The Moscow apartment bombings of September 1999 are held to be Vladimir Putin’s original sin, the moment when hundreds of Russians died in their beds to boost his flagging poll numbers. The Chechen human rights activist Natalia Estemirova understood that the Russian security services’ black operation had provided the casus belli for a second Chechen war, and got her little girl, Lana, out of Chechnya for the worst of the fighting. Then they returned. This saddening yet wonderfully brave book is Lana’s story of growing up in the not-that-safe space created by her mother, caught between the twin shadows of Putin’s killing machine and the torture engines of his Chechen quisling, Ramzan Kadyrov.
When she was thirteen, Lana noticed that Chechnya’s pro-Putin, pro-Kadyrov propaganda had “a new addition to the usual messaging – a woman in a headscarf. She never looked at the camera but down at the pavement. Modest, pious and quiet, she was everything the authorities thought a woman should be”. The girls at school were told to adopt headscarves, very much against the Chechen tradition of long skirts but open faces. Boys, too, were told to dress so as not to attract unwanted attention. Lana and a dozen or so other reprobates were dragged in front of the whole school and told to apologize. The others did so, until only Lana was left, holding out for four hours before the authorities gave up.
She grew up to be a lion-hearted anti-Kremlin journalist. She attributes her raw courage to her mother, who worked for Memorial, a human rights organization documenting crimes against humanity by the Russian army and the Kadyrov regime, until she was abducted and shot in 2009. The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was another extraordinary woman who moulded Lana’s childhood. Politkovskaya, when not causing trouble, was funny and caring and generous to her friend’s only daughter. Both she and Lana’s mother knew they were playing with fire. Having laid out the evidence for the Kremlin’s or Kadyrov’s hand in yet another hideous murder-kidnapping, they would go to earth in Oxford, Dublin or Moscow for a bit, then return to Chechnya to risk death.
Lana remembers her mother’s face going white the day she learnt of Politkovskaya’s murder. Three years later, her mother asked on the way out of the door: “Lana, where’s my perfume?” It was the last time Lana heard her voice. A colleague from Memorial called her and began to cry down the phone. Lana knew what those cries meant.
Please Live is beautifully written and utterly authentic, told through the eyes of a young girl looking out on a world made mad by bad actors. It is a grim reminder of what dread things can happen to those who put their lives – and all too often that also means their families – on the line for free speech.
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