Chechen president widely seen as Moscow puppet. Kadyrov's seven months presidency of Chechnya, widely known as Moscow's chosen head of the state, ended perilously with his death in a bomb blast in the central stadium of Grozny while attending a Victory Day concert to mark the anniversary of the Red Army's defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Kadyrov, one of the central protagonists in the complex Chechen-Russian politics, lately became one of the key figures by virtue of the tactics of President Vladimir Putin, who badly needed a loyal Chechen to do his bidding for political expediency. Kadyrov was a respected religious leader in Chechnya. Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen chief who led the victorious war against Russia (1994-96) had made Kadyrov the supreme mufti of Chechnya. Kadyrov called for a war against Russia, led a division of guerrilla in the war, and took part in the 1996 negotiations that led to a humiliating Russian retreat. Kadyrov, in 1999, aligned himself against hardliners, and eventually stuck a devil's bargain with Kremlin, and gained power and eventually elected - election rigged to suit the needs of Moscow - as president, in October 2003 - effectively on the order of the Kremlin. He regularly voiced his outrage at Russian atrocities and human rights abuses in Chechnya, protests that were blithely ignored in Moscow but which allowed the Russian leadership to pretend he was not their puppet. Akhmad Abdulkhamidovich Kadyrov was born, in exile, to a family of poor peasants in Karaganda, in Kazakhstan after Stalin's mass deportation, in 1944, of entire Chechen people in cattle wagons from the Caucasus Mountains to the central Asian plains.