On the morning of July 15, 2009, the prominent activist and investigator for the Memorial human rights group Natalya Estemirova was abducted from her home in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s North Caucasus region of Chechnya. Later the same day, her body was found in a forest in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, bullet wounds in her head and chest. She was 51 years old.
Fifteen years later, the case remains unsolved.
“She bothered people,” said fellow rights activist and friend Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch. “She was an inconvenience. There is no doubt that Natasha’s death was retribution for her rights advocacy. That is obvious.”
'A Person Who Knows How To Talk To People'
Estemirova was born and raised in the Urals region. Her mother was an ethnic Russian, while her ethnic Chechen father had been forcibly removed from Chechnya as a child with his parents during the mass deportation of Chechens under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in early 1944. She graduated from university in Chechnya with a degree in history and became a teacher before beginning her career in journalism and rights activism.
Natalya Estemirova visiting the memorial to victims of the 1944 Chechen deportation in Grozny (undated photo)
Moving to Chechnya and making her life there was “a conscious choice” of identity, said fellow Memorial activist Aleksandr Cherkasov. In 1992, he recalled, she made her first foray into rights activism.
“There was ethnic cleansing going on,” he recalled of fighting between Ingush and Ossetians that broke out in October-November 1992 near Chechnya. “There was fighting, streams of displaced people, people being taken hostage. Natasha saw a bus full of hostages. She walked up to the people who were holding them and began talking to them, saying she was with the Red Cross. She managed to convince them that they were doing a monstrous thing, and they released the hostages.
“It might seem like a miracle,” Cherkasov added. “But a teacher is a person who knows how to talk to people. And Natasha knew how to talk to people.”
After a brief return to the Urals following the birth of her daughter, Lana, in 1994, Estemirova returned to Chechnya and began reporting on the conditions of prisoners being held in the filtration camps that were set up following the first Chechen war.
She survived and witnessed the October 21, 1999, Russian rocket strikes on Grozny in the early days of the Second Chechen War.
Estemirova brought evidence of the strikes, which the Russian government denied carrying out and blamed on an explosion of munitions held by Chechen militants, to Moscow hidden in one of her daughter’s stuffed animals, Cherkasov told RFE/RL’s Caucasus.Realities.
Estemirova began writing for Novaya Gazeta in the mid-1990s and in 2000 began working for Memorial. A few years later, the group opened an office in Grozny. One of her first major reports covered evidence that a rampage by Russian troops had left more than 50 civilians in the Grozny neighborhood of Aldy dead in February 2000.
'Without Going Mad'
In 2002, Estemirova was the first to write about a unit of Russian GRU military-intelligence special forces under Captain Eduard Ulman that executed six Chechen civilians in the Shatoi region. Ulman, who was sentenced in absentia to 14 years in prison over the incident, was killed fighting in Ukraine in May.
In connection with the Ulman investigation, Estemirova made contact with prominent Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya and began years of close collaboration.
A memorial to slain investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya outside the Moscow office of Novaya Gazeta in 2013
“[Estemirova’s] name is not in Politkovskaya’s stories for safety reasons, but a large portion of them was prepared using Natasha’s materials,” Cherkasov said.
Politkovskaya was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006. In 2014, five Chechen men were convicted of carrying out the killing, but it was never established who ordered or paid for it.
Estemirova, together with Politkovskaya and lawyer Stanislav Markelov, were instrumental in the investigation into the abduction and disappearance of a Chechen student named Zelimkhan Murdalov in 2001. Although Murdalov’s body was never found, Estemirova and the others were able to produce enough evidence to force the arrest of police Lieutenant Sergei Lapin, known by the radio call sign Kadet. When a Grozny court convicted Lapin of exceeding his authority and causing bodily harm in 2007, it was the first case in which a Russian law enforcement officer was imprisoned for human rights violations in Chechnya.
Over nearly a decade of work, Estemirova collected thousands of testimonials from victims of extrajudicial abductions and torture and relatives of those who were disappeared.
