MOSCOW (RIA Novosti political commentator Yury Filippov). The terrorists who placed a bomb under the stands of a city stadium in Grozny on May 9 last year did not simply intend to kill certain people; they wanted to explode the situation in Chechnya and the entire North Caucasus.
The prime target for assassination was Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, who acted as the guarantor of relative stability in a republic that was balancing on the edge of war and peace. Kadyrov died in that terrorist attack on May 9, 2004.
He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Russia, which was unprecedented. As a field commander and a religious leader (he was Chechnya's most senior mufti for a while), he fought the Russians during the first Chechen campaign but still became an official hero of the country. Theoretically, he could have been targeted in a Russian ambush somewhere along a mountainous pass in his native Chechnya rather than being allowed to walk on a carpet in the Kremlin wearing his traditional fur hat. It was an amazing time in Russia five-six years ago. A gunman-mufti had become the leader of a Russian Federation member, and nobody was surprised. Kadyrov's death marked the end of that era.
Another Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, who had also been a frequent guest at the Kremlin, did not manage to arrange circumstances in his favor. The coordinator of the Chechen resistance who sent numerous letters to the Council of Europe, Maskhadov never became a "Westernized" leader of Chechnya's militants. After Kadyrov's death, which symbolized the end of fantastic possibilities and unimaginable transformations, it was absolutely impossible. Maskhadov was eliminated as a terrorist, and after his death, he did not become either a martyr or a hero, neither for Russia, like Kadyrov, nor for those who fought against Russia by his side.
With Kadyrov's death, the standoff in the Caucasus became more pronounced and personalized, if not more fierce. Russian forces no longer conduct large-scale military operations, but they consistently monitor the movements of armed groups not only in Chechnya, but also in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, and eliminate those groups whenever and wherever they find them. It is not war anymore. It is something else.
Chechnya's incumbent president, Alu Alkhanov is a representative of a new, non-Kadyrov generation with other abilities, although he sometimes calls himself Kadyrov's political successor. Alkhanov recently joined United Russia and will probably become its candidate when the party wins regional parliamentary elections in Chechnya, and a candidacy for the head of the republic has to be coordinated with the Russian leader.
Kadyrov's approach was different. In his time, he was not a Chechen, or even less a party candidate, but mostly "a self-nominated" candidate, although his enemies called him the Kremlin's favorite.
The position taken by Kadyrov's son, Ramzan, points out at the end of the Kadyrov era better than anything else. Immediately after his father's death, he was considered the frontrunner for the Chechen presidency, and then after it became clear he was too young to run under the republic's constitution, there was an opinion that he could at least become the informal leader of the republic. However, even today, when he will soon be able to run for the presidency, he has not indicated any desire to do so. "I am not a politician," he says. But he does have thousands of armed supporters - a well-organized and powerful force in Chechnya.
Nevertheless, Ramzan Kadyrov is a politician. If this were not true, he would not have been able to either maintain influence over thousands of gunmen (members of his personal guard after his father's death) or drop into the president's office in the Kremlin as his father once did. But the times of politicians of his father's caliber are gone, and that is the main conclusion that we can make today, a year after Akhmad Kadyrov's death.
