Usman Ferzauli was born in Arshti in 1958. He first trained as a construction engineer then studied Law in St Petersburg. During the First Russian-Chechen War, he was Commissioner for Prisoners of War.
Ilyas Akhmadov was born on December 19, 1960 in Kazakhstan, where most of the Chechen nation – including his family – was exiled by Stalin’s government in 1944. The Akhmadovs returned to Shatoy, Chechnya in 1962.
Akhmad Zakayev was born in Urus-Martan in 1959 and belongs to the influential Chinkho taip (clan). He graduated from the College of Acting in Voronezh in 1981 and played many leading roles at the state Theatre in Grozny.
Dokka Umarov was born on April 13, 1964 in the village of Kharsenoy (Shatoy District) and is a member of the Mulkhoy taip. Umarov graduated from the construction facility of the Oil Institute in the Chechen capital of Grozny. He earned a degree in construction engineering.
Abdul Khalim Sadullayev was born into the Biltoy branch of the Ustradoi teip, an influential clan in the town of Argun on the plains of central Chechnya to the east of Grozny. (The Ustradoys are believed to have founded Argun. ) After growing up in Argun, he entered Grozny’s university to study Chechen and Russian philology, but had to break off his studies as the First Chechen War with the Russian Federation broke out in 1994. He joined an Argun militia to fight against the Russians as a volunteer fighter.
On September 21, 1951, Aslan Aliyevich Maskhadov was born in the Karagandy Province of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) of the Soviet Union, in the small village of Shakai. He was born during the mass deportation of the Chechen people which was ordered in 1944 by Joseph Stalin. His family was of the Alleroi teip. In 1957, his family returned to Chechnya where they settled in Zebir-Yurt which is in the Nadterechny District.
Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was born in 1952 in Kazakhstan. In 1956, his family returned to Chechnya to live in Stary Atagi. Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev studied at the Maxim Gorki Institute of Literature in Moscow and was a co-founder of the clandestine Prometheus literature club, which was banned in 1989. He published several volumes of poetry in his lifetime.
Dzhoxar Dudaev was born in February 1944 during the forced deportation of his family along with the entire Chechen, Ingush, Balkar, Kalmyk, Crimean Tatar and other smaller nations, on the orders of Joseph Stalin. Dudaev and his family were deported from their native village of Yalkhoroi in the abolished Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). He spent the first 13 years of his life in exile in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.
