THE CHECHEN
The gangster’s gangster
It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be.
Russian proverb
Borz (not his real name, for fairly obvious reasons) was in many ways the stock image of the wily Chechen of a certain age: a spry man in his indefinable sixties, with the weathered skin and deep wrinkles that spoke of a hard life and an outdoors one, at that. But he had a cheerful smile, a sparkling eye and an energy to his speech and his movements that transformed him into someone younger, vital, unstoppable. He was also one of the most skilful and expensive contract killers in Moscow.
I met him, of all places, in a café in Sheremetyevo airport, which was still half shrouded in tarpaulins as it went through a much-needed remont or remodelling, in line with Moscow’s desire to slough off its dowdy Soviet image and look like a glittering Western capital. Earlier that day, a contact I knew well enough – and trusted – had rung me up and told me there was someone I just had to meet. Who? A Chechen, a professional assassin, who was thinking of retiring and happy to talk. An invitation to have a chat with a killer for hire is something that I find almost irresistible, but, on the other hand, my recondite area of research had taught me the value of being cautious to the point of paranoia. The airport café seemed the ideal venue for a meeting, somewhere not only very public, but also behind a screen of metal detectors and humourless security guards, watched over by cameras and prowled by sniffer dogs and their handlers.
As it was, Borz was the soul of congeniality. I was immediately reminded that, while most Chechens are Muslims, they typically bear their faith lightly and flexibly as he produced a bottle of vodka and insisted that we toast not only friendship and health, but also Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. He proved delighted to talk, even as he deflected certain specific questions, and was a natural storyteller. In many ways, his tales outlined the very trajectory of the Chechens in recent decades and the ways whereby they became the most feared (and mythologised) players in the Russian underworld, not least the effects of Russian oppression: as he put it, ‘the Russians taught me to want to kill, and then they taught me how to do it well’.1 His stories were also polished from ample retelling and more than faintly hard to believe, so a few days later when I had the opportunity to mention his name and some of his claims to an officer from the Moscow police’s Main Criminal Investigations Division, I was half expecting to be told that he was some Caucasus Walter Mitty canny enough to spin tales to keep a gullible Westerner buying drinks. The officer gave me a grave look. ‘Oh no, that’s all true. If anything, he probably didn’t spill the really big stories. He’s serious, a very serious man.’2
Born of blood
We will not break, we will not weep; we will never forget.
Inscription on a memorial to the victims of deportation, Grozny
The Chechens, a people whose national animal is the wolf, take a perverse pride in the hardships they have endured, with some reason, given that they have survived, unbroken and untamed. While the 1990s saw the resumption of their on-and-off struggle for independence, it also saw the extraordinary rise of the Chechen bratva (‘brotherhood’) within the Russian underworld.
Conquered by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, as it spread south into the mountainous Caucasus region, the Chechens have periodically rebelled when they have felt their masters seemed weakened or distracted. The Russians have brutally repressed them each time, crushing the forms of resistance but never managing to extinguish the desire. Stalin, true to form, adopted the most murderously comprehensive response in 1944 when the Chechens took advantage of the Nazi invasion of the USSR to launch another series of risings. On 23 February – coincidentally Red Army Day in the Soviet calendar – the entire Chechen population, along with their ethnic cousins the Ingushetians, were ordered to report to local Party centres. This was the start of ‘Operation Lentil’, the forced deportation of two entire nations – men, women and children – a brutal and violent process in which anything from a quarter to a half of the total population died. Stalin had them scattered across Siberia and Central Asia, and amongst the human flotsam were the newborn Borz and his family. The Chechens would not be allowed to return home until after Stalin’s death.
Borz’s sister died in the crowded but freezing railway carriage on the way. Guards simply hurled her body off the train when they stopped for the day’s count. The rest of the family made it to Bratsk in south-western Siberia, where they were told to stay, on pain of a twenty-five-year stretch in the Gulag. Borz, his older brother and their parents scarcely made it through to the summer – a sticky, sweaty, mosquito-ridden summer – because there was no housing allocated to them, and their ration cards were often not accepted.
