Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me

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A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

”Powerful . . . a coming-of-age story with a twist” Guardian

”Heart-wrenching . . . We need accounts like this haunting, compelling book” Telegraph

”A profound and moving tribute . . . It is Lana”s inside perspective on what it was like to grow up within this society that makes this such a unique and powerful book” Sunday Times

”Wonderfully brave, beautifully written and utterly authentic” TLS

”Haunting” Radio Times

”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.