Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me

(Hardback)

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'Please live' were the last words fifteen-year-old Lana said to her mother. Shortly afterwards Natalia Estemirova was kidnapped outside their apartment block in Grozny, Chechnya. On 15th July 2009, she was murdered for telling the truth.

A mountainous sliver of land which creates a natural boundary between Europe and Asia, for centuries Chechnya had been a sharp bone in Russia's throat. Three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, frustrated by the continued presence of the independence movement within Chechnya, Russia invaded.

It was a war of extraordinary brutality. It turned Lana's mother, Natalia Estemirova, from a teacher into a human rights investigator. She became a dedicated member of Memorial, intent on exposing the kidnappings, bombings, torture and murders committed by Russian forces and Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed Chechen President. Natalia Estemirova's life, assassination, and the impunity that followed it, tell the story of Putin's Russia.

This is Lana's story of growing up in a war. Of the intense bond between a mother and daughter, desperate to be together even though it was so much safer for Lana to live elsewhere, often for months at a time. It is a book both about being brave and about being ordinary in extraordinary times. It's the fulfilment of a promise Lana made at her mother's grave.

Author Bio

Lana Estemirova is Chechen, 28 years-old and works for the Justice for Journalists Foundation (JFJ), a London-based charity which fights against attacks on the media. Formerly a freelance journalist for the Guardian and the Moscow Times, Lana studied International Relations at the London School of Economics. She currently lives in Lisbon.