But they did survive, whatever it took. They took over a deserted and tumbledown hut, and hunted and foraged outside the city for food. In 1947, Borz’s father managed to find work building the new Angarlag labour camp nearby. Ironically enough, the year his family’s exile was lifted, 1957, Borz volunteered to join the Soviet army, a decision he explained away with a shrug and a reference to it being ‘a man’s job’. If nothing else, I imagine it was more rewarding than a hardscrabble life in Bratsk and less frustrating than the extensive campaign his family had to wage – which started with court cases and petitions to the local Party and ended with threats and a burned-out car – to drive out the Russian family which had taken over their farm back home. Borz became a sniper and scout, and after ten years in the ranks and with a sergeant’s stripes, returned home. He became a wheeler-dealer, an enforcer, graduating up to the local crime syndicate in Shali, Chechnya’s second city. As he put it, ‘once I had found my family again, my brothers, we looked after each other. We fought, lived and rose together.’
And they made the big time, in their own small way. He hand-waved his way over his intervening career, but, by the time I met him, he had moved from the local underworld on the far southern borderland through to becoming one of the most feared hitmen in Moscow. The deaths to his name were not as many as other figures such as Alexander Solonik, profiled in chapter 13, but as he himself stated with quiet pride, he was no torpedo, as a common hitman is called. Instead, he specialised in high-risk, high-value targets: organised-crime figures, and usually senior ones at that. How much did someone have to pay him to have an enemy ‘ordered’, as the jargon has it? Borz wouldn’t say, but by my count he lived well on maybe one or two hits a year. The policeman who expressed such grudging awe of this ‘serious man’ had rattled off a list of hits possibly attributable to Borz. Later rumour, though, suggested that some of them were actually carried out by his younger relatives, up-and-comers working his ‘franchise’. His career thus exemplifies how the Chechens rose, united by the fierce loyalties of a dispossessed and persecuted minority, and characterised by tremendous hardiness and skill in the tradecraft of violence, such that they ended up preying not so much on ordinary Russians as on other gangs. Given how fiercely the Chechens would fight, those gangs would often rather pay them off than resist.
The highlanders
Our real problem is with the [people from the north Caucasus]; our [Russian] criminals are becoming legitimate, but these guys never change.
Russian police officer, 20123
When talking to Russian law enforcers, one of the constants is their determination to discuss Georgians, Chechens and others whose origins are in the Caucasus region: one could almost believe that they are to blame for most organised crime in Russia. Admittedly, as of 2004, ethnic Georgians reportedly comprised 35 per cent of the vory v zakone across the former USSR, and only 2 per cent of the population.4 Dina Siegel notes from a study of known vory v zakone in 2011 that fully half have Georgian names and ‘according to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, over a half or more than 1,200 vory v zakone are immigrants from Georgia’.5 But does this mean much? At a time when the value of the title ‘vor v zakone’ has been markedly debased, Russian criminals are less concerned about it but Georgians – and other criminals from the Caucasus, especially Armenians – eagerly claim or buy it still. The actual number of these so-called apelsiny (‘oranges’), as the faux vory are called, matters relatively little.
That said, considering the relative proportions of such populations as Chechens (fewer than 1.5 million) and Georgians (fewer than 1 million) in a country of 143 million, it is clear that there is something distinctive about the ‘highlander’ or ‘mountaineer’ (gorets) peoples from the Caucasus. The Chechens represent something of a force apart. If nothing else, this is visible in the fact that, whereas the Georgians and others can boast an abundance of vory v zakone, only one Chechen, ‘Sultan Balashikhinsky’, is said to have ever joined their ranks, back when it meant something.6 It is hardly that the Chechens were not criminal enough, tough enough or disciplined enough to merit ‘coronation’. Rather, the vorovskoi mir was never their way.
