C. J. CHIVERS - ESSAY
Using the tools of a historian to expose unwelcome truths.


NATALYA ESTEMIROVA IS gone now. Her executioners forced her into a car in front of her home in Chechnya and sped away with her on the morning of July 15. She managed to shout that she was being kidnapped, her last known words documenting the beginning of the crimes against her, just as she had documented crimes against uncountable others.

Her killers worked quickly, as if on orders. They drove to a remote place, shot her and left her near the road, killing her in exactly the manner her friends had long feared would be her fate. Her purse was nearby. Her killers did not want it. This crime was about something else.

Ms. Estemirova was an essential member of a tiny circle of the premier human rights investigators in the entire Caucasus - a woman of immeasurable courage, precision and calm. She was a researcher for Memorial, the human rights organization, in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. To the families whose pain she worked to relieve and whose stories she forced the world to see, she was a resolute champion.

To the men whose crimes she exposed, case by case, with a quiet composure, she was a confounding enemy, a feminine nemesis they could neither fathom nor dissuade.

She wandered the ruined republic wearing a skirt, blouse and heels, lipstick on, carrying her purse and presenting a straight face, perhaps warmed by a slight smile, to masked gunmen and victims alike. She could seem as proper as a chief librarian, ready to add to her archive, both on paper and in the mind, which revealed the Chechen wars for what they really were. How did she dare?

This was Chechnya, after all, a world of violence so sinister it can be difficult to describe in a newspaper. Thugs dominate this land. Experience has taught them that fear will bend opponents to heel. Who was she to chase them? Why could she not be persuaded to quit? The answer is now written, though everyone who knew her knew it long ago: only death would stop her. All her friends could do was trust her to dodge it, as she had, somehow, for years.

A question hangs over her execution, the most recent in a series of killings of those still willing to chronicle Chechnya’s horrors. Is the accounting of the human toll now over? Without her, will Chechnya become, like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, a place where no one risks asking hard questions openly?

Chechnya is a tiny spot on Russia’s big map, home to only several hundred thousand souls. But its past two decades offered lenses into factors driving modern war: nationalism, oil, religious intolerance, racism, tribalism, blood codes that demand revenge, irregular fighters and ill-disciplined conventional units, outright banditry, poverty, official corruption and, for good measure, traveling Islamic mercenaries and a government rooted in a personality cult.

Her world could not be much worse. First it matched separatism against crude Russian tactics. Then it hosted insurgency, terrorism and state-directed rights abuses on an extraordinary scale.

Lately it morphed into micro- Stalinism under Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the former rebel turned feared president.

Ms. Estemirova’s office became a kaleidoscope of the macabre.

She was, improbably, a onewoman parallel government, providing services that the real government was unwilling to offer. She found the incarcerated. She hunted for hidden graves. She built cases against perpetrators, even when she found, as she often did, that they wore government uniforms.

Russia fell silent to the wars. State-controlled television did not broadcast her findings. Most Russian journalists avoided her. Her truths were not welcome. In Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, she was a nonperson. She was undeterred. She took her findings directly to prosecutors, having done their jobs for them, and requested investigations.

Facts drove her. She had trained as a historian, and once history erupted around her she wanted both to document the suffering and crimes and give Russia a chance to address them, thereby stepping toward the modern world. The Kremlin was not interested.

Her files were stuffed not with innuendo or judgments. They contained facts, each one carefully checked. They were a damning accumulation. A Chechen friend, a heavily scarred former fighter, offered an explanation of how she managed to carry on. She was a fighter apart. Bezstrashnaya, he said: “without fear.”

Over the years, and again recently, Ms. Estemirova and her co-workers were summoned to official meetings to hear blistering complaints about their work.

The message was crude and clear: Stop.

She was called before President Kadyrov, head of a government that ran torture centers where, as her records showed, detainees were subjected to beatings, shocks, mock executions, sodomy, burnings by gas torch and, for some, execution.

Mr. Kadyrov, survivors said, participated in these crimes with delight.

Many victims have not been seen since. Mutilated remains of others turned up, the human refuse of Chechnya’s governing style. Almost inevitably these cases were documented by Ms. Estemirova.

Almost no one was ever charged. And now Ms. Estemirova, the lead investigator, who refused to quit when told it was time to be silent, is gone, taken from life - and from Russia - the same way.

Natalya Estemirova, a human rights activist, was kidnapped and killed.


Natalya Estemirova, who antagonized the authorities by documenting human rights violations in Chechnya, was remembered July 16 at a memorial rally in Moscow.