Sixty-year-old Oyub Titiyev was arrested in January of 2018. Drugs had supposedly been found in his car. Human rights defenders claim the case was fabricated. Oyub Titiyev, a former teacher and boxing coach, took the helm of the Chechen branch of the Russian human rights organization Memorial ten years ago after its previous leader, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered. Before his arrest, few people knew the name Titiyev, or knew that Memorial was still active in Chechnya. This isn’t surprising, considering that Titiyev’s work was undercover. He and his colleagues were basically a small guerrilla unit, one that saved people instead of killing them. When Titiyev was arrested, journalist Aleksandr Burtin went to the Chechen Republic; in narrating Titiyev’s biography, Burtin narrates the republic’s post-war history.

“I remember one time mama sewed a patch on his pants, on the backside,” Oyub’s older sister recalls. “He was in the second or third grade. [Mama] said, ‘Wear these to school, the other ones aren’t dry yet.’ He was unhappy, but he got dressed and got his things together, his book bag and everything, and left. He didn’t say a word. Mama says to me, ‘I know he’s probably hiding somewhere, give him a minute and then follow him.’ I went out and tracked him down: he had gone around the corner of the neighbor’s house and stopped. I wait, wait a little more, he doesn’t come out. So I go up to him and I say, ‘You’re going to get in trouble with mama’ – our mama was strict, too. ‘Look, you can’t even see it. Go in like that today, Oyub. Just sit there in your place and nobody’ll ever know.’ So he hemmed and hawed and dragged his feet, but he went. I don’t know, for some reason I always remember that little scene…” 

I wasn’t going to include this episode. There seemed to be no reason to. But then later I realized that I kept remembering it too. Probably because it really did reflect Oyub’s nature: correct, self-effacing, and stubborn. 

Titiyev and I met about ten years ago. He was my sister’s friend and colleague. They rebuilt schools that had been destroyed in the mountainous regions of Chechnya and drove the wounded and sick to Moscow for treatment. Titiyev was a quiet, middle-aged man, nothing memorable about him at first glance.  

At one point I needed to write something about Chechen traditional laws, adats, and Oyub drove me around the mountains for a couple of days introducing me to old men. He knew everybody out there, for some reason. He turned out to be a pleasant person, and you could tell right off he was trustworthy. And his demeanor was plain and simple, like in the village. We switched to using the informal ty right away, even though he was significantly older than me. Then I noticed that something else was hiding behind his rustic manner. Sometimes when Oyub was telling me about the villages, he’d describe things that had happened there during the war, complete with unit numbers, commanders’ names, the exact numbers of the dead, and the awful, concrete circumstances of death. Also who had ransomed the body of any given victim, and when, and from whom, and for how much. You had the sense that he knew all this in precise detail, and that he hadn’t gotten it off the internet.  

Some time later I came to the realization that Oyub was far better informed than all the Memorial people and other journalists and human rights defenders I knew. It turned out that he knew the inside scoop on everything that had happened or was happening in Chechnya. He habitually gave short, specific replies to all questions. He’d say, for example, “No, that’s not how it was,” and it was clear that he wasn’t going to say anything else about it, and that this was exactly as much information as you needed to understand the situation. Oyub never explained how he knew so much, and he obviously wasn’t proud of knowing it. He looked like a modest village teacher who, for some reason, had been burdened with a massive amount of information about human misery. 

Even though we’d had friendly conversations on more than one occasion, Oyub never talked about himself. So I didn’t know what else to write about him. 

A woman who knows Oyub told me, “In Chechnya you’ll be hard put to find someone who’ll talk to you. Personally I wouldn’t, if I were there…”

She was wrong. I ran out of time before I could talk with everyone who wanted to tell me about Oyub. It is true that I can’t give any of the Chechens’ names. I couldn’t visit anyone at home, and I always had to spend the night in hotels. Any local who is involved in this story is taking a great risk.  

Forgiveness

It seems that a certain event from Oyub’s childhood had a big impact on his fate. His father, a village policeman, killed someone. It was an accident, and everyone knew that Oyub’s father hadn’t meant to do it. The Titiyevs asked forgiveness, and the clan of the man who’d been killed forgave them. In Chechnya, blood feud is law: a killing can’t go unpunished. The family of the dead man must get revenge—or else forgive the killer’s family, in which case long negotiations are held, compensation is offered, and religious leaders and the elders of both clans are consulted. It’s important to understand here that a blood feud isn’t the family’s right, it’s the family’s obligation. The rest of the community expects the family to serve justice. Letting a killing go unpunished would destroy the clan’s reputation, and that’s the foundation of the entire way of life. Forgiveness is possible, but it requires a special procedure, as well as an extremely compelling justification that everyone around agrees with. 

