Later on in his life he significantly softened his tone after a 1979 imprisonment for getting into a fight with a party organizer, controversially signing off an open letter critical of Ayshe Seitmuratova's activities with Radio Liberty, which was published in Lenin Bayrağı and Pravda Vostoka in February 1981.

The family tried to flee from advancing German troops during the invasion of Crimea, but were enable to evacuate the peninsula in time, forcing them to live quietly and hope to remain unnoticed until the Red Army returned.

Despite their loyalty to the Soviet government, they were still subject to exile, and when he was a young child he was violently awakened early one May morning when a soldier who pointed a bayonet in his face; his family, like other Crimean Tatars, were subsequently given very little time to get dressed and pack a few belongings they could carry before being deported to Central Asia.

[1][2] Despite the hardships he endured growing up, Kadyev excelled academically in secondary school and managed to get accepted into the Physics Faculty of Samarkand State University after some setbacks.

[1] In May 1968 Kadyev joined a group of an estimated 800 Crimean Tatars in an organized delegation to Moscow to hold a rally to mourn the anniversary of the deportation on 18 May and speak with political leaders.

However, word about plans to hold the rally reached authorities before it happened, leading to Moscow authorities violently suppressing the activities of and detaining the Crimean Tatar visitors to Moscow before expelling them from the city on 17 May; Kadyev concluded that the KGB had been wiretapping their phones and recording their conversations because of their advance knowledge of the planned rally; he also visited Bakhchysarai, but was not able to stay for very long.

Later that year at the conference in Tbilisi he gave an honest and bleak assessment of the situation Crimean Tatars faced to a foreign journalist who asked him about it, which the KGB immediately found out about.

Having been on their radar for a while, they prepared to prosecute him for his activism for Crimean Tatar rights, ransacking his residence in Samarkand before eventually arresting him in early October 1968.

On 12 November 1968 he wrote a letter to the prosecutor of the Uzbek SSR tearing apart arguments made by authorities against him and demanding various documents for his defense, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Constitution of the USSR, all volumes of CPSU resolutions and decrees, and the complete works of Lenin followed by threat of hunger strike.

While he never denied having written the content of various leaflets and letters, he asserted that everything he wrote was truthful, countering the prosecutions claims that he was producing and distributing documents containing "deliberately false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system".

The Motherland rejected us today too, having put us in the dock only because we could not come to terms with the situation of our outcastDespite his strong and passionate defense refuting the prosecution's claims, he and all the other defendants were found guilty, and he was sentenced to three years in prison on 5 August 1969.