GROZNY, Russia — Last year, Libkan Bazaeva decided she wanted to drive.
She wanted to drive wherever she needed to go — to shop, to work, to see a friend. “I was tired of exploiting my husband,” is how the 66-year-old put it.
In most parts of Russia, that would be no big deal. But Bazaeva lives in Chechnya.
“People look at me on the road,” she said. “Sometimes when I drive home, the kids in the street scream, ‘Look! Grandma’s at the wheel!’”
Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechnya has reverted to a deeply traditional culture, reinforced by the flight of ethnic Russians as the southern republic devolved into separatist war in the mid-1990s. Today, the government of Kremlin-backed Ramzan Kadyrov maintains a fragile piece as it fights the remaining Islamic rebels.
Meanwhile, traditional values are becoming more entrenched as Kadyrov seeks to become, as local activists put it, “more Islamic than the Islamists.” The main targets? Women.
Chechnya has not reached the level of restrictions seen in Saudi Arabia, where a Saudi woman has recently launched a movement urging other women to defy the kingdom’s female driving ban. Chechnya does not restrict through legislation.
That standard is set, like everything else in Chechnya, by Kadyrov, who runs the republic as though everyone in it were his loyal subject. One of his first public statements upon … >>>