Forgiveness saddles the killer’s family with an enormous obligation. From that point on, they have to help the family of the man who was killed, they have to be the first ones to come help in any difficult situation, as though they were trying to stand in for the dead man.  

“Now [the family of the man Titiyev’s father killed] are like our relatives,” says Oyub’s sister. “We’ve been helping them ever since. We helped when their son got married, we helped when their daughter got married… and in the spring and fall, we help them with their field, too. Just as a regular, ordinary family, we’re obligated to be close to them like that.”  

The social life of the killer himself is profoundly altered. It’s as though he’s dying, or in eternal mourning. He must either permanently leave the area where he was born, or stay, but lead an extremely humble life: he can’t be a public figure, he can’t participate in village gatherings, he can’t be out among people.  

“Their father quit his job and had to just sit at home, not let anybody see him,” explained a friend of the Titiyevs. “So there he was, required to live like that, and the mother shouldered all the responsibility [for the family] herself. It was hard on her… she’s such a strong woman…”  

As a person, Oyub’s father was very mild, and – Soviet propriety notwithstanding – devout. His strict mother was quite the opposite. Oyub was the youngest of four brothers. I suspect his father’s tragedy made a strong impression on Oyub, informing his reserve, modesty, and distaste for violence. And it seems to me that this feeling of guilt has been hanging over him his whole life.  

P. E. Teacher

Oyub graduated from an agricultural-technical high school, got a college degree at an institute in Novgorod, and then came back to Kurchaloy and started working in the school as a physical education teacher. In the mid-eighties he and a comrade organized a boxing class there, one of the first in the republic. All his friends say that Oyub is touchingly, fanatically devoted to athletics. 

“He started one of the first boxing clubs in Chechnya. It’s been producing various champions ever since,” explains Aleksandr Cherkasov, the chairman of Memorial. “He was really invested in it. The fate of that club and of the people in it, his students, was exceptionally important to him. It wasn’t just some kind of random thing, it was one of the core elements of his life.” 

I can well imagine Oyub as a coach: he’s so serious, laconic. I can imagine how much he loves his kids, even though he doesn’t show it, and how patiently he works with them. That club of his played a huge, yet contradictory part in his fate. 

Oyub left the school during perestroika. He became a businessman, traded in furniture, I think, and something else. He had a little shop in Gudermes. He got married. He was different back then, to judge from the stories; he was cheerful, uninhibited, and friendly. That lasted until the war. But when the Russian troops entered Grozny, Oyub, like many others, joined Dudayev’s militia. He joined it in spite of what his older brothers thought. 

“At first the call-up went like this: ‘Let’s go, come on out! Wives, mothers, let your men go! If you’re a man, sell a cow and buy an assault rifle!’ And yes, a few did give in. Good, honest guys,” says Yakub Titiyev. “But from the very beginning, as soon as Dudayev came on TV, I told my brothers: no, I’m not going to follow that moustache anywhere. That’s not a man’s mustache. If we have to, we’ll find guns, we’ll go out. There are four of us. But right now there’s no sense in defending anything, nobody’s getting ready to take our homeland away from us…”  

But Oyub left the village and went to Grozny anyway. Many of the village’s young men were right behind him, including his students. However, he didn’t end up staying in Grozny very long.

“Then his mother and sister went to him,” one of his friends recounted, “and just fell to their knees, crying, trying to convince him to come back, that his father was gone, he couldn’t leave the family like that, and so forth. And his mother said to him: if you don’t listen to me right now and come back with me, then you’re no son of mine. And Oyub felt so guilty before her, guilty that she hadn’t seen anything in life, that she’d always had it so hard… That’s why he had to leave.”

Oyub obeyed and went back. But his students stayed to fight. And they died, seventeen of them, all in one day. Oyub walked around the field and gathered them up in pieces… a leg, an arm, a single boot…

Depression

After his students died, Oyub didn’t leave the house for a long time. He didn’t speak with anyone. His friends thought he’d gone off his rocker: “He just sat around all the time trimming and squaring those stone churts, those stone grave-markers. He put them on all their graves. It was a terrible blow to him that he came back, but they died.”  

