| http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020to expose these horrors. They did all
they could to help victims and prevent
new ones.
Titiev always figured they would stop
him, sooner or later—one way or anoth-
er. For example, they might plant drugs
on him and arrest him. That would be
the least they could do (the most being
murder). The authorities had planted
drugs on other critics of the govern-
ment. And, on January 9, 2018, they did
it to Titiev.
That morning, police stopped his car
and made him get out. While they were
“inspecting” the car, lo, they “found”
180 grams of marijuana under the pas-
senger seat.
Why then? Why did the authorities
move on Titiev at that moment? He thinks
it was because he was working on a par-
ticularly sensitive case, known as the
“Case of the 27.” On January 26, 2017,
the authorities killed at least 27 people
extrajudicially in Grozny.
The idea of Oyub Titiev as drug pos-
sessor or seller was laughable to anyone
who knew him. Titiev is a devout Muslim
who neither smokes nor drinks. More -
over, he is devoted to physical fitness,
running or using the gym daily.
For the first ten days of his confine-
ment—in the dead of winter, mind you—
he was kept in a tiny windowless cell
without heat. They told him they would
harm his family if he did not confess. This
rattled the prisoner, obviously, and he
thought of ways to protect his family—
but he did not, and would not, confess.
Indeed, he wrote a letter to Putin in
Moscow, along with other high officials.
The message: If you ever hear a confes-
sion from me, it will be because I was tor-
tured into it.
Police went to Titiev’s home, looking
for his son and his brother. They were
not there. There were women, however,
whom the police chased out. They evicted
them from their own home. Titiev’s fami-
ly left the country for safety.
In the midst of all this, Ramzan Kadyrov
took to the airwaves—state television—
calling Oyub Titiev a “drug addict.” He
also railed against human-rights defenders
generally: “They have no motherland, no
ethnicity, no religion.... They have
interests.... They keep smearing our
Chechnya, trying to provoke us.... We are
going to break the spines of our enemies.”
Say what you will about Kadyrov, he
is not guilty of subtlety.C
HECHNYAis the worst place in
Russia, “a nearly totalitarian
enclave,” as Tanya Lokshina
says. She works for Human
Rights Watch in Moscow. Oyub Titiev
says that Chechnya is “a testing ground
for repression and terror.” Techniques
perfected there can be applied elsewhere
in the country.
Titiev works for the Memorial organi-
zation, about which I will say more in a
moment.
Chechnya, or the Chechen Republic, is
in the North Caucasus, with Georgia on its
southern border. Since 2007, it has been
ruled by Ramzan Kadyrov, a classic brute.
He may be seen as Vladimir Putin’s
viceroy in Chechnya. Kadyrov is a little
Stalin, with some Caligula thrown in.
He likes to call his opponents “ene-
mies of the people” and “foreign
agents.” As he would have it, he and his
comrades are “patriots” whereas their
opponents are “traitors.” Oyub Titiev
will have none of that. “They are patriotic
toward Putin,” he says, “not toward the
Chechen or Russian people. What kind
of patriot robs his country, making mil-
lions for himself, while fighting his
own people?”
Titiev is from an old Chechen family,
and he was the Memorial director in
Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.
Memorial is the organization founded at
the instigation of Andrei Sakharov in- (Sakharov, you recall, was the great
dissident and physicist.) Memorial’s pur-
pose is twofold: to promote the truth
about the past, and to promote democracy
in the present. In 2017, I wrote in these
pages about another Memorial worker,
Yuri Dmitriev, from the Republic of
Karelia. He is a political prisoner today, as
he was then.
Oyub Titiev was a political prisoner
from January 2018 to June 2019. Unable
to work in his home republic, he lives
and works in Moscow. I will tell you a bit
of his story.
He was born in 1957 and grew up in
his ancestral village, Kurchaloi. His
father worked in the passport office of a
police station. (These were internal pass-
ports, necessary to move within the So -
viet Union.) Like many boys in the Soviet
Union, and especially in Chechnya, he
says, he aspired to be an athlete. He was
a wrestler and weight lifter. As an adult,
he taught physical education and found-
ed a sports club, for youth. He also
worked other jobs—in a furniture store,
for example.
In 2001, five Memorial workers came
to Kurchaloi, to investigate the usual
horrors (abduction, torture, murder).
Titiev met them by chance. He assisted
them, driving them to homes and hospi-
tals and the like. In due course, they
offered him a job.
“What motivated you to do human-
rights work?” I have asked this question
of many people, and their answers tend to
be the same: I don’t know. How could you
not, given the circumstances?In a Q&A
with me, Titiev says essentially this.
It has long been very, very dangerous
to investigate human-rights abuses in
Chechnya, and to defend innocents there.
Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist, did
so. She was murdered in 2006. Stanislav
Markelov, a lawyer, did so. He was mur-
dered in 2009. Zarema Sadulayeva was
murdered later that same year. She had
founded a children’s-rights organization.
She was murdered along with her hus-
band, Alek Dzhabrailov.
Natalia Estemirova, a journalist,
worked for Memorial. In 2007, she won a
prize named after Politkovskaya. Two
years later, she herself was murdered—
abducted from her home, shot up, and left
in the woods.
At this point, the director of the
Memorial branch in Grozny left the coun-
try with his family. This was understand-
able, not only in view of Estemirova’s
killing but also in view of explicit death
threats to him. The work of Memorial in
Chechnya was suspended for six months.
Then Oyub Titiev convinced the nation-
al organization to start it up again. He
himself became director.
Under Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya
is a festival of extrajudicial killings,
collective punishment, secret prisons,
“disappearings”—again, the usual. Titiev
and his colleagues did what they could
22The Example
Of Oyub
Titiev
On a brave soul from Chechnya
BY JAY NORDLINGER3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/4/2020 1:35 AM Page 22
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