18 July 2025
Teresa Cherfas reviews Please Live. The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me by Lana Estemirova, John Murray; June 2025; Hardback; 288 pp; £20; ISBN-13: 9781399811620
Lana Estemirova was fifteen. Her mother, Natalia Estemirova, a human rights activist and board member of the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, was silhouetted against the sun streaming through the window of their flat in Grozny. She woke her sleeping daughter to ask where her perfume was and left for work, “trailing the scent of Nina Ricci’s Premier Jour behind her, and,” writes her daughter, “ I never saw her again.” A day that began with Premier Jour was to be their last day together. It was 15th July 2009.
Three years earlier, on 7th October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian journalist who had reported about Russian war crimes from the ground in Chechnya, was murdered coming out of the lift in her apartment block in Moscow. October 7th was Putin’s birthday. Was Politkovskaya’s murder a brutal birthday gift?
For Lana and her mother, this was much, much more than a news story. Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova were exact contemporaries and very close friends. Politkovskaya stayed with Natalia and her daughter, Lana, when visiting Grozny and Natalia often accompanied her to meetings and interviews. When Natalia insisted on accompanying Anna to her interview with Chechnya’s president, “Putin’s little dragon,” Ramzan Kadyrov, she witnessed at first hand the menacing and threatening behaviour that symbolised the unchecked personal power he enjoyed in Chechnya.
I first remember becoming aware of Lana Estemirova soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the spring of 2022. When the atrocities at Bucha were discovered or the bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol was reported, Lana gave interviews and wrote about Russia’s Chechen wars, demonstrating that it was the same Russian playbook then as now. Lana, fluent in English, had continued her education in the UK after her mother was murdered. Please Live is the culmination of everything she experienced as her mother’s daughter and a soaring testimony to her mother’s bravery and grace.
The very next day after Politkovskaya’s murder, Natalia Estemirova left for Moscow to attend the funeral. She left the twelve-year-old Lana to stay with the downstairs neighbours. This was by no means the first time she’d had to make child care arrangements on the fly. Reading Please Live one can’t help thinking what a field day any number of child therapists would have picking over Lana’s story. The candour and honesty with which she writes about their life together is surprising and unexpected. Lana gives voice to her own emotions and experiences, chronicling the stages of her childhood in a chaotic world, rendered unpredictable war and want, fear and absence. Yet her evocation of her relationship with her mother, its intensity, the bond that they share, is universal and utterly relatable.
Lana Estemirova was born in 1994. Her mother, Natalia, had divorced her Chechen father when still pregnant with Lana. Lana’s maternal grandfather, aged nine, had been deported on 23rd February 1944 under Stalin’s orders, when the entire Chechen nation was evicted from their homes and sent east. It was not until after 1953 that those who survived were allowed back. Raised by her mother to know about her Chechen heritage, Lana’s story is also the story of Chechnya.
Lana was two in 1996 when the first Chechen war ended. She was five at the start of the second Chechen war. As a five-year-old, Lana writes, the war on the surface was the backdrop to everyday life and she seemingly took it in her stride. But the trauma of that lived experience came out in nightmares, of wild bears and ghouls, that stalked her imagination, and inhabited her reality, to the point that she couldn’t always distinguish between them. For her sixth birthday, Natalia gave her a handmade book of fairy tales. Titled Mum’s Fairy Tales, it included a story called How People Conquered Fear – a perfect fable for a six-year-old growing up in Ramzan Kadyrov’s lawless republic.
Lana describes idyllic times spent with her Chechen aunts and cousins in the long school holidays, in three different villages where the pace of life was slow and a Chechen way of life entrenched. Cossetted in uncomplicated familial love and her cousins’ easy companionship is when Lana learned what it is to be a Chechen, about Chechnya’s cultural mores and traditions. She recounts her adventures with such joie de vivre that it’s easy to forget that war is all around them. On an outing to a wedding party in a nearby village, she and her cousins become restless and go exploring. They slip through a gap in the barbed wire fence of a meadow, as a dare to the local children who’ve told them it’s dangerous there:
The three of us scattered, all heading in different directions, until we hard someone shouting, “Stay where you are! Don’t move!”
The field was mined. Lana continues:
My heart was pounding so loudly it seemed as if it had become the whole of me; small and scared, I was the size of my heart. So many times on my walk to school in Grozny, I had been anxious about sappers blowing up a mine; now I was closer to one than I had ever been before.
Frozen in position, Lana goes through all the information she’d accumulated in school, starting in second grade with mine-awareness lessons. This is childhood in a war zone. The echoes of Chechnya in today’s Ukraine are palpable.
Even alone, Lana feels her mother’s protection, her presence, her moral compass.
Natalia Estemirova’s first vocation was as a history teacher at Grozny’s School No. 7. She continued to teach even as a human rights activist. In one unforgettable episode, Natalia and Lana were walking home just before curfew when some young ‘federals’ in Russian army uniform started shooting. Lana describes how her mother marched straight up to them, berated them for their total lack of humanity, firing at a child like that. Sheepishly, they stopped their heedless gun-toting.