Human rights specialist Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, author of the two-volume International Tribunal For Chechnya, told RFE/RL that the material Estemirova gathered remains an invaluable resource as researchers and activists continue documenting mass human rights violations in Chechnya.
Estemirova had a unique ability to speak with people and convince them to confide in her, Cherkasov said.
“She knew how to talk to them,” he said. “She spoke with police officers and investigators and was able to reach understandings with them.”
Dmitriyevsky recalled Estemirova as a person of unquenchable drive and energy.
“She was always rushing to do something, to go somewhere, and then on to somewhere else,” he said. “She’d be exhausted and ready to sleep, but a report would come in that someone was missing or a call would come in the middle of the night saying that someone had been arrested. And we’d be off again.
“How did she live this way,” he mused. “Who can work like that for so many years without going mad? I don’t know, but she did.”
'One More Unfinished Case'
One Chechen activist, who asked not to be identified out of safety concerns, marveled at Estemirova’s fearlessness.
“Unfortunately, there was no one who could stop her, influence her, or convince her of the danger,” the activist said. “She strongly resisted any situation in which she was being restrained, any advice to remove her name from some publication or another. She thought that was wrong, even dishonest.”
Activist Lokshina said this character trait may have led to Estemirova’s death.
“Just a couple of days before her death, Natasha gave a lengthy interview and discussed some truly horrific cases, including the public execution of a man in the Kurchaloi district,” she said. “And she discussed all this openly, under her own name. Many of her colleagues believe this interview was sort of the last straw in her case.”
A protester holds a portrait of Estemirova during a 2009 Moscow demonstration against the persecution of activists in Chechnya
Shortly before her death, Estemirova gave a television interview in which she attacked efforts to force Chechen women to wear head scarves in public.
“It is my business whether to wear a scarf or not,” she said. “If I am going to a funeral, of course, I wear one out of respect for the family and their grief. But if I am just out on the street, then no one can force me or any other Chechen woman to wear one.”
That interview attracted the attention of Ramzan Kadyrov, Lokshina said.
“After these words, Kadyrov understood that Natalya was not just some Russian outside, but that these were the words of a Chechen woman,” she said.
Cherkasov said that interview convinced Kadyrov that Estemirova was his problem to deal with.
“Before that, it was possible to view her as a Russian who was doing something there,” he said, “but Russians were beyond Kadyrov’s scope. But if she was a Chechen, then he would be free to control her using the means at his command.”
Estemirova was summoned to meet with Kadyrov personally, Lokshina recalled, and was appalled by his conduct.
“He shouted at her, swore at her, asked pointed questions about her daughter,” Lokshina said. “It was very personal and very frightening. Natasha briefly left Chechnya, but she soon returned, as she always did. There was always more work, people who were counting on her, people who needed help.”
One of the last reports Estemirova filed was about the extrajudicial killing of Rizvan Albekov in the mountain village of Akhkinchu-Borzoi. As a result of that report, officials of Memorial and other human rights groups were summoned before Chechen ombudsman Nurdi Nukhazhiyev and told that Kadyrov was unhappy with Memorial and with Estemirova in particular.
“Natasha’s publication about that execution infuriated Kadyrov,” said rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina in 2018. Memorial co-founder Oleg Orlov -- now in prison on charges of discrediting the Russian military, which he denies -- also said in 2018 that he believes her killing was tied to her investigation of Albekov’s execution.
“As I understand it,” he said, “the report about the execution carried out by Kadyrovtsy had a strong effect among top officials in the republic.”
Gannushkina was with Estemirova the day before she was killed and said that, following Nukhazhiyev’s warning, it was clear that Estemirova should leave Chechnya.
“We really agreed that Natasha had to leave soon,” Gannushkina said in her 2018 interview with RFE/RL. “But not that day or the next. It was the same as always: ‘Yes, I should leave, but wait, there is just one more unfinished case.’”