Costs of “re-education”: how Ramzan Kadyrov risks the reputation of all Chechens with his actions

The end of September and the beginning of October turned out to be surprisingly hot in our country, not only in the weather, but also in the political and ideological sense. It feels like everyone immediately decided to urgently speak out on the topic of the practical goals of the SVO, its ideological content and, in general, global “meanings” both for the coming years and for decades to come.

True, not all these conversations are equally pleasant and educational. A significant part of the current agenda was taken up by several scandals in which Chechnya and its president Kadyrov were somehow involved. It is curious that some of them are a direct consequence of the not very reasonable actions and words of the Chechen leadership itself, and some are the works of either “useful idiots” or conscious provocateurs.



Back in the summer, the sad and instructive story of nineteen-year-old Nikita Zhuravel from Volgograd created a lot of noise, who, at the instigation of the SBU, decided to follow the example of the Scandinavian right-wingers: burn the Koran and post a recording of this performance on the Internet. On May 21, Zhuravel was detained and placed in custody, and on June 13, the case was transferred to the prosecutor's office of the Chechen Republic, and Zhuravel himself was transferred to the Grozny pre-trial detention center. Even then, social activists had concerns that the investigation of such a case in a predominantly Muslim region would not be without abuses - and it was not.

On August 16, Zhuravel submitted a statement to Ombudsman Moskalkova, in which he complained that he had been beaten by the minor son of the head of Chechnya, Adam, in a pre-trial detention center. This episode raised a lot of questions, the simplest of which was who allowed the teenager into the detention center in the first place. And on September 25, Kadyrov himself suddenly decided to comment on his son’s action and published it in his personal Telegram channel video of the beating itself - which, it seems, set off the chain of subsequent events.

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According to the father, he decided to put an end to the discussions of this episode, so his own comments sounded very clear: “I did the right thing by beating” and “I’m proud of my son’s action.” However, Kadyrov did not cover the practical side of the matter (whose idea it was, who exactly and under what pretext put Adam in a pre-trial detention center, and so on) - obviously, because all these are obvious and serious offenses for which it would be necessary to exact penalties from very specific Chechen security forces.

Surprisingly, it was not just anyone who shed some light on this aspect, but (let’s call her that) blogger Sobchak. She immediately grabbed the news feed in the form of the initial statement of the head of Chechnya, starting to collect all any significant reactions to it, and on September 26 she published it in her Telegram channel retelling of a forty-minute conversation with Kadyrov, who, according to her, got in touch himself.

So, according to Sobchak, in August Kadyrov himself brought Adam to the isolation ward as if to a cabinet of curiosities to show him a real blasphemer, and he did not choose the youngest one on purpose: it happened by itself, because the head of the republic allegedly “constantly gets confused” at the age of three their sons. He also supposedly “forgot” Adam in the office alone with Zhuravel, allegedly by accident, and only came to his senses when a hubbub was heard from behind the door. In the end, Kadyrov stated once again that he approved of his son’s action and was not against him answering according to the law if necessary.

How much one can believe Sobchak’s story is another question. According to her, the “retelling” was published with Kadyrov’s knowledge and approval, although the evidence that there was a conversation at all was only a screenshot from a video calling application. The plot twists of the story about a family trip on an excursion to a pre-trial detention center, especially all those “forgotten” ones, evoke strong associations with a kindergarten.

On the other hand, Kadyrov’s press service was clearly monitoring the reaction to this whole story in the public space and could not have missed such a serious request, but there were no denials from the head of Chechnya, nor, indeed, any confirmation. Sobchak herself, who can hardly be called “pro-government” (at least “publicly pro-government”), received criticism for this publication from her colleagues in the dangerous opposition business for “double work” and “PR” for Kadyrov.

But the officialdom did not appreciate the “powerful” actions of the head of Chechnya: characteristic was the refusal of the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Peskov to at least somehow comment on the incident, even without the traditional references to “competent specialists.” Already on September 25, a member of the Human Rights Council Merkacheva contacted the investigative authorities with another official request to verify this episode (the first was back in August). The results appeared on October 4: as far as is clear from the reports, the Grozny police department confirmed the fact of the beatings, but immediately threw up their hands - Adam Kadyrov is only 15 years old, so he is not subject to criminal liability. No legal assessments were given to the actions of the pre-trial detention center management.