Beyond them the ‘highlanders’ form a wide range of gangs, with the largest players at the time of writing being two main networks – the (erstwhile) Usoyan and Oniani gruppirovki – and a third, a mixed-ethnicity gang formed by the Azeri gangster Rovshan Dzhaniyev (‘Rovshan Lenkoransky’ or ‘Rovshan from Lenkoran’) that sought to challenge the status quo. To a greater or lesser extent, they all draw on a combination of clannish social organisation, a culture of banditry and vendetta, and a fierce sense of loyalty to kin rather than country. That they came from homelands where the state was often weak, alien or both only helped them emerge and prosper. Much like the Sicilians – a parallel Federico Varese and others have drawn – the ‘highlanders’ have for generations relied on parallel pseudo-state structures for protection and dispute resolution rather than a government they did not trust, and from this has grown a pervasive and pernicious criminal tradition.7 While the next chapter will discuss the other ‘highlanders’, the Chechens need to be considered as a special case.
If the Slavic gangs have predominance in political and probably economic power within the Russian underworld and the Georgians the most vory – though not most members as a whole – then what is the distinctive asset for the ‘highlanders’ of the north Caucasus, and particularly the Chechens? The answer would appear to be cohesion and reputation.8 The Chechen criminals, often described as the Chechenskaya bratva or ‘Chechen brotherhood’ (and occasionally Chechenskaya obshchina, ‘Chechen commune’), have no formal structure in common. They do represent a distinctive criminal subculture, though, holding itself apart from the mainstream Russian underworld. A characteristic mix of modern ‘branding’ and bandit tradition means that they have such a powerful place in the Russian criminal imaginary that now they are even a ‘franchise’. Local gangs not made up of Chechens compete – and pay – to be able to act as their local representatives.
Banditry and resistance are deeply ingrained within the Chechen national identity, not least in the traditional figure of the abreg (also rendered as abrek), the honourable outlaw whose banditry is driven by righteous vendetta or a refusal to knuckle under before the crimes of the powerful.9 The abreg is a self-sufficient and wily figure, a Caucasus Robin Hood, who often gathers a gang of like-minded daredevils around him, raiding the rich, feeding the poor, protecting the weak and dismaying the corrupt. While essentially mythological, the figure of the abreg still provides a degree of legitimacy to the modern gangster.
A tradition of resistance
When shall blood cease to flow in the mountains? When sugar cane grows in the snow.
Caucasus proverb10
Chechens and encroaching Cossack soldier-settlers clashed and raided each other from the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire brought the Caucasus region under its control, by conquest, punitive massacre and deportation, culminating in Stalin’s act of near-genocide. Genuine tragedies make for powerful national folklore, and onto the abreg’s role as bandit was overlaid that of national freedom fighter. His may be an ultimately futile battle, as the state, whether tsarist, Soviet or post-Soviet, has always had overwhelming force on its side, but the abreg way is precisely to fight the good fight regardless. Khasukha Magomadov, the so-called ‘last abreg’, who fought the Soviets during the Second World War, was eventually killed in 1976, at the age of seventy-one, when his hideout was stormed by a combined KGB and police team. He was shot, a TT pistol still in his hand.
This became again relevant with the collapse of the USSR. In local presidential elections in 1991, Chechens overwhelmingly supported Dzhokar Dudayev, an air force officer turned nationalist politician. The Chechens declared independence, but Moscow proved unwilling to accept. Clumsy attempts to pressurise the Chechens back into the Russian Federation only served to rally them behind Dudayev, culminating in two wars: the first, 1994–6, in which the Chechens in effect fought Moscow into accepting partial autonomy, and then the second, from 1999, which saw them forced back into the fold. While Rebecca Gould quite rightly notes that none of the leaders of the anti-Russian resistance, whether nationalists or Islamists, explicitly described themselves as abregs,11 nonetheless even just from personal experience I can say that Chechens – notably in Moscow, perhaps seeking to reconnect with cultural traditions or demonstrate that they have not lost that Chechen identity – sometimes used the term for maverick rebel leaders such as Shamil Basayev and Salman Raduyev.