Everyone says that Oyub spent the next few years in a state of depression. His personality changed. He became quiet, reserved, the way he was when we met him. He helped the people from his village look for imprisoned relatives or the bodies of the dead and ransom them from the federal forces. 

“It was usually the women who looked for people who’d disappeared. Because the men had to get behind the women back then; it was dangerous. But Oyub wasn’t afraid. He never hid behind a skirt,” says one of Oyub’s friends. 

That time period, I think, and that state of mind was when Oyub learned to do very dangerous things, to get the job done while ignoring his fear. Perhaps he was trying to atone for his guilt, or hoping to die. 

“He took risks. He really took risks,” recalls Oyub’s neighbor. “Do you remember that one separatist field commander, Raduyev? He and his men went into Gudermes, shot things up. In return the federal forces really let them have it. Oyub and I went to Gudermes together, drove right through the middle of town, across the bridge. There were a lot of bodies. I even recognized one man. Nikolay Narenko. Worked in the highway patrol. People were running out of the city on foot, it was being bombed, shot up. So Oyub goes and ferries those people out of Gudermes in his own car. He drove all day under bombardment. His fender was shot up, there was a hole that big in it. Then he buried bodies…” 

That, clearly, was when Oyub started memorizing everything he heard about what was going on. All his coworkers say they were repeatedly amazed by his phenomenal memory for dates, numbers, and events. 

“Not even a computer can remember that much, probably. Going back to 1990. Every year, month, day, when such and such happened, what all happened on such and such a day. Say, for instance, if someone was killed, he remembered literally everything. I was just astonished at his memory,” relates a neighbor. 

“That’s something Muslims believe, just like Jews,” says Cherkasov. “If you can’t do anything, if you can’t even say anything, then the least you can do is remember. That will also count in your favor on Judgment Day.” 

The Volunteer

Oyub’s shop in Gudermes burned to the ground during the war. His in-laws were going to rebuild it, but Oyub had lost interest in it. He went back to the school where his older brother, Sultan, was principal. The school was in ruins. The brothers rebuilt it by themselves, and Oyub began teaching physical education and history. When the second Chechen war started, Oyub began rescuing people again, getting people from his village out of the Russian filtration camps.  

Natasha Estemirova from the Memorial Human Rights Center arrived in Kurchaloy in 2000. She was gathering data on murders and kidnappings. People put Natasha in touch with Oyub, and he offered to help. That’s how they got to know each other: he began passing her information.  

At first, Oyub and the people from Memorial were wary of each other. Human rights defender Svetlana Gannushkina got the feeling they wouldn’t be able to work very well together: “He didn’t smile much, he spoke kind of gritting his teeth a little bit. How are you supposed to work with a person like that? His first reaction, his facial expression, seemed to say that what we were doing was nonsense. But gradually he saw that we do serious work.”   

All Oyub’s friends told me that Memorial is what saved him, and otherwise he might’ve really gone around the bend. At first he just passed on information, as a volunteer. He took notes by hand and drove to Khasavyurt, 50 kilometers and dozens of checkpoints away, to send the documentation on to Moscow. He didn’t sign his own name. He was just “Monitor 1.”

In the 2000s, not all of Chechnya had submitted to Kadyrov yet. Moscow was supporting the leaders of several different armed clans at once, each one fighting to gain power or remain independent: the Yamadayev brothers, Baysarov, Kakiyev, Khasambekov. They were very bloodthirsty men, the whole lot of them. Kurchaloy was the domain of Khamzat Edelgiriyev, the Kurchaloy police chief, also famous for his monstrous cruelty. People said he wasn’t afraid of Ramzan Kadyrov. Edelgiriyev had his own secret prison in the mountains around the village of Yalkhoy-Mokhk where kidnap victims were tortured. The Kurchaloy police station was a hundred meters from Oyub’s house.  

“That station is one of the most terrible places in all of Chechnya,” says Yelena Milashina, a journalist for Novaya gazeta [The New Gazette]. “Every single day was a risk for him. We knew that in the evening we would be leaving work and going home, but he was going back into the belly of the beast.” 

The Village

There’s a side of Oyub I hadn’t even known existed; I found out about it from conversations with his relatives and neighbors. In Kurchaloy and beyond he is widely respected as a peacemaker.  

First off, you need to understand that there are two public spheres in Chechnya. There’s the external one—the one people talk about on TV—and then there’s the village one, which is defined by clan affiliation [teip], by distinct Chechen-Ingush identity and customs [vainakh]: this is the one where men court their brides, then steal them; where people get married and divorced; are born and die. This is the sphere where conflicts between families are sparked into life and brought to rest, where blood feuds smolder on, where local lay courts keep the peace.     

