On August 22, Gadzhi Makhachev married off his 19-year-old son Dalgat to Aida Sharipova. The wedding in Makhachkala, which we attended, was a microcosm of the social and political relations of the North Caucasus, beginning with Gadzhi's own biography. Gadzhi started off as an Avar clan leader. As Soviet power receded from Dagestan in the late 1980s, the complex society fell back to its pre-Russian structure. The basic structural unit is the monoethnic "jamaat," or commune. The jamaats within each ethnic group have been competing with one another to lead the ethnic group. This competition is especially marked among the Avars, the largest nationality in Dagestan.

Gadzhi has cashed in the social capital he made from nationalism, translating it into financial and political capital—as head of Dagestan's state oil company and as the single-mandate representative for Makhachkala in Russia's State Duma. His dealings in the oil business—including close cooperation with US firms—have left him well off enough to afford luxurious houses in Makhachkala, Kaspiysk, Moscow, Paris and San Diego.

Gadzhi's Kaspiysk summer house is an enormous structure on the shore of the Caspian. The house filled up with visitors from all over the Caucasus during the afternoon of August 21. Though Gadzhi's house was not the venue for the main wedding reception, he ensured that all his guests were constantly plied with food and drink. The cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room. The alcohol consumption before, during and after this Muslim wedding was stupendous. Amidst an alcohol shortage, Gadzhi had flown in from the Urals thousands of bottles of Beluga Export vodka.

An hour before the wedding reception was set to begin, the 'Marrakech' reception hall was full of guests. Gadzhi was locked into his role as host. He greeted every guest personally as they entered the hall and later moved constantly from table to table drinking toasts with everyone. The 120 toasts he estimated he drank would have killed anyone, but Gadzhi had his Afghan waiter Khan following him around to pour his drinks from a special vodka bottle containing water. Still, he was much the worse for wear by evening's end. At one point we caught up with him dancing with two scantily clad Russian women who looked far from home.

The next day's reception at the Marrakech was Gadzhi's tribute to Aida's family, after which we all returned to a dinner at Gadzhi's summer home. But at 8 p.m. the compound was invaded by dozens of heavily armed mujahedin for the grand entrance of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. After greetings from Gadzhi, Ramzan and about 20 of his retinue sat around the tables eating. Gadzhi then announced a fireworks display in honour of the birthday of Ramzan's late father, Ahmat-Hadji Kadyrov. The fireworks started with a bang that made both Gadzhi and Ramzan flinch. Gadzhi had from the beginning requested that none of his guests, most of whom carried sidearms, fire their weapons in celebration. Throughout the wedding they complied, not even joining in the magnificent fireworks display.

After the fireworks, the musicians struck up the lezginka in the courtyard and a group of two girls and three boys performed gymnastic versions of the dance. First Gadzhi joined them and then Ramzan, who danced clumsily with his gold-plated automatic stuck down in the back of his jeans (a houseguest later pointed out that the gold housing eliminated any practical use of the gun, but smirked that Ramzan probably couldn't fire it anyway). Both Gadzhi and Ramzan showered the dancing children with hundred dollar bills; the dancers probably picked upwards of $5,000 off the cobblestones. Gadzhi told us later that Ramzan had brought the happy couple "a five kilo lump of gold" as his wedding present. After the dancing and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove off back to Chechnya. We asked why Ramzan did not spend the night in Makhachkala, and were told, "Ramzan never spends the night anywhere."

IndianExpress

http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4641921