Back in tsarist times, the Chechens’ skill and ferocity had been proverbial in Russian circles. General Alexei Yermolov, imperial viceroy of the Caucasus, was especially exercised by this ‘bold and dangerous people’ and one of his staff officers admitted that ‘amidst their forests and mountains, no troops in the world could afford to despise them’ for they were ‘good shots, fiercely brave [and] intelligent in military affairs’.12 Their ability to hold their own against modern Russian firepower and numbers only burnished their image.
Meanwhile, the ‘bandits’ were also becoming a powerful force within the wider Russian underworld, albeit neither as omnipotent nor as omnipresent as their myth suggested. Under Dudayev, Chechnya became a virtual criminal fiefdom. Favouritism, corruption, nepotism, clientelism and localism all flourished. The Chechen police force suddenly grew from the 3,000 officers it inherited from the Soviet period to fourteen separate forces, accounting for some 17,000 armed officers, as hitmen and clan gunmen were sworn in as ‘police’.13 Likewise, the Chechen State Bank became a counterfeiter’s, fraudster’s and money launderer’s dream. In 1992 alone, at least 60 billion rubles (then $700 million) were siphoned from the Russian Central Bank through the use of the avizo. This was a proof-of-funds document used to manage transactions between branches of the Russian banking system. Corrupt managers at the Chechen bank would issue some of these documents, which an accomplice would then take to Moscow and on that basis withdraw money there. When Moscow then sought to redeem the avizo from their Chechen counterparts, there would mysteriously turn out to be no record of them or, indeed, the customer.14 The continued pretence that Chechnya was part of the Russian Federation was costing Moscow dear.
After Dudayev’s death in 1996, his successor, Aslan Maskhadov, made some efforts to combat the more overt forms of banditry. However, these attempts were hamstrung by a lack of resources and authority and made irrelevant by the 1999 invasion. Today’s pro-Russian regime under Ramzan Kadyrov, even though it claims to have the lowest crime rate of any Russian region,15 is likewise bedevilled by credible accounts of lawlessness, banditry and corruption, and, as is discussed below, can in many ways be seen to have simply taken over the rackets of Chechnya to form a single criminal–state syndicate.
The two Chechnyas
Criminals were coming to Chechnya from all over the world – they did not have a place in their own countries. But they could live perfectly well in Chechnya.
Akhmad Kadyrov, former Kremlin-backed
Chechen president, 200416
Especially during the First Chechen War, Moscow claimed that it was fighting a gangster regime in Grozny that was connected to a wider Chechen criminal diaspora throughout Russia. In 1996, for example, Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov asserted that rebel leaders planned to send fighters to Moscow to take over banks and businesses and thus precipitate a new round of turf wars: ‘The goal of the looming gangster wars is the complete destabilisation of Russia.’17 Although the Dudayev regime was undoubtedly criminalised, in fact there emerged a striking division between the networks operating in Chechnya and those outside the republic. Nikolai Suleimanov, the powerful Chechen gangster known as ‘Khoza’, described this as the ‘two Chechnyas’.18 There were connections between the two, largely through kinship, with deals being struck and personnel moving from one world to the other. However, these relations were essentially pragmatic; Russian-based Chechen gangs were very keen to downplay their connections with the homeland. In part this was out of fear of being targeted by the authorities as potential fifth columnists, and in part it reflected a genuine and widening cultural divide between those Chechens who were wheeling and dealing in a larger, predominantly Russian context and those who stayed locked within the tighter and smaller world of tradition and kin back home. In 1995, Dudayev requested that bratva godfathers help bankroll his regime; not only did they refuse, but at a subsequent gathering in Moscow they banned direct transfers of money, men or weapons to the rebels.19 The former head of Dudayev’s Presidential Guard, Ruslan Labazanov, had a fierce falling out with the Chechen leader in 1993 and became for a while a godfather of Chechen gangs in Moscow with the Russian government’s quiet connivance, precisely because he stood in the way of any support for Dudayev.20
