Already from the plane, I could get an idea of the scale of the reconstruction: all
the apartment buildings along the avenue seemed to be new, the green roofs and the
canary yellow façades . . . . In the centre, everything is brand new, absolutely everything:
not only the beautiful 19th century buildings, completely restored, alongside the
Prospekt, but also the sidewalks, the pavement, the green grass lawns with automatic
sprinklers.”[39]
Littell saw modern restaurants, a pharaonic new mosque, named after Akhmad Kadyrov,
the president’s father, which is an exact copy of the famous blue mosque of Istanbul,
and a reconstructed orthodox cathedral with glittering golden onion-shaped towers.
The main boulevard, the Prospekt Pobedy (Victory Boulevard) had been rebaptized into
Prospekt Putina (Putin Boulevard). “One could almost say, without exaggeration, that
Paris seems to keep more traces of the Second World War,” wrote Littell, “than Grozny
of its two conflicts.”[40] Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose father Akhmad was killed in April 2004,
is Putin’s special protégé. He reigns as a sultanist, oriental despot, and his feared
militia, the kadyrovtsy, maintains a climate of terror.[41] The system holds only because of the “special relationship” between Kadyrov and
Putin. Ramzan’s regime, however, shows the limits of Putin’s Chechenization. As more
and more former separatist fighters side with Ramzan, “there is an aspect of Ramzan’s
policy that is [for the Russian authorities] a subject of great concern: the massive
cooptation of former independentist fighters.”[42] Should Ramzan disappear, this feudal structure based upon the personal loyalty
of the Chechen leader to Vladimir Putin, could break down and Moscow would be confronted
with some twenty thousand heavily armed Chechens. When, on April 16, 2009, Moscow
decreed the official end of the kontrterroristicheskaya operatsiya (KTO) in Chechnya, it was a victory especially for Ramzan Kadyrov, who had acquired
an almost complete autonomy by declarations of loyalty. According to the Russian political
commentator Sergey Markedonov, “beginning in 2003, the Kadyrovs, first father and
then son, in fact had succeeded in pushing out the federal presence from the republic.
Slowly, step by step, but consistently.”[43] And Charles King and Rajan Menon observed: “there are persistent worries in Moscow
that he [Ramzan Kadyrov] has built his own state within a state—offering a model for
how savvier Chechens, Circassians, and others might one day gain the kind of de facto
autonomy, perhaps even independence, that previous generations failed to win.”[44]
