23The ex-prisoner is still working for
Memorial, but in Moscow, as I’ve said.
There is no Memorial office in Chechnya.
How could there be? In a sense, Kadyrov
and his goons have won, driving the
human-rights defenders out of Chechnya.
But the final chapter has yet to be writ-
ten. (It never is.)
Titiev hopes to live to see a better day
for Chechnya. Putin despises Chechens,
he says, deriving pleasure from Kadyrov’s
depredations. Faith is the most important
thing in Titiev’s life. If rulers had a deeper,
higher sense of faith, he says, “I am sure
there would not be so much hatred and
anger toward people.”
Titiev’s friends and colleagues speak
of him in almost reverent tones. They
admire his quiet courage, his modesty,
his fortitude—the example he sets.
There are lots of names to remember in
this crowded, turbulent, often impres-
sive world, but add Oyub Titiev’s to
your list.During these same days—January
2018—the Memorial office in Grozny
was raided, and the staff threatened. A
Memorial office in a neighboring repub-
lic, Ingushetia, was torched. The car of a
Memorial lawyer in another neighbor-
ing republic, Dagestan, was torched.
And so on.
As for Oyub Titiev, his trial lasted eight
months. He had great support, interna-
tionally, nationally, and locally. Human-
rights organizations publicized his case.
The president of France, Emmanuel
Macron, spoke to Putin personally about
it. The Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe gave Titiev its Václav
Havel Human Rights Prize (in absentia).
Amnesty International declared him a
prisoner of conscience.
Amnesty made a blunt, and true, state-
ment: All the fuss about Titiev, around
the world, was affording him “a level of
protection against torture.”
Amazingly, some 20 of Titiev’s friends
and neighbors came to the court to testify.
They vouched for the defendant’s
integrity. This was amazing, says Titiev,
because Chechens had seldom done such
a thing in recent years. It was too risky.
They would incur the wrath of the gov-
ernment. Even family members would
not testify for family members. (“I do not
judge them,” Titiev tells me.) But for
Titiev, people showed up.
The trial was a sham, with many comi-
cal elements. Among those who wrote
about the trial was Simon Cosgrove, of
the U.K.-based group Rights in Russia. I
will relate just one detail, reported by him
and others.
On the day Titiev was arrested,
CCTV cameras, oddly enough, were
not working. There were 17 of them, on
the road, in the police station, and at
many other points in the relevant area.
But every single one of them was under
repair on that particular day, according
to the prosecution.
The boss, Kadyrov, weighed in on the
trial, confident of its outcome (for good
reason). “Once the trial is over,” he
said, “Chechnya will become forbid-
den territory”—forbidden territory for
human-rights defenders such as Titiev
and Memorial at large.
Near the end of the trial, in March
2019, Titiev himself made a statement to
the court. It was a long and stirring
address. “I’m a troublemaker,” he said. “I
tried to get the authorities to pay attentionto violations of people’s rights.” He also
said, of himself and his colleagues, “If,
over the years, we have managed to save
even one person—and I know we have
saved many more than that—our labor
was not in vain.”
Titiev’s sentence was a relief, in that it
was relatively light: four years of “correc-
tive labor” in a minimum-security colony,
with the possibility of early release.
One of the questions I put to Titiev is,
“How did the other prisoners treat you?”
They treated him royally, in a word. They
knew of his case and respected him
greatly. What’s more, they hated those
who had framed him. They would not let
Titiev clean his own cell or carry out other
such tasks, wanting to do them for him.
Titiev was released on June 21, 2019,
having been in custody for about a year
and five months. It could have been so
much worse, as you know. The atten-
tion of the broader world made a criti-
cal difference.Oyub Titiev during his trial in Chechnya, Russia, 2019TANYALOKSHINA/HUMANRIGHTSWATCH3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/4/2020 1:35 AM Page 23
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