Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me

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.