This division only grew under Putin and during the Second Chechen War, when it was made very clear to the Chechen bratva that any hint of support for the rebels in Chechnya would bring savage reprisal. Furthermore, the rise of Islamist radicalism within Chechnya and the rebel movement left the bratva unimpressed. Although Chechens are a Muslim people, theirs has tended to be a relatively moderate form of Islam, as Borz demonstrated. The gangsters’ pursuit of money, power and a high-rolling lifestyle did not fit with the jihadists’ puritan ideals – and, more to the point, with an open challenge to the Russian state and the repressions that would trigger. As a result, for example, when Al-Qaeda sought to procure weapons for its allies in 2000, Chechen gangs again refused to cooperate, and the jihadists ended up paying ethnic Russian criminal gangs, who smuggled the weapons into Chechnya using military supply convoys.21
Within Chechnya, many rebel warlords also maintained profitable side-lines in kidnap, banditry and drug smuggling. Arbi Barayev, for example, was a wilful combination of rebel warlord and bandit chieftain, who claimed allegiance to Dudayev but largely used his private army to make millions through oil smuggling, kidnapping and contract killing. Maskhadov later tried to have him arrested, earning Barayev the distinction of being wanted by both sides. As a result, he not only concentrated on his directly criminal activities, but also offered them to Islamists on a mercenary basis. He was reportedly promised, if not paid, $30 million from Al-Qaeda for kidnapping and subsequently beheading three British and one New Zealand telecommunications workers in 1998.22 Barayev was eventually killed by Russian forces in 2001, but in an interesting example of the way that the confluence of war and crime often makes for strange alliances, his killers may have been drawing on local knowledge provided through back channels by Maskhadov’s forces.
The Chechens are the most serious organised crime threat we face. They are motivated by a bitter resentment against Russia, they have a pre-modern sense of common loyalty, and they have the most modern weapons and means of operation.
Report from a senior Russian police officer, 199723
Although Russian police officers love to talk up the ‘Chechen threat’, not only are the Chechens relatively few in number – they represent less than 1 per cent of the total Russian population, and most are in Chechnya – but their bratva remains a network that is culturally more cohesive, but structurally much looser than its Slavic counterparts. It is looser in that constituent gangs guard their autonomy even more fiercely, and any leaders who rise in such a culture tend to be able to command only their own personal gangs – over the rest of the bratva they merely exert the moral authority of a successful abreg. It is more cohesive, on the other hand, thanks to a shared sense of fierce national identity: while capable of very violent internecine conflicts, the sense of being surrounded by enemies, and Russian enemies at that, means that the bratva retains an unusually high degree of solidarity. Disputes are typically resolved through negotiation and the intervention of respected elder figures.
In many ways, Chechen organised crime draws on the patterns of Chechen society. Andrei Konstantinov noted that ‘to survive, the Chechen people were forced to develop their internal organisations to the highest level of all the peoples of the Caucasus’.24 They are typically either small gangs built around one or a few charismatic or effective leaders or else larger collections of such groups. Their characteristic structure is not a hierarchical pyramid so much as a snowflake, semi-independent groups around a coordinating council of elders.25 In many ways, these correspond to the building blocks of Chechen society: the nekye or extended family, and the teip, the clan, made up of multiple families. This parallel also extends to personnel and recruitment. The smaller gangs tend to be based initially around direct kinship or other personal ties. For example, the Moscow-based group run by the gangster known as ‘Malik’ comprised twenty-two core members, of whom seven were his direct kin and nine more came from his teip, the Yalkhoi.26 Larger groupings tend in turn to bring together a variety of these smaller gangs, united either by the area in which they operate or else the teips from which their leaders trace back their origins. ‘Malik’ and his gang were within the larger Ostankinskaya network, a gang which in the 1990s and early 2000s dominated the north-eastern Moscow neighbourhood of the same name, and which was run by members of the Yalkhoi clan. This concentration on both kinship and personal loyalties also helps explain the fierce loyalties within Chechen crime groups and the difficulties the authorities have in penetrating them and recruiting informants.
