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CONFIDENTIAL CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN SECRET SECRET//NOFORN UNCLASSIFIED UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

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### Viewing cable 06MOSCOW9533, A CAUCASUS WEDDING

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Reference ID | Date | Classification | Origin
--- | --- | --- | ---
06MOSCOW9533 | 2006-08-31 06:06 | CONFIDENTIAL | Embassy Moscow

`

    VZCZCXRO9862
    PP RUEHDBU
    DE RUEHMO #9533/01 2430639
    ZNY CCCCC ZZH
    P 310639Z AUG 06
    FM AMEMBASSY MOSCOW
    TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 1394
    INFO RUCNCIS/CIS COLLECTIVE PRIORITY
    RUEHXD/MOSCOW POLITICAL COLLECTIVE PRIORITY

` `

    C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 05 MOSCOW 009533

    SIPDIS

    SIPDIS

    E.O. 12958: DECL: 08/30/2016
    TAGS: PGOV ECON PINR RS
    SUBJECT: A CAUCASUS WEDDING

    Classified By: Deputy Chief of Mission Daniel A. Russell. Reason 1.4 (
    b, d)

    Summary
    -------

    ¶1. (C) Weddings are elaborate in Dagestan, the largest
    autonomy in the North Caucasus. On August 22 we attended a
    wedding in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital: Duma member and
    Dagestan Oil Company chief Gadzhi Makhachev’s son married a
    classmate. The lavish display and heavy drinking concealed
    the deadly serious North Caucasus politics of land,
    ethnicity, clan, and alliance. The guest list spanned the
    Caucasus power structure -- guest starring Chechen leader
    Ramzan Kadyrov -- and underlined just how personal the
    region’s politics can be. End Summary.

    ¶2. (C) Dagestani weddings are serious business: a forum for
    showing respect, fealty and alliance among families; the
    bride and groom themselves are little more than showpieces.
    Weddings take place in discrete parts over three days. On
    the first day the groom’s family and the bride’s family
    simultaneously hold separate receptions. During the
    receptions the groom leads a delegation to the bride’s
    reception and escorts her back to his own reception, at which
    point she formally becomes a member of the groom’s family,
    forsaking her old family and clan. The next day, the groom’s
    parents hold another reception, this time for the bride’s
    family and friends, who can “inspect” the family they have
    given their daughter to. On the third day, the bride’s
    family holds a reception for the groom’s parents and family.

    Father of the Groom
    -------------------

    ¶3. (C) On August 22, Gadzhi Makhachev married off his 19
    year-old son Dalgat to Aida Sharipova. The wedding in
    Makhachkala, which we attended, was a microcosm of the social
    and political relations of the North Caucasus, beginning with
    Gadzhi’s own biography. Gadzhi started off as an Avar clan
    leader. Enver Kisriyev, the leading scholar of Dagestani
    society, told us that as Soviet power receded from Dagestan
    in the late 1980s, the complex society fell back to its
    pre-Russian structure. The basic structural unit is the
    monoethnic “jamaat,” in this usage best translated as
    ”canton” or “commune.” The ethnic groups themselves are a
    Russian construct: faced with hundreds of jamaats, the 19th
    century Russian conquerors lumped cantons speaking related
    dialects together and called them “Avar,” “Dargin,” etc. to
    reduce the number of “nationalities” in Dagestan to 38. Ever
    since then, jamaats within each ethnic group have been
    competing with one another to lead the ethnic group. This
    competition is especially marked among the Avars, the largest
    nationality in Dagestan.

    ¶4. (C) As Russian power faded, each canton fielded a militia
    to defend its people both in the mountains and the capital
    Makhachkala. Gadzhi became the leader from his home canton
    of Burtunay, in Kazbek Rayon. He later asserted pan-Avar
    ambitions, founding the Imam Shamil Popular Front -- named
    after the great Avar leader of mountaineer resistance to the
    Russians -- to promote the interests of the Avars and of
    Burtunay’s role within the ethnic group. Among his exploits
    was a role in the military defense of Dagestan against the
    1999 invasion from Chechnya by Shamil Basayev and al-Khattab,
    and his political defense of Avar villages under pressure in
    Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

