Please, Live

«Please, live!» — the last message that fifteen-year-old Lana Estemirova sent to her mother Natalia, a Chechen human rights activist, journalist, and employee of «Memorial». On the same day, Natalia Estemirova was abducted near her home and killed. After many years, Lana was able to write this book, which contains childhood memories of wartime and post-war Chechnya, a family history spanning the entire twentieth century, and a biography of an extraordinarily brave woman who believed in justice and pursued it at all costs — even where it was clearly impossible. But «Please, live» is also a universal and poignant story of maternal love and the long, difficult experience of loss. In 2025, the book was published in English by the British publisher John Murray; we are releasing it in Russian for the first time.