Although long known in the cities of southern Russia, the Chechens really began to become players in Moscow’s underworld in the late 1980s. The Ostankino Hotel became the headquarters of a gang run by one ‘Magomet the Big’. The rather larger Lazanskaya gang under Movladi Altangeriyev (‘Ruslan’) and Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, later simply known as Tsentralnaya (‘Central’), ran protection and vice rackets in a collection of hotels and restaurants and the Rizhsky market. The smaller but more aggressive Yuzhnoportovaya (‘South Port’) gang under Nikolai Suleimanov (‘Khoza’) and Lechi Altimirov (variously known as ‘Lecho the Bald’ and ‘Lecho the Beard’) operated along the banks of the Moskva in the southern Pechatniki district.27
Generally, the Chechens were involved largely in protection racketeering and some prostitution, but several, including Altangeriyev and Nukhayev, were rumoured to maintain good links with the KGB. In particular, the security agencies would turn a blind eye to their foreign currency dealing, in return for useful information about the tourists and travellers they encountered. By the beginning of the 1990s, a fourth gang, Avtomobilnaya, emerged, but in 1991 Suleimanov, Altangeriyev and Altimirov were all arrested, fragmenting the Chechen bratva just at the time when the turf wars were truly hotting up. Over time, they would largely be eclipsed by Slavic gangs (most notably the Solntsevo, Orekhovo, Lyubertsy and Balashikha groupings) and also the wider ‘highlander’ networks of Tariel Oniani and Aslan Usoyan, discussed in the next chapter. The Chechens were simply too few, and taking them on even became a mark of machismo for Slav gangsters.
In November 1993, for example, ‘Roma the Claw’, a leader of the Orekhovo group, clashed with Chechen gangsters in Tsaritsyno Park in southern Moscow, as part of an escalating conflict dating back to 1991.28 When a sit-down went bad, the ensuing shoot-out left five Chechens dead. This bad blood led to months of skirmishes which actually made the Chechens disengage from south-western Moscow, and ‘Silvestr’, head of Orekhovo, gained considerable authority amongst the Slav gangs as willing to go nose to nose with the Chechens at a time when Solntsevo was still honouring a non-aggression pact with them.29
In part, the erosion of the Chechens’ position in Moscow came about also because of pressure from the police; as noted above, especially after the outbreak of hostilities in Chechnya, these gangs were considered a particular threat. Apparently, a 1993 MVD report predicted: ‘Despite the current disunity of the Chechen groups, one should not underestimate the force of Chechen tradition to unite and act together under emergency conditions, that is, we have to conclude that the Chechen groups will act as an integral whole in the largest operations and conflicts.’30
In hindsight, this was an alarmist assessment, but an understandable one. Concerned lest it trigger precisely the kind of ‘rally round the flag’ response that could turn gangsters into insurgents, Moscow held off until 1995. Then, following the mass hostage-taking in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, a combined police and Federal Security Service task force launched Operation Vikhr (Whirlwind). The aim was to eliminate or expel any gangs in the capital suspected of ties to the Chechen regime. While most groups survived, the operation played a crucial role in weakening the Chechens in Moscow.31 In many ways, St Petersburg became their new Russian capital, and perhaps as a response, there they became especially pricklish with respect to their independence and quick to violence; in Konstantinov’s words, ‘for cruelty, daring, efficiency and decisiveness, the “Chechens” of Petersburg can be compared only with the “Tambov” association’.32
The protection racketeers’ protection racketeer
We Chechens have our ways, and everyone understands that. We are honourable: what we say we will do, we will do. And that also means we will avenge ourselves on any who wrong us. People understand that, and it helps them do business with us, and with those we work with.
‘Borz’, 200933
However, the Chechens’ failure to prosper in the same way as the other major networks also reflects their clear and conscious determination to buck the trend of diversification into business and politics. Some Chechens have certainly accumulated businesses and property and followed the avtoritet route. The aforementioned Nikolai Suleimanov made most of his money through fraud and was looking to shift into privatised businesses until his murder in 1994. However, many other Chechen gangs have tended not to evolve beyond their core speciality: the use and threat of violence. Perhaps remaining true to their bandit roots, they continue to be heavily involved in extortion and protection racketeering. However, in many cases they have become in effect the ‘protection racketeers’ protection racketeer’, acquiring networks of client gangs (from any ethnic background) from whom they simply demand tribute on pain of gang warfare.