    ¶5. (C) Gadzhi has cashed in the social capital he made from
    nationalism, translating it into financial and political
    capital -- as head of Dagestan’s state oil company and as the
    single-mandate representative for Makhachkala in Russia’s
    State Duma. His dealings in the oil business -- including
    close cooperation with U.S. firms -- have left him well off
    enough to afford luxurious houses in Makhachkala, Kaspiysk,
    Moscow, Paris and San Diego; and a large collection of luxury
    automobiles, including the Rolls Royce Silver Phantom in
    which Dalgat fetched Aida from her parents’ reception.
    (Gadzhi gave us a lift in the Rolls once in Moscow, but the
    legroom was somewhat constricted by the presence of a
    Kalashnikov carbine at our feet. Gadzhi has survived
    numerous assassination attempts, as have most of the
    still-living leaders of Dagestan. In Dagestan he always
    travels in an armored BMW with one, sometimes two follow cars
    full of uniformed armed guards.)

    ¶6. (C) Gadzhi has gone beyond his Avar base, pursuing a
    multi-ethnic cadre policy to develop a network of loyalists.
    He has sent Dagestani youths, including his sons, to a
    military type high school near San Diego (we met one
    graduate, a Jewish boy from Derbent now studying at San Diego
    state. He has no plans to enter the Russian military).

    MOSCOW 00009533 002 OF 005

    Gadzhi’s multi-ethnic reach illustrates what the editor of
    the Dagestani paper “Chernovik” told us: that in the last
    few years the development of inter-ethnic business clans has
    eroded traditional jamaat loyalties.

    ¶7. (C) But the Avar symbolism is still strong. Gadzhi’s
    brother, an artist from St. Petersburg, ordered as a wedding
    gift a life-sized statue of Imam Shamil. Shamil is the
    iconic national symbol, despite his stern and inflexible
    character (portrayed in Tolstoy’s “Hadji-Murat” as the
    mountaineers’ tyrannical counterpart to the absolutist Tsar).
    Connection with Shamil makes for nobility among Avars today.
    Gadzhi often mentions that he is a descendant on his
    mother’s side of Gair-Bek, one of Shamil’s deputies.

    The Day Before
    --------------

    ¶8. (C) Gadzhi’s Kaspiysk summer house is an enormous
    structure on the shore of the Caspian, essentially a huge
    circular reception room -- much like a large restaurant --
    attached to a 40-meter high green airport tower on columns,
    accessible only by elevator, with a couple of bedrooms, a
    reception room, and a grotto whose glass floor was the roof
    of a huge fish tank. The heavily guarded compound also
    boasts a second house, outbuildings, a tennis court, and two
    piers out into the Caspian, one rigged with block and tackle
    for launching jet skis. The house filled up with visitors
    from all over the Caucasus during the afternoon of August 21.
    The Chair of Ingushetia’s parliament drove in with two
    colleagues; visitors from Moscow included politicians,
    businessmen and an Avar football coach. Many of the visitors
    grew up with Gadzhi in Khasavyurt, including an Ingush
    Olympic wrestler named Vakha who seemed to be perpetually
    tipsy. Another group of Gadzhi’s boyhood friends from
    Khasavyurt was led by a man who looked like Shamil Basayev on
    his day off -- flip-flops, t-shirt, baseball cap, beard --
    but turned out to be the chief rabbi of Stavropol Kray. He
    told us he has 12,000 co-religionists in the province, 8,000
    of them in its capital, Pyatigorsk. 70 percent are, like
    him, Persian-speaking Mountain Jews; the rest are a mixture
    of Europeans, Georgians and Bukharans.

    ¶9. (C) Also present was XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. He was reserved at the time, but in a
    follow-up conversation in Moscow on August 29 (please
    protect) he complained that Chechnya, lacking experts to
    develop programs for economic recovery, is simply demanding
    and disposing of cash from the central government. When we
    pressed him on disappearances, he admitted some took place,
    but claimed that often parents alleged their children had
    been abducted when in fact their sons had run off to join the
    fighters or -- in a case the week before -- they had murdered
    their daughter in an honor killing. We mentioned the
    abduction of a widow of Basayev, allegedly to gain access to
    his money. XXXXXX said he had not heard of the case, but
    knew that Basayev had had no interest in wealth; he may have
    been a religious fanatic, but he was a “normal” person. The
    fighters who remain are not a serious military force, in XXXXX view, and many would surrender under the proper
    terms and immunities. He himself is arranging the immunity
    of a senior official of the Maskhadov era, whose name he
    would not reveal.