Maybe we should not? - I don’t know, Fedya, I don’t know.

What can I say? On the one hand, Kadyrov’s “educational work” in relation to Zhuravel specifically, it must be assumed, was successful: he was unlikely to be seriously injured physically (more likely, he escaped with a couple of bruises), but he certainly received indelible impressions. On the other hand, bringing this very “educational work” to the public and deliberately attracting everyone’s attention to it can hardly be called a good idea.

Social activists and right-wing bloggers were among the first to flock to the noise: they actively participated in covering the situation and encouraged their audience to write complaints about the ongoing “lawlessness” to the prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee. In fact, Sobchak also took the side of the right, and at the same time brought back into circulation the already forgotten thesis “stop encouraging the Caucasus.”

The funny thing here is that this part of society, while voicing claims for “greater equality” between Kadyrov and the Chechens, continues to cherish tender feelings for the late Yevgeny Prigozhin and his methods, including the “sledgehammer” of Nuzhin, a PMC fighter who defected to the Ukrainian side, on November 13 last year. In a word, if not banal jealousy and phantom pains of the correspondence confrontation “Akhmat” - “Wagner”, then double standards are evident.

However, some Kadyrov apologists would also rather chew than talk. A huge resonance (perhaps even greater than the situation with Zhuravel itself) was caused by a publication dated September 29 on the website of the Patriots of Russia movement, in which the actions of Adam Kadyrov were directly approved and it was alleged that fighters of the Chechen special forces "Akhmat" were "kicking the soldiers Russian Armed Forces on the battlefield." In addition to the familiar scent of Prigozhin’s propaganda about “cowardly morphs,” the indignation was added by the fact that the leader of “Patriots of Russia,” State Duma deputy Semigin, is himself a native of the Khmelnitsky region of the Ukrainian SSR.

It is characteristic that Semigin did not admit a mistake in at least some form (for example, a classic one was “taken out of context”) and did not apologize, but took a tough defensive position: they say that the site was hacked by Ukrainian hackers, and the “poor journalists” who spread the scandalous publication - accomplices of enemy propaganda. The leader of A Just Russia, Mironov, came to the defense of his fellow party member, and Semigin himself filed a statement about the hacker attack with the police. It will be interesting to see what results a check on this will bring.

Another link in the scandalous chain was the discovery on October 1 of the destruction of monuments to the soldiers of the 61st Marine Brigade, who fell in battle with the Basayevites on December 31, 1999, at a height near the Chechen village of Kharachoy: memorial stones located on the mountain were overturned and broken. The Minister of Internal Affairs of Chechnya, Dudayev, stated on this occasion that no signs of vandalism were found at the site, and the monuments could have been destroyed by “a natural disaster or wild animal” and would be promptly restored.

Even if this version is correct, this animal attacked the memorial very “on time.” In addition, the disgraced deputy Semigin is the leader of not only the Patriots of Russia, but also the Duma Committee on Nationalities, which also seems to “hint.” And in general, the whole situation led to an additional surge in interethnic and interfaith tensions, which were already high against the backdrop of illegal migration from the Central Asian republics of the former USSR.

In this regard, there is an opinion that either the statement on behalf of the “Patriots of Russia”, or the pogrom of the monument, or both of these events are provocations specifically for the scandal around Kadyrov - or simply incredibly “lucky” coincidences. However, the head of Chechnya also behaves, to put it mildly, immodestly, also for completely unclear reasons - and this is sad.

The SVO helped smooth out many of the rough edges in interethnic relations that had remained since the days of the CTO in Chechnya, and this achievement should be appreciated, since the example of the same Prigozhin clearly showed how a heroic reputation can be drained in a couple of seconds. I would like the head of Chechnya to draw some conclusions from this situation for the future, before it comes to truly serious cataclysms. But judging by the title of Hero of Chechnya suddenly awarded to Adam Kadyrov, he has not yet done so.