This might, actually, also help explain why the Russian police are always eager to talk up the Chechen threat: they represent competition. According to former interior minister Boris Gryzlov, the police’s Main Directorate for Combating Organised Crime (GUBOP) also ended up often being the ‘krysha’s krysha’.34 Indeed, GUBOP was sometimes known in Moscow in gangster style as the ‘Shabolovskaya brigada’ because of its headquarters on Shabolovka Street. GUBOP was formally dissolved in 2001 but essentially lived on in a new Directorate for Fighting Organised Crime and Terrorism (DBOPT). This went the same way in 2008, but its old customs continued in new structures.
The police have guns and badges, but the Chechens have something far more terrifying at their disposal: guns and folklore. Russians are, in a way, victims of their own literature. Nineteenth-century works such as Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Pushkin’s Prisoner of the Caucasus imparted a sometimes admiring, sometimes horrified picture of the Chechen as a fierce primitive who would never shirk from a fight, an impression only solidified by their performance during the Chechen wars. As a result, there is a general assumption that, to quote one gang hanger-on, ‘you don’t mess with the Chechens. If you challenge them, even if they know they will lose, they will fight, and they’ll summon their brothers and their cousins and their uncles and keep fighting. Even if they are going to lose, they’ll fight just to bring you down, too. They are maniacs.’35
There is a perverse bonus for the Chechens in being considered implacable, indomitable maniacs: it makes sense to cut a deal with them, even if the logic of force and connections would seem not to be to their advantage. This actually has made Chechen-related gang violence less common since the mid-1990s, for the very reason that people are disinclined to challenge them. While this has denied them some of the scope for expansion enjoyed by their counterparts, it does mean that the Chechens have managed to dominate their chosen niche. This is evident in the way that the authorities ascribe them such a disproportionately powerful role within the Russian underworld. It would be easy to discount this as a by-product of the way the Chechens have been demonised by state and public alike, and there is some truth in this. Certainly, ethnic Russians seeing criminals of Caucasus appearance will often simply assume they are Chechen when they could just as easily be Ingushetian, Ossetian or from one of the numerous other regional nationalities.
However, there is more to it than that: the efficiency and ruthlessness of the Chechens has given them a powerful ‘brand name’. So too has their perceived honour. As one of their victims put it:
A lot of people are afraid of the Chechens, but they are very good people when you get to know them. They are loyal. They don’t double-cross you, and they are honest people . . . They can do anything. If I needed a driver’s licence, tomorrow they would bring me a new licence. If I needed legal help, or someone to fix a problem with my apartment, they can help out too. They are really serious people.36
Honest, serious, loyal, able to do anything: what’s not to love? Since the late 1990s, this image has increasingly been ‘franchised’ to other gangs, many of which contain no Chechens and may even be entirely made up of Slavs. In conversation with Misha Glenny, I called this a ‘McMafia’.37 By being able to claim that they ‘work with the Chechens’ (this is the usual expression) and thus can, if necessary, call on their support, gangs acquire considerable additional authority. Victims who might otherwise consider resisting their extortion are more likely to pay; rival gangs are less likely to encroach on their turf; and even law enforcers might think twice about taking them on. In return, the gang pays a cut of its proceeds and subordinates itself to the nearest influential Chechen godfather, who may call on it for services in the future. In this respect, the Chechens, for all their traditionalism, have truly embraced the modern market.
A good Muslim would never commit a crime . . . I am an official person. I am not a bandit.