    ¶10. (C) During lunch, Gadzhi took a congratulatory call from
    Dagestan’s president, Mukhu Aliyev. Gadzhi told Aliyev how
    honored he would be if Aliyev could drop in at the wedding
    reception. There was a degree of tension in the
    conversation, which was between two figures each implicitly
    claiming the mantle of leadership of the Avars. In the
    event, Aliyev snubbed Gadzhi and did not show up for the
    wedding, though the rest of Dagestan’s political leadership
    did.

    ¶11. (C) Though Gadzhi’s house was not the venue for the main
    wedding reception, he ensured that all his guests were
    constantly plied with food and drink. The cooks seemed to
    keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron
    somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the
    carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room.
    Gadzhi’s two chefs kept a wide variety of unusual dishes in
    circulation (in addition to the omnipresent boiled meat and
    fatty bouillon). The alcohol consumption before, during and
    after this Muslim wedding was stupendous. Amidst an alcohol
    shortage, Gadzhi had flown in from the Urals thousands of
    bottles of Beluga Export vodka (“Best consumed with caviar”).
    There was also entertainment, beginning even that day, with
    the big-name performers appearing both at the wedding hall
    and at Gadzhi’s summer house. Gadzhi’s main act, a
    Syrian-born singer named Avraam Russo, could not make it
    because he was shot a few days before the wedding, but there

    MOSCOW 00009533 003 OF 005

    was a “gypsy” troupe from St. Petersburg, a couple of Azeri
    pop stars, and from Moscow, Benya the Accordion King with his
    family of singers. A host of local bands, singing in Avar
    and Dargin, rounded out the entertainment, which was constant
    and extremely amplified.

    ¶10. (C) The main activity of the day was eating and drinking
    -- starting from 4 p.m., about eight hours worth, all told --
    punctuated, when all were laden with food and sodden with
    drink, with a bout of jet skiing in the Caspian. After
    dinner, though, the first band started an informal
    performance -- drums, accordion and clarinet playing the
    lezginka, the universal dance of the Caucasus. To the
    uninitiated Westerner, the music sounds like an
    undifferentiated wall of sound. This was a signal for
    dancing: one by one, each of the dramatically paunchy men
    (there were no women present) would enter the arena and
    exhibit his personal lezginka for the limit of his duration,
    usually 30 seconds to a minute. Each ethnic group’s lezginka
    was different -- the Dagestani lezginka the most energetic,
    the Chechen the most aggressive and belligerent, and the
    Ingush smoother.

    Wedding Day 1
    -------------

    ¶11. (C) An hour before the wedding reception was set to begin
    the “Marrakech” reception hall was full of guests -- men
    taking the air outside and women already filling a number of
    the tables inside, older ones with headscarves chaperoning
    dozens of teenaged girls. A Dagestani parliamentarian
    explained that weddings are a principal venue for teenagers
    -- and more importantly their parents -- to get a look at one
    another with a view to future matches. Security was tight --
    police presence on the ground plus police snipers positioned
    on the roof of an overlooking apartment block. Gadzhi even
    assigned one of his guards as our personal bodyguard inside
    the reception. The manager told Gadzhi there were seats for
    over a thousand guests at a time. At the height of the
    reception, it was standing room only.

    ¶12. (C) At precisely two p.m. the male guests started filing
    in. They varied from pols and oligarchs of all sorts -- the
    slick to the Jurassic; wizened brown peasants from Burtunay;
    and Dagestan’s sports and cultural celebrities XXXXXXX presided over a political table in the smaller of
    the two halls (the music was in the other) along with Vakha
    the drunken wrestler, the Ingush parliamentarians, a member
    of the Federation Council who is also a nanophysicist and has
    lectured in Silicon Valley, and Gadzhi’s cousin Ismail
    Alibekov, a submariner first rank naval captain now serving
    at the General Staff in Moscow. The Dagestani milieu appears
    to be one in which the highly educated and the gun-toting can
    mix easily -- often in the same person.

