Chechen tiger without a chain

The women lead the way up the concrete staircases, the smell of human waste thickening as they climb. They duck into an apartment and gesture around in despair: Bare, cracked floors have been patched up so hastily that concrete smears the walls and the footprints of workmen are permanently sunk into the rooms. There is no running water, sewage or toilet. No doors. Only a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling.

But when somebody mentions the thousands of missing people to a woman named Zaira Dovletbayava, her eyes widen and fly to the minder sent by Kadyrov's press office.

"No," she says, quietly and quickly, eyes fixed on Kadyrov's man. "There are no missing people."

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It's graduation day at the Kadyrov School, a freshly opened elementary and high school named after Chechnya's most famous clan. All 1,400 students have been invited to the party. Russian rock music booms through the corridors, out to where the senior girls and boys in red sashes pose for photographs. The girls wear patent leather spike heels, generous slabs of makeup and big earrings under their head scarves. Like everything else in Grozny, the school is very clean and very full of Kadyrov. Bright, burst balloons litter a courtyard buckled from bombs. "He alone managed to save us all," read the posters on the wall. "The worthy son of a worthy father."

The principal is sitting in her office, overflowing with cakes and candies and fresh fruit. She adores the president. He isn't afraid to do the "dirty work," she says. "We ordinary people are very, very grateful to him," she says, "because he fulfilled our dreams."

She recently took a handful of her best graduates to meet the president.

"On that day I realized he is really the leader of the youth," she says. "I saw the children's eyes, and they were full of admiration. And I thought, 'They'll do whatever he tells them.' "

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megan.stack@latimes.com

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Kadyrov timeline

October 1976: Ramzan Kadyrov born in the Chechen town of Tsentoroi.

December 1994: Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin sends troops into the breakaway republic of Chechnya to "restore constitutional order." Ramzan Kadyrov and his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, fight as militia leaders in the first Chechen war.

1995: Akhmad Kadyrov named chief mufti of the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. He declares the war against the Russians a "jihad," drawing foreign fighters from across the Islamic world.