In the fall of 2022, Seda Suleimanova fled Chechnya for St. Petersburg to avoid being forced into an arranged marriage, as her older sisters were. She was forcibly returned in August 2023 -- and promptly disappeared.
A rights group that helped her escape Chechnya believes she was killed that November and buried "like a dog" on a roadside in her native village of Alkhan-Yurt.
Such a fate is not so unusual: Known for rampant rights abuses under longtime Kremlin-backed leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya has seen a surge in "funerary repression," or posthumous humiliation, activists say.
Authorities use the denial of customary burial rites to target, posthumously, those who challenge power or deviate from strict social norms enforced from above in the deeply conservative, mostly Muslim region. Women who flee their families and LGBT people appear to be most at risk.
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Chechen Woman's Disappearance Investigated As Possible Murder, Rights Group SaysAfter Suleimanova fled Chechnya, she lived in St. Petersburg and found work as a barista. But she wasn't safe there.
Her brother tracked her down in February 2023; security camera footage from her workplace shows him berating her for bringing "shame" upon the family and demanding to know her address.
Suleimanova fled out a back door at the time, but police came to the apartment where she was living with her partner, Stanislav Kudryavtsev, in August 2023, detained them, and told her she was suspected of stealing jewelry in Chechnya. Suleimanova was then taken to Chechnya.
Kudryavtsev, who converted to Islam in hopes of marrying her, was unable to find her.
In September 2023, Chechen authorities issued a video showing Suleimanova, looking frightened and meek, with the regional human rights ombudsman, who says she is happy to be close to family and has no complaints. She did not speak in the video, and no information on her whereabouts was released. She was never seen in public again.
Seda Suleimanova
"I am really certain she's dead," Aleksandra Miroshnikova, spokeswoman for SK SOS Crisis Group, which helps LGBT community members and other vulnerable people escape violence and oppression in Chechnya, told the Russian-language channel Dozhd in 2025. "I don't see any scenario in which she could still be alive."
Other cases point to a pattern.
Zelimkhan Bakayev, a singer who vanished after traveling to the Chechen capital, Grozny, for his sister's wedding in 2017, was killed because of his sexual orientation and was denied a traditional Islamic funeral, according to SK SOS Crisis Group.
Instead, the organization said, his family was ordered to bury him without formal rites. It also said he was tortured before he was killed and his body was handed over to his relatives.
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Aishat Baimuradova, 23, fled domestic violence -- at the hands of her father and then of her husband in an arranged marriage, according to rights activists -- and later criticized Chechen authorities online.
She was found dead in a rented apartment in Armenia last October after meeting someone reportedly linked to Chechen officials. Her family refused to claim her body, which remained in a morgue for five months before she was buried in Armenia.
"Even after death, they face the same control and judgment," said Fatima Gaziyeva, a human rights activist with the Switzerland-based organization PeaceWomen Across the Globe. "They are denied dignity."
Kadyrov's 'Gay Purge'
Lesbians, gay men, and other LGBT people have faced sometimes deadly discrimination, oppression, and abuse under Kadyrov, who was installed as Chechnya's leader in 2007 by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Missing Russian Man May Have Been Swept Up In Chechnya's 'Gay Purge'About a decade ago, regional authorities intensified a campaign against the LGBT community, activists say, a severe and violent crackdown that came to be known as Chechnya's "gay purge."
In an interview with US-based HBO in 2017, Kadyrov denied the existence of an anti-LGBT campaign by falsely claiming there were no gay people in Chechnya, adding: "To purify our blood, if there are any here…take them away."
Rights groups also point to what they say are highly restrictive policies toward women. In late 2025, the Chechen government appeared to intensify its "virtue campaign," barring women from appearing in public without a head scarf and prohibiting clothing with "masculine elements."
While officials cited the preservation of tradition, critics argue these measures are fundamentally about state control.
A number of women who have attempted to flee domestic violence have been hunted down and forcibly returned to Chechnya, and in some cases have disappeared or wound up dead.
Fear And Families
Analysts say that when the state targets people for their sexual identity, political dissent, or other reasons, families are often too terrified to defend their own children, fearing collective punishment.
Now this repression even extends beyond death. While Islamic tradition dictates clearly defined burial rites -- including ritual washing and funeral prayers -- activists say local religious authorities, who are closely tied to the state, increasingly refuse these rites for those labeled "nontraditional."
"If these people's families are in power, they misuse that power to persecute women and punish them," said exiled Chechen political analyst Ruslan Kutayev.
The religious establishment offers little recourse, analyst Ruslan Aysin told RFE/RL's Caucasus.Realities. Chechnya's local religious authorities exist in system of "dual control," he said: The muftiates control the faithful while the political and security officials control the muftiates.
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Five Months Of Hell In A Chechen Prison: A Survivor Describes His OrdealKadyrov and his inner circle remain under sweeping Western sanctions over human rights violations in Chechnya and their support for Russia's war against Ukraine. The measures targeting Kadyrov, his family, and his close associates include travel bans and the freezing of billions in assets.
Kremlin critics say Putin, who relies on Kadyrov to keep a lid on a region that has been the site of two devastating separatist wars and a long, bloody Islamist insurgency since the Soviet collapse of 1991, has turned a blind eye to what rights groups say are widespread abuses, a climate of violence and impunity, and the flouting of federal law and the Russian constitution.