Kinship ties happen to be the most important factor here, but it is still an entirely public life, although it’s absolutely non-public in our sense of the word. Even if everyone around is talking about a conflict, it is still considered a private matter between two families. Nobody would write about it in the paper. But every Chechen lives for better or worse in both spheres, and every complicated situation is interpreted in two dimensions. 

“Let’s say somebody got in a fight,” one of Oyub’s relatives explains, “or that one guy got in a car accident and the other driver died. People would call Oyub if they needed to make peace. If he goes out there to talk, they can’t refuse him, because he’s a respected man coming to request it. And it wasn’t just his own kin asking him to do this; it was other people from his village, and people from the next village over, and from across the republic. I even remember people coming to us from Ingushetia.”

“And what was it people came to see him about?”   

“I don’t know. That was just between them. If I ever went to him and told him something, he would never tell it to anyone.”  

Yakub Titiyev explains, “There are the rules of sharia, of the Koran; and there are customary rules, the rules of adat; but either way there has to be justice. If people are looking for a way to resolve an issue without making a big fuss, it’s ‘Come on, let’s go see Oyub, or maybe Usman or Mahomed?’ ‘Let’s go.’ It means that people are already saying this man judges fairly, objectively. First they all verbally agree to his contract: ‘My verdict is final, both sides will agree. If not, then I won’t even start.’ Once he’s decided whether you’re guilty or innocent, that’s it. That means it’s over. You’ve lost the right to keep being angry about it.”

In Memorial, few people, if any, knew about this part of Oyub’s life. But it starts to make sense how Oyub had so many sources. 

The Dark Side

“Whenever I was coming in to Chechnya, we’d sit down somewhere and he’d start telling me everything that was happening, in the minutest detail,” recalls human rights defender Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya. “Somebody’d been kidnapped, was being held somewhere in an illegal prison, was tortured and eventually killed. He worked hundreds of cases like that. Hundreds of peoples’ fates. Bodies that were either buried nobody knew where, or that had been dumped, and then buried in some village cemetery somewhere. He took a long time with his investigations, he was very painstaking. He wove it all together, slowly and gradually, just like a pattern; he brought different loose ends together, checking and double-checking, making sure, until he had the whole picture.

“Oyub understood that he had to establish the facts and document things, because people are leaving—not just the relatives, but also the locals who washed and buried the bodies. They still remembered what the corpse looked like, how it was dressed, but it was obvious that soon this information would be lost forever,” continues Sokiryanskaya. “He had to drive out to where those people were, it was the wives and mothers most often, and get their testimonies. It’s hard on people, psychologically, to make them remember those events again. And it’s astonishing how people forget things: sometimes mothers wouldn’t even be able to remember what color their child’s eyes were, or what day it happened, or what month. They’d remember one thing very clearly, but other details just disappeared for good, and we knew what a huge amount of information was being lost.” 

Gradually Oyub created a unique database for Memorial. It could be used not only to look for people who’d disappeared, but also to unearth criminals, including criminals in the military. He had to check and double-check people’s old court cases, information from the public prosecutor, lawyers’ requests, and systematize all of it, collect all the information about each person who’d disappeared in one place; or he’d have to combine several cases, because people would often disappear in groups, for example, around a certain military base. According to Memorial’s information, security forces kidnapped and killed from three to five thousand people in Chechnya in the 2000s. 

The Lone Wolf

A woman with a human rights organization explains, “When I started working with him, the people back in Moscow said he’s kind of a lone wolf. My daughter was secretary, but she was afraid to even sit down to lunch at the same table with him, he’s so serious. And he told me himself that people probably don’t like him because he’s not charming. Everyone kind of avoids him.”

“Just looking at him, he comes off as this really stern highlander,” says a female staff member of Memorial. “But then you’d start to see that he’s actually really emotional, but he tries to sort of tamp it down. And there’s nothing the least bit macho or flashy about him. Like when it’s a holiday, giving the girls little presents—doing something nice for somebody else was very important for him, but it wasn’t easy for him. He’d bring us something, with this shy little childlike smile: ‘Here, have some…’ You could see a really touching awkwardness in those gestures of his.”  

Oyub’s nephews are really nice-looking guys, thirty years old or thereabouts. They work in construction. Both of them resemble Oyub, but in different ways: one is reticent and stern in the Chechen manner, while the other’s the complete opposite—open, mild, and direct.  