    ¶13. (C) After a couple of hours Dalgat’s convoy returned with
    Aida, horns honking. Dalgat and Aida got out of the Rolls
    and were serenaded into the hall, and into the Makhachev
    family, by a boys’ chorus lining both sides of the red
    carpet, dressed in costumes aping medieval Dagestani armor
    with little shields and swords. The couple’s entry was the
    signal for the emcee to roll into high gear, and after a few
    toasts the Piter “gypsies” began their performance. (The
    next day one of Gadzhi’s houseguests sneered, “Some gypsies!
    The bandleader was certainly Jewish, and the rest of them
    were blonde.” There was some truth to this, but at least the
    two dancing girls appeared to be Roma.)

    ¶14. (C) As the bands played, the marriageable girls came out
    to dance the lezginka in what looked like a slowly revolving
    conga line while the boys sat together at tables staring
    intently. The boys were all in white shirts and black
    slacks, while the girls wore a wide variety of multicolored
    but fashionable cocktail dresses. Every so often someone
    would shower the dancers with money -- there were some
    thousand ruble notes but the currency of choice was the U.S.
    hundred dollar bill. The floor was covered with them; young
    children would scoop the money up to distribute among the
    dancers.

    ¶15. (C) Gadzhi was locked into his role as host. He greeted
    every guest personally as they entered the hall -- failure to
    do so would cause great insult -- and later moved constantly
    from table to table drinking toasts with everyone. The 120
    toasts he estimated he drank would have killed anyone,
    hardened drinker or not, but Gadzhi had his Afghan waiter
    Khan following him around to pour his drinks from a special
    vodka bottle containing water. Still, he was much the worse
    for wear by evening’s end. At one point we caught up with
    him dancing with two scantily clad Russian women who looked
    far from home. One, it turned out was a Moscow poet (later
    she recited an incomprehensible poem in Gadzhi’s honor) who

    MOSCOW 00009533 004 OF 005

    was in town with a film director to write the screenplay for
    a film immortalizing Gadzhi’s defense of Dagestan against
    Shamil Basayev. By 6 p.m. most of the houseguests had
    returned to Gadzhi’s seaside home for more swimming and more
    jet-skiing-under-the-influence. But by 8 the summer house’s
    restaurant was full once more, the food and drink were
    flowing, the name performers were giving acoustic renditions
    of the songs they had sung at the reception, and some
    stupendously fat guests were displaying their lezginkas for
    the benefit of the two visiting Russian women, who had
    wandered over from the reception.

    The Wedding -- Day 2: Enter The Man
    ------------------------------------

    ¶16. (C) The next day’s reception at the Marrakech was
    Gadzhi’s tribute to Aida’s family, after which we all
    returned to a dinner at Gadzhi’s summer home. Most of the
    tables were set with the usual dishes plus whole roast
    sturgeons and sheep. But at 8:00 p.m. the compound was
    invaded by dozens of heavily armed mujahedin for the grand
    entrance of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, dressed in jeans
    and a t-shirt, looking shorter and less muscular than in his
    photos, and with a somewhat cock-eyed expression on his face.
    After greetings from Gadzhi, Ramzan and about 20 of his
    retinue sat around the tables eating and listening to Benya
    the Accordion King. Gadzhi then announced a fireworks
    display in honor of the birthday of Ramzan’s late father,
    Ahmat-Hadji Kadyrov. The fireworks started with a bang that
    made both Gadzhi and Ramzan flinch. Gadzhi had from the
    beginning requested that none of his guests, most of whom
    carried sidearms, fire their weapons in celebration.
    Throughout the wedding they complied, not even joining in the
    magnificent fireworks display.

