The notion of Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, seeking to remake his image through a Donald Trump-like reality show would be mildly amusing if his rule were not so obscenely brutal and corrupt. “The Team,” in which the losing contestant’s name is scrawled with a gold pen — the equivalent of “You’re fired” — doesn’t even begin to approach reality. Bludgeoning would be more like it.

The North Caucasus republic of Chechnya was wracked by two vicious wars with Russia and factional struggles in the decades after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and on succeeding his assassinated father as the regional leader, Mr. Kadyrov, backed by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, imposed a ruthless one-man rule based on a cult of personality and marked by pervasive corruption and appalling human rights abuses.

Reports of killings, torture, rape and kidnappings by Mr. Kadyrov’s paramilitary forces are numerous, and he has been personally implicated by human rights groups in several of them. Chechens who opposed his rule have been assassinated abroad, and Chechen hit men have been implicated in a number of killings outside Chechnya, including that of the Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov last year. At the same time, Mr. Kadyrov has accumulated enormous wealth, much of it apparently by helping himself to the hefty subsidies paid to Chechnya by Russia.

Mr. Kadyrov is also obsessed with his image, regaling the more than two million people who follow him on Instagram with a torrent of images and posts. These have ranged from rifle cross hairs superimposed on a video of a politician to an appeal for information about his missing cat. That cat proved irresistible to the comedian John Oliver, who suggested that it was not a good idea to leave someone like Mr. Kadyrov feeling anxious.