The center of Grozny, the capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya, is unrecognizable to anyone who saw it during the country’s two most recent wars against Russia. The First Chechen War, which began in 1994, was a war of nationalist resistance—Chechnya had declared independence from Russia when the Soviet Union disintegrated—and ended two years later, after a Russian bombing campaign killed thousands of civilians and left the city in ruins. The Second Chechen War, which the Russians launched in 1999, in an effort to curb not only Chechen separatism but the threat of militant Islam, wound down a decade later, with special operations carried out deep in the craggy, wooded hills of the Caucasus. These days, the rubble is gone. The city’s skyline is punctuated by the glass towers of Grozny-City, a collection of skyscrapers that house offices, luxury apartments, and a five-star hotel. Grozny is quiet and bland, with well-paved boulevards running through its center; there is still a faint air of menace—men in black uniforms stand with automatic rifles on many street corners—but the city’s flashier attractions, like a man-made lake with a light show, seem whimsical and family-friendly.

In 2011, Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who rules the republic as his own private fiefdom but remains unquestionably loyal to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, showed off the Grozny-City complex at his extravagant thirty-fifth-birthday party. Hilary Swank and Jean-Claude Van Damme appeared onstage—for unspecified fees—to watch an acrobatics show and a concert. Asked where the money for the celebration came from, Kadyrov told reporters, “Allah gives it to us.”

The skyscrapers loom over the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque, named for Kadyrov’s father and predecessor, who was assassinated in 2004. Known as “the Heart of Chechnya,” it was built by Turkish artisans, and opened in 2008. A vast hall lit by Swarovski crystal chandeliers holds ten thousand worshippers, and the mosque is ringed by manicured gardens and fountains decorated with colored lights.

One morning in November, I stood in a large square across from the mosque, waiting for a concert to begin. A young Grozny local had given me directions tinged with sarcasm: “Let’s meet in front of the Kadyrov Mosque, on Kadyrov Square, at the intersection of Kadyrov Prospect and Putin Prospect.” The concert had been organized by the Kadyrov administration in honor of National Unity Day, a Russian public holiday that, given the two wars over as many decades, is not without irony for Chechens.

The officials onstage issued wooden pronouncements on Russia’s many achievements. The crowd was mostly university students and bused-in state employees. Security guards prevented anyone from leaving until Kadyrov had spoken. “He wants to see that this big crowd of people has gathered for him—all voluntarily, of course,” the Grozny local said. But Kadyrov didn’t show—“If he doesn’t feel like it, he doesn’t come.” He delegated speechmaking duties to Magomed Daudov, a former rebel fighter who switched to Moscow’s side in 2004 and is still known by his nom de guerre, Lord. Daudov, who is now the speaker of Chechnya’s parliament, said, in a mumbly monotone, that Putin “demonstrates an excellent command of events and has the ability to respond appropriately to the challenges of our time.” Kadyrov, the “national leader” of the Chechen people, “understands well that only unity can provide a basis for the further rebirth and development of the republic.”

Kadyrov is thirty-nine. He has a thicket of reddish-brown hair growing into a pointy beard sculpted in the Chechen manner, and a guttural voice with the bass-amped rumble of a heavy truck. His squat, muscular frame reflects the amount of time that he spends on his physical-training routine. He is a skillful and popular politician, one of the few in modern Russia, where nearly all officials tend to be charmless functionaries. “Kadyrov’s rule rests on propaganda, fear—and real popularity,” Gregory Shvedov, the editor of Caucasian Knot, a news Web site, told me. “He is like the Chechen Putin.” Over the years, Kadyrov has tried out various personalities: the merciless warrior in fatigues who leads special operations to kill anti-government rebels; the jolly Caucasus baron who spars with Mike Tyson and shows off his private zoo; the family man and observant Muslim who has banned alcohol, ordered that women wear head scarves in public buildings, and boasts that his six-year-old son has memorized the Koran.

Kadyrov has more than one and a half million followers on Instagram. This fall, he posted a video of himself in which, kneeling on a sandy beach, he grabs a hissing python, talks quietly to it, and tosses it away. The snake, he wrote in the caption, “symbolizes the forces of evil that have taken over huge territories of the globe where hundreds of millions of people suffer.” The next day, he posted a photograph of himself discussing the preservation of Chechen traditions with a circle of ministers. “A people who have lost their national dances, rhythm, and music cease to be a nation,” he explained. He can be brutal and severe. In 2009, he told captured rebel fighters on local television, “You want to kill people? You kill my comrades, I’ll kill your father, your brother, all your pets.” But he can also appear genuine, even sensitive—another rarity in Putin-era politics. In November of last year, Kadyrov seemed sincerely moved by a meeting with a Chechen teen-ager whose father disappeared during the Second War. “You and I share the same sorrow,” he said, alluding to his own father’s death. He seized the boy by the arm and said, “When you told me how your father had been taken from you, I swear to Allah all I could do was cry.”

Kadyrov has 1.6 million followers on Instagram. Instagram Instagram

In 2011, Terek Grozny, the local soccer team, of which Kadyrov is the honorary president, announced that it had hired the Dutch coach Ruud Gullit. Gullit headed to Grozny with Tom Sauer, a young Dutchman, as his Russian translator. Sauer told me of driving around Grozny with Kadyrov behind the wheel of a luxury sedan as his bodyguard cradled a gold-plated AK-47. Once, after Gullit told Kadyrov during practice that the club hadn’t paid the players the bonuses they were owed, Kadyrov sent some of his men to his car to fetch bags filled with rubles. Sauer had dinner with Kadyrov several times. At one meal, he told Sauer that he had himself participated in the mission to kill the rebels who planned the attack against his father. “It’s not that people are scared of him,” Sauer said. “I would say: respectfully fearful.”

Long before the recent wars, Russians and Chechens harbored a mutual antagonism. In the Russian imagination, Chechnya, a thousand miles south of Moscow on the edge of the Caucasus mountains, is a place of violence, home to a people who are to be feared and ultimately subjugated, yet awarded the respect one gives to a valiant enemy. Throughout the nineteenth century, the tsar’s army waged a prolonged campaign against guerrilla fighters in the mountains. In “The Cossacks,” Tolstoy, who served as a young military officer in the Caucasus, depicts the Chechens as fierce warriors, and has a Chechen fighter tell a Russian adversary, “Your men slaughter ours, ours butcher yours.”

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet power held the promise of modernization, and, with time, many Chechens joined the Communist system as professors, doctors, and state functionaries. Yet just as many remained hostile to the Russian state. During the Second World War, countless Chechens fought on the Soviet side against the Nazi invaders; others seized the moment to try to overthrow Moscow’s rule. In 1944, Stalin, using the pretext of perceived collaboration with the Germans, ordered the deportation of the entire population of Chechnya—half a million people—to the distant steppes of Kazakhstan. They remained there until 1957, when Nikita Khrushchev allowed them to begin to return home. Most Chechens have a grandfather or grandmother brought up in exile; many of the deportees died of cold and hunger. “Chechens remember everything,” Khassan Bayiev, a widely respected Chechen surgeon, who now lives in Boston, told me. “We know who is who—when Stalin died, the whole country was weeping, but we were dancing the lezginka.”