    ¶17. (C) After the fireworks, the musicians struck up the
    lezginka in the courtyard and a group of two girls and three
    boys -- one no more than six years old -- performed gymnastic
    versions of the dance. First Gadzhi joined them and then
    Ramzan, who danced clumsily with his gold-plated automatic
    stuck down in the back of his jeans (a houseguest later
    pointed out that the gold housing eliminated any practical
    use of the gun, but smirked that Ramzan probably couldn’t
    fire it anyway). Both Gadzhi and Ramzan showered the dancing
    children with hundred dollar bills; the dancers probably
    picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones. Gadzhi told
    us later that Ramzan had brought the happy couple “a five
    kilo lump of gold” as his wedding present. After the dancing
    and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove
    off back to Chechnya. We asked why Ramzan did not spend the
    night in Makhachkala, and were told, “Ramzan never spends the
    night anywhere.”

    ¶18. (C) After Ramzan sped off, the dinner and drinking --
    especially the latter -- continued. An Avar FSB colonel
    sitting next to us, dead drunk, was highly insulted that we
    would not allow him to add “cognac” to our wine. “It’s
    practically the same thing,” he insisted, until a Russian FSB
    general sitting opposite told him to drop it. We were
    inclined to cut the Colonel some slack, though: he is head
    of the unit to combat terrorism in Dagestan, and Gadzhi told
    us that extremists have sooner or later assassinated everyone
    who has joined that unit. We were more worried when an
    Afghan war buddy of the Colonel’s, Rector of the Dagestan
    University Law School and too drunk to sit, let alone stand,
    pulled out his automatic and asked if we needed any
    protection. At this point Gadzhi and his people came over,
    propped the rector between their shoulders, and let us get
    out of range.

    Postscript: The Practical Uses of a Caucasus Wedding
    --------------------------------------------- --------

    ¶19. (C) Kadyrov’s attendance was a mark of respect and
    alliance, the result of Gadzhi’s careful cultivation --
    dating back to personal friendship with Ramzan’s father.
    This is a necessary political tool in a region where
    difficulties can only be resolved by using personal
    relationships to reach ad hoc informal agreements. An
    example was readily to hand: on August 22 Chechnya’s
    parliamentary speaker, Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, gave an
    interview in which he made specific territorial claims to the
    Kizlyar, Khasavyurt and Novolak regions of Dagestan. The
    first two have significant Chechen-Akkin populations, and the
    last was part of Chechnya until the 1944 deportation, when
    Stalin forcibly resettled ethnic Laks (a Dagestani
    nationality) there. Gadzhi said he would have to answer
    Abdurakhmanov and work closely with Ramzan to reduce the
    tensions “that fool” had caused. Asked why he took such
    statements seriously, he told us that in the Caucasus all
    disputes revolve around land, and such claims can never be

    MOSCOW 00009533 005 OF 005

    dismissed. Unresolved land claims are the “threads” the
    Russian center always kept in play to pull when needed. We
    asked why these claims are coming out now, and were told it
    was euphoria, pure and simple. After all they had received,
    the Chechen leadership’s feet are miles off the ground. (A
    well-connected Chechen contact later told us he thought that
    raising nationalistic irredentism was part of Abdurakhmanov’s
    effort to gain a political base independent from Kadyrov.)

    ¶20. (C) The “horizontal of power” represented by Gadzhi’s
    relationship with Ramzan is the antithesis of the
    Moscow-imposed “vertical of power.” Gadzhi’s business
    partner Khalik Gindiyev, head of Rosneft-Kaspoil, complained
    that Moscow should let local Caucasians rather than Russians
    -- “Magomadovs and Aliyevs, not Ivanovs and Petrovs” --
    resolve the region’s conflicts. The vertical of power, he
    said, is inapplicable to the Caucasus, a region that Moscow
    bureaucrats such as PolPred Kozak would never understand.
    The Caucasus needs to be given the scope to resolve its own
    problems. But this was not a plug for democracy. Gadzhi
    told us democracy would always fail in the Caucasus, where
    the conception of the state is as an extension of the
    Caucasus family, in which the father’s word is law. “Where
    is the room for democracy in that?” he asked. We paraphrased
    Hayek: if you run a family as you do a state, you destroy
    the family. Running a state as you do a family destroys the
    state: ties of kinship and friendship will always trump the
    rule of law. Gadzhi’s partner agreed, shaking his head
    sadly. “That’s a matter for generations to come,” he said.

    BURNS

`