Movladi Udugov

Movladi Saidarbievich Udugov (Мовла́ди Саидарби́евич Уду́гов; born February 9, 1962, in Germenchuk, Shalinsky District, Chechnya into the Shirdi teip) is the former First Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (ChRI). As a Chechen propaganda chief, he was credited for the Chechens' victory on the information front during the First Chechen War. A highly-controversial figure, following a particularly fundamentalist strain of Islam that is not shared by most Chechens, he is currently one of the ideologues and the main propagandist behind the Caucasus Emirate (a Pan-Islamic militant movement that is rejecting the idea of a merely independent Chechen state in favor of an Islamic state encompassing most of the Russia's North Caucasus and based on Islamic Sharia law). Georgi Derluguian has described him as a "wonderfully opportunistic journalist" and an "autodidactic master of Chechen war propaganda" who, outside Islamic sources, also quotes Western authors such as Gramsci and Huntington. Udugov currently lives in exile in Turkey. From 1983 to 1988, Udugov studied in Checheno-Ingushetia State University. Since 1988, was editor in chief of the newspaper Orientir, which was banned by the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1989. Soon, he became a member of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the National Congress of Chechen People (NCCP). In NCCP, Movladi Udugov became the chairman of the Information Committee and simultaneously an employee of the local television station; during the 1991 revolution in Grozny, Udugov used this position to broadcast Dzhokhar Dudayev's address to the people. After the Chechen declaration of independence by Dudayev, Udugov joined the ruling structures of the Chechen separatist government, serving as press secretary. During the 1994-1996 war, the ways in which he distributed information about the conflict, although crude by the Western standards, were still more professional than those of the Kremlin and the Russian federal forces.