After Katerina Gordeeva’s interview with Alla Pugacheva, Ramzan Kadyrov’s press service publicly reacted to the singer’s remarks about Dzhokhar Dudaev. Recalling the wars she had lived through in the USSR and Russia, Pugacheva mentioned both Chechen campaigns and described the first president of independent Chechnya as a “decent, honorable, intelligent, handsome man.”
That assessment angered not only Kadyrov but also pro-war commentators, who began speaking of justification of terrorism. Yet the Chechen leader himself had spoken about Dudaev in even warmer terms in the past. In an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta in 2009, he said that in his youth he loved and respected Dudaev, waited for him outside the presidential palace, and saw him as a national hero followed by the people.
“In my soul I still respect Dudaev, because he was a great man,” Kadyrov said in one of his public speeches from that period.
The article links those statements to Kadyrov’s effort to place himself within the Chechen historical pantheon, where Dudaev already held a central place. At first, the Chechen leader aligned himself with the national interpretation of key events and figures, but later began distancing himself from those earlier views. As his power solidified, the text argues, Dudaev became an obstacle to the effort to heroize Akhmat and Ramzan Kadyrov.
Against that backdrop, official Chechen rhetoric shifted: independence supporters came to be portrayed as forces paid by the West, while Akhmat Kadyrov was cast as the man who saved the republic. In that narrative, Ramzan Kadyrov continued the “path of Akhmat,” even though the very idea of a political “path” in Chechen symbolism had previously been associated with Dudaev.
Journalist Andrei Babitsky argued as early as 2008 that Chechnya was developing into a closed system with a high degree of autonomy, and that ideologically Kadyrov’s model largely continued Dudaev’s. In that interpretation, the article says, Kadyrov became the figure who implemented a key part of the earlier project of Chechen separateness, despite formal loyalty to Moscow.