Ramzan Kadyrov, 200638
The Russians won their war in Chechnya with extravagant brutality, overwhelming firepower – and Chechens. The Second Chechen War, which began in 1999 and formally ended in 2009 when Moscow announced the euphemistic end of ‘anti-terrorist operations’, was launched by Russian troops but largely concluded through the use of Chechen militias. Many were former rebels, able to take on the insurgents in the hills and villages on their own terms. Several figures were instrumental to this ‘Chechenisation’, but the most important were Akhmad Kadyrov and his son Ramzan. A former rebel leader, Akhmad Kadyrov had fallen out with Dzhokar Dudayev and threw in his lot with Moscow. His reward was to be appointed interim head of occupied Chechnya in 2000 and then president in 2003. When he was assassinated by a rebel bomb in 2004, his son Ramzan was still too young legally to succeed him, although that was clearly Moscow’s intent. He quickly cycled through the positions of Chechen interior minister, prime minister and then, in 2007, when he was finally thirty and thus eligible under the constitution, president.
Chechnya is relatively peaceful now, but it is a cowed peace. For all that it is technically a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, it is evident that Kadyrov holds it in an iron-mailed fist as if it were his personal fiefdom. The local security forces are known as Kadyrovtsy, ‘Kadyrovites’, for the personal oath they swear to him. Even the usual institutions of central control such as the republican police and Federal Security Service (FSB) have been tamed, placed under men loyal to Kadyrov. When, back in 2007, the local FSB blocked a group of armed Kadyrovtsy from marching into their headquarters in Grozny, Kadyrov’s forces essentially besieged the building, and had all its entrances and exits welded shut. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev had personally to intervene to end the standoff, but from then on it was clear: in Chechnya, even the FSB answered to Kadyrov.39
The irony is that Chechnya is arguably now more independent in practice than at any time since it was conquered under the tsars – and what is more, it gets the Russians to pay for it. More than 80 per cent of the Chechen republican budget is made up of subsidies from Moscow, as the Kremlin is desperate to avoid another bloody and unpopular war in the south. Not that ordinary Chechens get to benefit from much of this. Even back in 2006, a US diplomatic cable spoke of ‘massive corruption and state-sponsored banditry in Chechnya . . . Presidential Advisor Aslakhanov told us last December that Kadyrov expropriates for himself one-third off the top of all [federal] assistance.’40 Money has gone on extravagant vanity projects, such as the construction of a shiny commercial centre to which nobody goes, and a huge mosque dedicated to Akhmad Kadyrov.
Somehow, a luxurious lifestyle is achieved for Ramzan Kadyrov.41 While his official income is around 5 million rubles ($78,000),42 he has a personal zoo, and a stable of luxury cars including a Lamborghini Reventón, one of only twenty ever made and costing $1.25 million. It seems money also goes to keeping his family and subordinates – the two are often one and the same, such as cousin and parliamentarian Adam Delimkhanov – happy and loyal.43 Meanwhile, Kadyrov has been accused by the US Treasury of overseeing ‘an administration involved in disappearances and extrajudicial killings’; according to a Reuters report quoting a senior US State Department official, ‘one or more of Kadyrov’s political opponents were killed at his direction’ – an allegation that Kadyrov implied was a smear, but did not deny, defiantly stating on social media that ‘I can be proud that I’m out of favor with the special services of the USA . . . the USA cannot forgive me for dedicating my whole life to the fight against foreign terrorists’.44 Ordinary Chechens who display any lack of enthusiasm for his regime also disappear.45
There are thus still ‘two Chechnyas’. One, the mother country itself, features sometimes on trafficking routes, including heroin from Afghanistan and women into the Middle East. However, it is really best considered a single criminal–feudal operation, where the primary business is diverting and embezzling state funds.46 So long as Kadyrov controls the government – and the 20,000 or so Kadyrovtsy – and Moscow feels it cannot afford to move against him, this situation is likely to continue. The other Chechnya, the Chechen criminal diaspora, has developed its own distinctive niche elsewhere in Russia, one largely built on its reputation for timeworn gangster virtues of honour and implacable vendetta. Are these old-style gangsters in a new underworld? Or, given the emergence of the ‘Chechen franchise’ and their capacity to prey on the predators, are they in fact very modern, simply leveraging a traditional (and sometimes mythologised) image to build themselves a formidable brand?