“Oyub never yelled at me, no matter what I did. He never yelled at anyone for anything…” The nephew sobs, covering his face with his arm.

“We were working in their courtyard, making cement. Oyub was down below and I was carrying buckets over to him and handing them down. He was doing something down there, he was bent over, and Yusuf says to him, ‘If you don’t take this bucket now, I’m going to pour it out on you.’ And just then Oyub looks up, but the handle breaks, and the entire bucket goes over on him. In his face. But Oyub didn’t say a thing. He wiped the wet concrete from his eyes and just smiled. If that’d been Yakub, he’d’ve shot us.” 

“He had a Volga and he’d taken it apart… it was in pieces, bumpers and doors…” remembers one of his neighbors. “He’d laid everything he could out on the roof of his house, so he could put it all back together again later. One time he was sitting at home and he hears someone walking on the roof. He looks out the window and there’s a thief up there. Oyub knew him, the guy also had a Volga. The guy takes what he needs and sneaks off. ‘What about you? Didn’t you say anything?’ ‘No. What am I going to say to him?’“  

“They were sitting around at home, the whole family, watching TV. All of a sudden Oyub remembers the neighbors don’t have a TV. They didn’t have much. He goes and turns it off and takes it over to them.” 

“His wife was telling me… this was about a month, maybe, before he was arrested. He comes home and he says, check and see, do we have food? Onions, potatoes? Keep some in reserve. I’m not getting a paycheck this month. ‘You already got it…’ ‘But I gave it to so-and-so.’ He helped the poor. He was always helping everyone in the mountains. He gave away their sewing machine! And his wife did what he said…”  

“If Oyub’s going somewhere, driving somewhere, and there’s a funeral, he stops and goes to it. Every time. ‘Because you also must die.’ He always said that.”  

“It’s Russians he was tolerant of. But I could barely bring myself to even smoke in front of him,” says a male staff member of Memorial. “Not to mention having a drink. We were at a seminar and it was my birthday. One gal, a colleague, says, ‘Oh, but we need some wine, to celebrate! Come on, what’s the big deal? You had a drink yesterday…’ And I can see it in Oyub’s eyes: ‘You alcoholic!’”  

“He’s a welder, never mind that he’s self-taught,” says Oyub’s neighbor. “He welded everything for everybody. If something happens in the village, an accident or some kind of trouble, he puts on old clothes and goes over. Just give him a call or knock on his gate. Even if it’s three a.m., it doesn’t matter, he’ll get up: ‘How can I help?’ When I was building my house, he worked harder than I did.” 

“There’s no such thing as ‘yours’ or ‘mine’ with him. When we worked in Gudermes, he had a Zhiguli, a nice red one. And we all of us drove that car around. He never refused anyone. One guy would drive up and park the car, I would get in and drive off. I would come back, and another guy would head out. This one traffic cop in Gudermes goes, ‘Listen, just tell me the truth, okay? Whose car is this?’”

“One time I gave him an Italian sport coat. It was too big for me. He felt the cloth. ‘Good quality. How much did it cost you?’ ’Forty-five thousand.’ ‘What are you, an idiot or something!? Why’d you spend that much? You could have given that to a poor man.’”

Oyub exercised diligently his whole life. His neighbors told me how someone knocked at his gate around fifteen years ago and told him that Yakub’s house had collapsed. The gas had caught fire. Oyub ran off to help, all the way to the other end of the village, but he couldn’t make it, he couldn’t catch his breath. So he worked out every day from then on. 

“You don’t have to look far for Oyub in the evening. He’s always in the gym,” one of his neighbors says. “Every day, even if he’s already toiled from morning to night. He lifted weights, never mind his age. He’s always been a powerful boxer. There wasn’t a day when he didn’t run his eight kilometers. One time he and his friend had a bet. Oyub puts on a bulletproof vest, eighteen kilos, and they head out on a run together. The friend couldn’t even make it two or three kilometers, but Oyub made it all the way out and back without stopping…”     

Fitness was part of Oyub’s ethics: he had to be strong if he was going to help people.

“He wrote us a letter,” recalls his nephew. “I have it here in my phone. He says, ‘Help everyone, both your kin and those who aren’t your kin. A man must help anyone who is having difficulties. You won’t always have the ability to do this. Help people while you are young and healthy. Wherever you are, help people there.’ I can’t translate everything into Russian right on the spot, but it’s a really good letter. He says, ‘And you have to go to the gym and work out.’”

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