Movladi Udugov
Movladi Saidarbievich Udugov (Chechen: 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.
Movladi Udugov | |
|---|---|
Мовлади Саидарбиевич Удугов | |
| First Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria | |
| In office August 1996 – February 2, 1997 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 9 February 1962 Germenchuk, Checheno-Ingush ASSR, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Nationality | Chechen |
| Political party | NCCP, IU, CPID (currently none) |
| Alma mater | Grozny State University |
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.