Imran Dragovich Zakhaev (12 October 1949 - 6 September 2011) was a Russian Chechen nationalist politician, arms dealer, revolutionary leader, and terrorist who was the founding leader of the Russian Ultranationalist Party from 1991 until his death in 2011. Zakhaev was a hardline Marxist-Leninist and ultranationalist who sought to restore Russia and Chechnya to its supposed Soviet-era glory by promoting anti-Western, anti-Kremlin, and pro-Soviet sentiment, culminating in the Second Russian Civil War of 2011-2016. Zakhaev was killed in a joint SAS-US Marine Corps operation in the Altay Mountains in 2011.
Biography[]
Zakhaev in Pripyat, Ukraine, 1996
Early life[]
Imran Dragovich Zakhaev was born in the Chechnya, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union to a Chechen family. He rose in the ranks of the Interior Ministry before becoming a high-ranking official at the height of the Cold War. He sent his son Viktor Zakhaev to an elite boarding school before re-enrolling him in a military academy after he was expelled for his unruly behavior.
KGB[]
Zakhaev was incensed by Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika reforms during the 1980s, though he served directly under him in 1981 in an investigation into a mole in the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka. Colonel Lev Kravchenko assisted Zakhaev with his investigation, in which Zakhaev restricted all keycard access to the bunker beneath the building, save for General Anton Charkov.
Zakhaev later ran into the disguised CIA agents Russell Adler and "Bell" in an elevator as they headed to the bunker level, inquiring into their purpose. Bell answered that they were reported to Commander Anatoly Sobel, Zakhaev letting them off the hook and promising to send their regards to Sobel.
Perseus[]
In 1982, Zakhaev met the legendary spymaster "Perseus," who convinced Zakhaev to join his cause by laying into Zakhaev's distaste with Gorbachev's pursuit of cultural and economic freedoms. However, Zakhaev realized how dangerous Perseus was, preventing him from taking control of a facility in Donetsk which held potent Nova-4 gas.
Collapse of the USSR[]
Following the Dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Zakhaev set about restoring Russia's former glory by founding the Russian Ultranationalist Party.
The RUP was a key participant in the National Salvation Front of Russia, and, following the FNS' breakup in 1994, the RUP attracted most of the FNS remnants as well as dissident nationalists from across the political spectrum (from neo-Stalinists and Marxist-Leninist hardliners to Russian National Unity neo-fascists, National Bolsheviks, and neo-Imperialists).
In 1994, Zakhaev went under an emergency heart bypass surgery; his son, Viktor, perceived this as his heart breaking from the Soviet Union's collapse.
Pripyat[]
Zakhaev engaged in arms dealing in the post-Soviet republics to remain a powerful warlord, and, in 1996, the British SAS was ordered to assassinate Zakhaev after it was revealed that he intended to purchase nuclear materials from local arms dealers in Pripyat, Ukraine. Lieutenant John Price shot Zakhaev with a sniper rifle during a major arms deal, severing his left arm. However, Zakhaev was driven away by his chauffeur Vladimir Makarov, and he went underground while the SAS believed him to be dead.
Second Russian Civil War[]
Zakhaev continued to finance the assemblage of an Ultranationalist army equipped with military hardware, tanks, APCs, helicopters, and other state-of-the-art equipment. He also utilized Vladimir Makarov, now his protégé, in committing several terrorist attacks in the 2000s to both strike fear across Europe and gather additional funding. In 2011, following the suppression of anti-government protests by President Dmitry Medvedev, Zakhaev led his Ultranationalist followers in open rebellion against the government, sparking the Second Russian Civil War. Several Russian Army units defected to the Ultranationalists, and the possibility of the Ultranationalists acquiring control over 15,000 nuclear warheads on their seizure of power led to the United States and the United Kingdom - Zakhaev's ideological enemies - backing the Russian Loyalist movement.
To distract America and Britain from the situation in Russia, Zakhaev fomented a resurgence of the Iraqi insurgency under Khaled al-Asad, and he secretly provided the Iraqi insurgents with a nuclear bomb. Following the insurgents' use of a nuclear bomb to kill over 30,000 US soldiers in Basra, the SAS and US Marine Corps launched a joint operation to track down Imran Zakhaev, first attempting to capture Viktor in Uzlovoy before "Viktor" shot himself.
Nuclear launches and death[]
Believing his son to have been killed by Western forces, Imran Zakhaev sought vengeance, threatening to fire several ICBMs at the US Eastern Seaboard unless all American and British soldiers left Russian soil. The US-British force failed to prevent the missiles from launching, but they succeeded in aborting the strikes, causing the missiles to fall harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean. The team then set out to evacuate the site, but they were caught at a destroyed bridge. There, Zakhaev killed SAS soldier Gary "Gaz" Elliott and US Marine Staff Sergeant Jackson Griggs. Before he could kill John "Soap" MacTavish, Zakhaev was distracted by the crash of a Mi-24 Hind helicopter, allowing for MacTavish to shoot him in the back and gun down his bodyguards.
Legacy[]
Zakhaev's death led to a leadership struggle within the Ultranationalist camp, with Boris Vorshevsky heading the moderate nationalist faction and Zakhaev's protégé Makarov heading the extremist and terrorist faction. Friction between these two factions played a major role in the start of World War III in 2016.