3 days ago
Putin terrorised this writer's childhood – her memoir is chilling
If a single set of events stands out as a primer to understand everything happening in Ukraine today, it is Russia's wars against Chechnya. In autumn 1999, even before he succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin decided to retake control of the newly sovereign republic, squeezed into the north Caucasus between the Caspian and Black Seas. He ordered murderous air strikes on civilian targets and a ground offensive to do so. The most infamous attack hit the capital Grozny's bustling market on October 21 that year, killing 118 people.
In her vivid memoir of growing up during the Chechen wars, Please Live, Lana Estemirova recalls her mother's rage at how the attacks were smoothly reported on Russian TV as 'targeted military strikes' to eliminate rebels. The West's depressing readiness to swallow such narratives have ensured the success of Russia's playbook for more than two decades in Chechnya; following years of hostilities, Putin proclaimed the wars over in 2017, and Chechnya has stayed a Russian republic ever since.
Estemirova's story of her childhood deserves to be told, not just because her mother was the prominent human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, who was kidnapped and assassinated on July 15 2009 by men loyal to Chechnya's pro-Putin leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
During the first Chechen war (1994–96), Natalya had documented the torture in Russian filtration camps of Chechens arrested for 'rebel activities'. It was the first time many of us became aware of the Russian military's capacity for sadism. In 2000, she joined the civil rights organisation Memorial, in Grozny, to help investigate the increasing detentions, savage violence and disappearances that accompanied Russia's second invasion of Chechnya. (The echoes of its invasion of Ukraine keep on coming.)
Natalya received frequent death threats; it was probably because of her investigations into brutal murders by police working under Kadyrov's direction that she was dragged into a white Lada in July 2009, driven out of Grozny and executed on a country road. Her killers have never faced justice.
Her daughter's book, with its domestic details – such as living in an apartment with no glass in the windows – conveys the poignant, brooding ambience of a country subject to what must have felt like a forever war. There are snapshots of school and birthdays and soft toys, but Lana's childhood was still heavily disrupted: she and Natalya often had to change flats, and, aged 14, she was moved to live with her aunt in Yekaterinburg for safety. Her mother meanwhile led a double life, devoted to her daughter and risking thuggish violence daily.
Even amid lulls in the violence, Lana's home life was still subject to shocks and was rarely a refuge. At school in Yekaterinburg, she was bullied for being Chechen. 'Escalate, always escalate,' was her mantra for dealing with her bullies (a motto the US would have been well advised to adopt with Putin, instead of its opposite). Back in Grozny, she and her mother were swindled out of their flat. Moving to another, they found Kadyrov's men living next door. The men were using the shared attic as a toilet, and liquid excrement was dripping through the Estemirovas' ceiling.
Visions of those murdered by Russia's extrajudicial repression stalk these pages: the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down on Putin's birthday in 2006, visits the Estemirovas, as do the prominent human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov ('he was incredibly funny') and opposition politician and critic of Putin, Boris Nemtsov, shot dead near the Kremlin in 2015. Natalya was a vital member of their struggle: a Memorial colleague described her as Politkovskaya's 'Virgil [in Chechnya], taking her through all the circles of hell.'
Now living in Lisbon, working with the British-based charity Justice for Journalists, and with a daughter of her own, Lana recognises that her childhood made her a difficult girl. 'My pouting expressions, extreme defensiveness and sarcasm would have driven anyone up the wall.' But she has kept her fierce promise to her mother, who died when she was 15, that 'one day, when I'm ready, I will write a book about us. She will be remembered and her killers will fade like ghosts.'
That promise rings particularly true in the heart-wrenching final quarter of Please Live, which culminates with the story of her mother's assassination and Lana's grief. These passages are painful to read. But if one lesson we have learnt from Russia's barbarism in Ukraine is the importance of empathy, another is that our empathy has limits: far from the front line, we're unlikely to find ourselves feeling the howling anguish, despair and disbelief of someone who has lost loved ones to war. We need accounts like this haunting, compelling book to show us what that feels like, and to understand.
When Putin first set out on his highway of violence in 1999, calls for Western intervention in Chechnya fell on deaf ears. The British reaction was captured, in a weirdly perfect way, by the first Bridget Jones film in 2001. 'So what do you think of the situation in Chechnya?' Bridget asks her boss, Daniel Cleaver. He replies simply: 'I couldn't give a f--k, Jones.' If Britain's response had been more engaged than Cleaver's, not just Chechnya's future but Georgia's after 2008 and Ukraine's after 2014 and 2022 – and even the US's and Europe's – might look considerably different today.
