Please Live.” Lana Estemirova’s book about her human rights activist mother and childhood in ...

Forwarded From Meduza — Books

“Please Live.” Lana Estemirova’s book about her human rights activist mother and childhood in wartime and Kadyrov-era Chechnya is coming soon from Meduza Publishing

In 2025, the British publishing house John Murray released “Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me” by Lana Estemirova, the daughter of Natalia Estemirova, the human rights activist, journalist, and Memorial staff member who was murdered in 2009.

Here is how Lana herself spoke about the book after the English-language edition was published:

From the very beginning, it was important to me that this book not be only for experts on Chechnya or Russia, not only for journalists or people who knew my mother. I wanted the center of the story to be not the war, not Kadyrov, not the murder, but the story of a single mother and her daughter. There are many families like that, and the story of a woman who gives herself over to her work while the child raises herself will resonate with a great many people. The people around us had this question: why did she do it, why didn’t she leave for another region of Russia or go abroad, why did she give her whole self to this work, which in the end led to her death. I tried not to look for an answer to that question, but simply to show what our life was like. So that the reader could come to an answer on their own as to whether it was worth it.

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A year later, “Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me” is finally being published in Russian as well, by Meduza Publishing (which makes us tremendously happy!). It is already at the printer, and preorders will open soon. As always, the book will be available in print and as an ebook; follow our updates.