Chechnya’s Donald Trump: strongman Ramzan Kadyrov launches reality TV show to find sidekick

Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov is looking for an assistant to help him rule his southern Russian region, and to find the right person for the job, he’s borrowing from Donald Trump’s signature reality TV show, The Apprentice.

Called Kommanda, or The Team in Russian, Kadyrov’s show made its national debut on Russian state-run television Wednesday night. While the setting of the show among the soaring peaks the North Caucasus mountains couldn’t be further from the dark, stuffy boardrooms where Trump put his stamp on the phrase “You’re Fired,” the plot was pretty much a knock-off.

Kadyrov, know for attention-grabbing moves such as barring President Obama from entering Chechnya, as well as the human rights abuses that crushed dissent and tamed the region after two devastating civil wars, used the first episode to introduce 16 contestants to his family’s alpine ancestral village and his opulent headquarters in the provincial capital, Grozny.

The show opens with Kadyrov clad in a military uniform amid the ruins of an ancient Chechen fortress as dramatic music plays, punctuated by the scream of an eagle. Then the contestants, who all speak Russian, are introduced and asked to share their reasons for coming and their vision. “I was tired of the comfort of Europe,” says one, who had been working for a business in Germany.

For his first assignment, Kadyrov gathers 3,000 people in a soccer stadium, splits the contestants into two teams, and challenges them organise the crowd, mainly women wearing headscarves, into depicting the name of their team. When one team fails miserably, Kadyrov admonishes them: “What is 3,000 people? Nothing really! We work with 1,300,000!”

One principle difference between The Apprentice and The Team: Trump would boast to contestants about his business conquests. Kadyrov lectures them on how his father, a former rebel who switched sides, was killed by separatists bombing attack in 2004 to persuade Chechens to support his pro-Russian government.

“To be on our team you have to be on the team of our president, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” Kadyrov says.