 1,025 Chechens), and

in 2001 4,824 (including 1,994 Chechens). Since 2012

the figures have risen again, peaking in 2013 with

14,487 applications. Their success rate was highest

between 2003 and 2005 (2004: 32 percent). By con-

trast, in 2016 just over 4 percent of applications were

112

“Rückkehr der OSZE nach Tschetschenien”, Neue Zür-

cher Zeitung, 15 June 2001; Wolfgang Grycz, “Tschetschenien

vor Ort. Interview mit dem OSZE-Beauftragten Botschafter

Jorma Inki”, Ost-West. Europäische Perspektiven (OWEP), no. 4

(2003): 311–16.

Prospects and Conclusion

SWP Berlin

Chechnya’s Status within the Russian Federation

May 2018

accepted. Of the more than 12,000 citizens of the

Russian Federation seeking asylum in Germany that

year, 9,850 were Chechens, i.e. over 80 percent.

113

Representatives of the Chechen diaspora in Paris,

Berlin and Vienna point out that the migration and

refugee crisis in the EU is noticeably transforming

asylum policy.

114

The German intelligence service

has recently warned of increased terror threats from

battle-hardened Islamists from the North Caucasus,

who have been involved in armed conflicts on foreign

jihad fronts in the Middle East.

However, equating Chechen migrants with mili-

tant Islamists must be treated cautiously. Human-

rights abuses on Kadyrov’s territory are not only

forcing the markedly reduced armed underground to

emigrate from Chechnya, but also those affected by

collective punishment, those identified as opponents

and critics of the head of the republic, or accused of

transgressing Chechen tradition through their sexual

orientation.

The link between migration problems and human-

rights problems demands international attention for

the situation in Chechnya. Accordingly, international

organisations and governments in Europe and the

USA have expressed their concern about the precari-

ous human-rights situation in the Caucasus republic

more frequently since March 2017 than at almost any

other time during the past decade.

113

Olga Gulina, “What Happens When Chechens Seek

Asylum in Europe?”,

Intersection (Russia/Europe), 2 October

2017, http://intersectionproject.eu/article/russia-europe/what-

happens-when-chechens-seek-asylum-europe.

114

“Chleny diaspory rasskazali o strache pered vlastjami

Chechni” [Members of the Diaspora report on their fear of

the Chechen authorities],

Kavkazskii Uzel, 27 December 2017,

http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/314365/.

Abbreviations

ASSR

Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic

FSB Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy

Federatsii

(Federal Security Service of the Russian

Federation)

“Islamic State”

LGBT

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender

OMON Otryad Militsii Osobogo Naznacheniya

(Special Purpose Police Unit)

OSCE Organisation for Security and Cooperation in

Europe

RSFSR

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

VTsIOM Vsyerossiyskiy tsentr izucheniya obshchestvenno-

go mneniya

(Russian Public Opinion Research

Centre)