In her daughter’s telling, Natalia Estemirova was a stylish and feminine woman. Applying her glossy burgundy lipstick, she would lecture Lana:
“It doesn’t matter how little money you have, as long as you can disguise it.” She sewed outfits for herself and Lana too, using Burda sewing patterns and an old sewing-machine, sometimes taking on orders when money was scarce. As they moved from one apartment to another in Grozny, escaping eviction or war damage, mother and daughter would dream up fabulous interiors, planning to implement them when Natalia’s next paycheck arrived. The only trouble was that as soon as payday arrived, Natalia would give it away to families in greater need. But some things were non-negotiable:
No matter how dire our financial situation was between the wars, Mum always made sure we always looked well put-together. (…) All dressed up, we would head to the remaining patisserie in the city called Stolychnyi for a glass of juice and a slice of cake, our sacred Sunday tradition.”
This was Natalia’s way of giving Lana a “normal childhood”.
Lana’s “normal” childhood also meant the enormous privilege of knowing and being loved by her extended “Memorial” family, Natalia’s colleagues and friends. Memorial’s Grozny office was Lana’s home away from home when Natalia couldn’t fetch her from school or something unforeseen had come up. Please Live is like a roll call of all the biggest names in Russia’s human rights movement seen through the eyes of a child. One made her laugh uproariously, another told her stories, another played her favourite games and another gave the best hugs. Sitting in the Memorial office waiting for her mum, little escaped her. On one occasion, Lana saw a video, of a rape victim:
This was the worst imaginable offence in Chechen society; to this day, it is impossible to tell how many women suffered at the hands of soldiers in this way,because the topic is simply taboo. That video of the dead woman, her neck blackened from bruises, will haunt me forever. I may have grown up ingesting other people’s pain through overheard stories, photographs scattered on desks and printed reports that Mum never bothered to hide but watching footage felt entirely different. It made it more real.
On 19th January 2009, Lana received an unexpected call from her mum. She was ringing to tell her that Stas was murdered, shot coming out of a news conference in Moscow. Stanislav Markelov was a brilliant human rights lawyer:
I sat motionless, phone in hand. I hadn’t seen Stas for a few years but my memories of him still carried a warm glow. He had a serious side, but the Stas I knew made me cry with laughter. He was the funniest person I’d ever met. A chill crept over me, as if someone had left the window open in winter. It was the same feeling I’d had when I heard the news of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder.
Six months later, Natalia Estemirova was shot five times in the chest and left for dead in the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia. To this day, her killers have never been brought to justice.
The impact of Lana Estemirova’s description of the day her mother was murdered is blindsiding; the helter skelter of emotions, the increasingly hopeless texts – Please Live, more a prayer than an injunction, is the last text she sent to her mum’s dead Nokia – the way she tells herself it isn’t true, it hasn’t happened, so long as no-one says it out loud in her earshot, her rage, her disbelief, her despair and final acceptance. I can’t remember the last time I could barely read for tears, barely breathe for the lump in my throat.
In April 2012, Lana returned to Chechnya on a visit. Grozny had been completely rebuilt, a theme park to Ramzan Kadyrov paid for by hugely generous Kremlin handouts. The only places still familiar to Lana were the villages of her childhood. She paid a visit to her mother’s grave:
“Kneeling on the ground, I placed my palms on the dry soil, observing the movements of a small ant colony. It was quiet, but as my senses adjusted I began to hear multiple sounds: trees whispering in the wind; birds making that sweet, joyful music of spring; little insects bustling about … Life found its way even in this solemn place.”
Many years later in Edinburgh, Lana began to grapple with the task of writing this book. Leafing through her own and her mother’s notes and journals, mementos from her childhood, she picked up the book of Mum’s Fairy Tales. Vivid in Lana’s memory, was one about an old cherry tree and a crow. It was called ‘A Story Without an End’ and it was missing. Lana recreates it from memory. The crow mocks and taunts one of the tight buds of the cherry tree in early spring, telling it that it won’t enjoy what life has in store, that it’s cold and there’s no sun. But the bud grows petals and flowers, and at each new stage of life, it finds joy in simply being alive. The old cherry tree casts its flowers into the world, its flowers create cherries and their stones create new trees, each one connected to the old cherry tree, even when separated in a new life. It’s as though Natalia had been preparing Lana since she was six years old for the day that would separate them forever. Moved by what she had experienced at her mother’s graveside, Lana made three promises to her:
First, I would always live in safety and would never needlessly risk my life. My children would have boring stable lives, far away from war.
Second, I would not succumb to bitterness but would fight darkness with light. I would see the beauty in everything, always, and never take my life for granted. And finally…
One day, when I’m ready, I will write a book about us. She will be remembered and her killers will fade like ghosts.
This is that book.
