Please Live - The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me

''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 safter 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.

Product details

• Authors: Lana Estemirova
• Publisher: John Murray
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 19.06.2025
• EAN: 9781399811620
• ISBN: 978-1-399-81162-0
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 156 mm x 236 mm x 32 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Biographies, autobiographies; Human Rights, Memoirs, Human rights, civil rights, Armed Conflict, Chechen Republic (Chechnya), Chechnya, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Activism & Social Justice, HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / General, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs