Authorities in the Chechen Republic have demanded that owners of beauty salons and women’s clothing shops register for a meeting with regional officials, threatening to shut down businesses that fail to comply.
In a video posted on Sunday, Amir Sugaipov — an aide to the head of Chechnya, deputy head of the secretariat of the republic’s leader, and youth affairs coordinator — said that the meeting had been ordered directly by Chechen Head Ramzan Kadyrov, and would be held without filming to ‘ensure a calm dialogue’.
According to Sugaipov, the aim of the meeting is to bring the beauty and fashion sector in line with ‘the traditional norms and moral values of the Chechen people’. He said registration was being carried out via a specified WhatsApp number and emphasised that salons and shops that failed to ‘register’ would be forcibly closed.
On Tuesday evening, Sugaipov released a new video message, stating that only the owners of shops selling hijabs, abayas, and headscarves had responded to the call. Those whom the message had been specifically addressed to had ignored it, he said.
Sugaipov set a final deadline for registration, Thursday. ‘This is the second warning. There will not be a third’, he said.
He added that the entire Chechen people had witnessed how politely and openly the initiative had been presented — ‘without pressure, without ultimatums, with an offer of dialogue’.
‘But you chose to ignore it. That means you didn’t appreciate the softness of our approach. You have exactly two days — until Thursday — to fix the situation’, he stated.
Both statements were recorded by Sugaipov in the Chechen language, but have been quoted according to a translation provided by the Chechen state news agency Grozny-Inform.
In December 2024, Kadyrov ordered the closure of beauty salons that promoted their services using models ‘violating the norms of Muslim ethics’.
‘Beauty salons are posting photos [on their social media pages] where female models show parts of their bodies that should not be displayed. Salons that corrupt people must be closed without fail’, Kadyrov said in a video published on his personal Telegram channel, as translated by state-run agency RIA Novosti.
In 2015, an interdepartmental commission conducted a large-scale inspection of beauty salons in Chechnya, identifying over 80 establishments ‘violating sanitary norms’ and initiating nearly 100 administrative cases.
Tata Shoshiashvili
