‘Mountain-Dweller To Arab Prince’: The PR Campaign To Sell Russia’s Chechen Strongman Ramzan Kadyrov

MOSCOW — Russian actress Liya Akhedzhakova, 77, panicked when she got a telephone call last month from a man offering her $10,000 to record a short video in support of Ramzan Kadyrov, the feared head of Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Chechnya.

“I started to shout and put down the phone,” Akhedzhakova, a star of Soviet-era comedies, said of the incident. The caller — whose number showed him to be from Tolyatti, a car-manufacturing town on the Volga river — rang her back three times before finally giving up.