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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. “He wants to see that this big crowd of people has gathered for him-all voluntarily, of course,” the Grozny local said. Security guards prevented anyone from leaving until Kadyrov had spoken. The crowd was mostly university students and bused-in state employees. The officials onstage issued wooden pronouncements on Russia’s many achievements. 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. One morning in November, I stood in a large square across from the mosque, waiting for a concert to begin. 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. Known as “the Heart of Chechnya,” it was built by Turkish artisans, and opened in 2008. The skyscrapers loom over the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque, named for Kadyrov’s father and predecessor, who was assassinated in 2004. Asked where the money for the celebration came from, Kadyrov told reporters, “Allah gives it to us.” Hilary Swank and Jean-Claude Van Damme appeared onstage-for unspecified fees-to watch an acrobatics show and a concert. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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.