And Then There Were None

Later that night in her kitchen, we were looking through pictures on a laptop of Mikhail Galustov, a freelance photographer I was working with. Before coming to Natasha, we had spent two days at Kadyrov's residence; at the time he was Chechnya's prime minister and heir apparent after the death of his father, the Kremlin's handpicked leader. The pictures featured Kadyrov showing us around his private zoo: cages with little lions and bears, ostriches running around the garden.

In one series of pictures, Kadyrov was taking his huge dogs out of their cage and baiting them, trying to get them to fight. "I know what else he uses these dogs for," Natasha said in a heavy voice. The story Natasha told us that night was breathtaking. It was about a teenage boy, a brother of a guerrilla, who had told Natasha that Kadyrov's police threatened to put him in that cage with the dogs, so he would tell where his brother was. Natasha was telling us story after a story that night about Kadyrov's methods of "making relatives talk." Her face darkened, her big beautiful eyes looked tired.

Two years later, the Chechen president offered Estemirova a position as the head of a civil society advisory commission for the city of Grozny. She accepted. It was not in Estimirova's character to shut up, though. Even while advising the government of Kadyrov, she did not stop writing reports for Memorial. The one about Kadyrov forbidding girls to come to universities without head scarves made him really angry. In March 2008, Kadyrov called her to come to a city office and yelled at her. Estemirova was fired. He threatened her multiple times, she later told us, but her Memorial friends "decided to keep that out of publicity, as Memorial's work in Chechnya would stop the moment we decided otherwise."

Last summer, Memorial was so worried about Estemirova's safety that they had to send her to London and Dublin for a couple months, Orlov, the director, told me. "Of course she could never stay away from Chechnya for too long. She was back doing the worst part -- abductions," Orlov said. This year Natasha's calls to Moscow Memorial's office sounded especially alarming. She called every day with her famous line: "Something has to be done."

And that was just what I was thinking as I wrote this while flying to Natasha's funeral in Chechnya. Something has to be done. Her body had a bruised face and four bullet holes, two in the chest and two in the head.

PREVIOUS 123