This is the story of Doctor Aishat Magomedova, who, in the 1990s, opened an exceptional charity hospital for the women of Dagestan’s mountain villages. Aishat helped tens of thousands of women. And then it was all taken away from her.
Standing in front of the locked gate of the former charity hospital in Makhachkala, Marzhanat Abdulbasirova weeps. Through a gap in the gate you can make out the courtyard. Marzhanat was once the custodian here, and to this day she vividly recalls every exam room, every corner of the corridors.
You can get inside by scaling the window bars up onto the destroyed roof, then jumping down into one of the wards. This is exactly what I do, but at four a.m., so as not to attract the attention of passersby.
The buildings that made up the hospital complex have basically collapsed; the roof is intact in only a few places. There are no doors or windows. Bushes and trees have taken root in what used to be indoor space. And beneath the piles of rubbish are the medical records of women who were once treated here.
Shakhruzad, 26 years old, 25 weeks pregnant. Threat of miscarriage. This is her fifth pregnancy. Miscarriage, miscarriage, stillbirth, miscarriage.
Lyudmila, 25 years old. Cyst on her right ovary. Hysterectomy.
Madinat, 28 years old, sixth pregnancy. Threat of a stillbirth.
There are hundreds of these yellowing charts…
As I extract myself from the building, I am spied by a man who happens to be passing by. He is convinced I am a looter and threatens to call the police. I tell him the story of Aishat Magomedova, the woman who created this hospital. I ask if he ever heard of her.
“Oh, you are spinning some kind of fairy tales,” the man says, clearly annoyed.
In truth, Aishat’s story is quite a bit like a fairy tale. Only one with an unhappy ending.
The little girl who would later be known as “Dagestan’s Mother Teresa” was born in 1944, in the mountain village of Godoberi. It’s 158 kilometers from Godoberi to Makhachkala (the republic’s capital) – a three-hour drive by car. But that is today. When Aishat was a child, Makhachkala was a world away.
Her mother, Suaybat, was divorced from her father and raised three children as a single mother, working long hours. As a result, Aishat often lived with distant relatives. But, as she got older, she had to help her mother out.
At that time, women had to retrieve water from the spring using heavy jugs and mowed grass high in the mountains, descending to the village with armfuls of hay. They carried sacks of coal, salt, and pine cones, tended huge vegetable gardens, and looked after cattle and children. The men offered no help – that’s not how things were done.
“The hay was strapped to your body with belts,” one resident of Godoberi remembers. “It would leave bruises on your arms. Once, I took too big a load of hay and it was so heavy and painful that I cried and had to leave it halfway. Only the next day was I able to return for it. What are you going to do?”
“Aishat did not like carrying heavy loads,” recalls Zagra Asadulayeva, a second cousin. “When we were little, we went into the forest to gather pinecones, each with two sacks on our back. They weighed maybe 80 kilograms. Aishat carried just one sack. ‘I’m not going to haul two,’ she said, ‘it’s heavy.’ When she was older, and saw how women were carrying water, firewood, or sacks of pinecones on their backs, she cried, ‘How is that possible? Look how the woman is suffering!’”
Aishat was at the top of her class, and when she was just 14 declared that she wanted to become a doctor. At that time, very few women received a higher education. For the most part, girls were married off immediately after leaving school.
“She had thin, beautiful fingers,” Zagra recalls. “She often folded her hands so that her fingertips touched, saying ‘I will go to college, and then I will be a gynecological surgeon.’ Her brother dismissed this, ‘A surgeon you will never be, woman.’ And she argued back, ‘I will! I’ll prove it to you.’”.
Aishat was very pretty – with lush hair and delicate features – and very modest and religious. But she had no interest whatsoever in getting married. “There is no family in my soul,” she said. “I want to help people.”
In 1962, two young men and two young women from Godoberi applied to college. Of the women, only Aishat was admitted.
“She was so happy!” Zagra remembers. “She was absolutely glowing! And sometime around the middle of her first year, I went to Makhachkala, and we saw one another. She was as thin and transparent as a shadow. Her mother was not able to send her any money, and only her older brother Nabi helped. Aishat occasionally fainted from hunger, once collapsing right in front of a car. The driver succeeded in braking, and jumped out of the car, yelling, ‘Hey, prostitute! You tired of living, or what? I’ve got four kids. The sea is that way, go there and kill yourself!’ I was supposed to enter college two years after her, but I got scared. And she said, ‘I haven’t eaten anything today, I haven’t a kopek to my name, but I am not going to quit college. I will graduate and will definitely become a surgeon.’”
After she graduated, Aishat was sent to work in the Kazbekov District. There she got married, but it was a short union. Her husband Khadzhimurat would get jealous and go out partying. He and Aishat would often fight. After they were no longer living together, Khadzhimurat was murdered.
Aishat returned to Makhachkala and got a job as an OB/GYN at the main hospital’s high-risk pregnancy department of the maternity ward. Later, she became the head of that department.
She spent a lot of time speaking with women from rural areas, querying them about their illnesses and needs, and she became desperate. Due to their strenuous work, the women suffered from hemorrhages, miscarriages, and untreated disease. Thirty-year-olds looked fifty, and many had no teeth. Patients said that they had no access to healthcare, because of the lack of roads between their village and the district center, or because doctors often demanded payment for services and medicines. And where were mountain women going to get money?
“Just imagine,” says Marzhanat, the charity hospital’s custodian, “you’re hemorrhaging and you have to get to the doctor on foot or on horseback.”
Aishat spent her own money to buy medicines and food for the new mothers. Whenever she traveled out into the countryside, she would try to see as many women as possible. For the most difficult cases in remote areas, she flew in by helicopter, providing medical assistance on site, in district hospitals, or evacuating patients to Makhachkala.
Once, the helicopter had an equipment failure in flight, and the pilot barely managed to land safely. Crying afterward as she recounted the incident to Zagra, Aishat said, “I thought that we would crash and then I wouldn’t be able to operate on the woman. When we landed, I said to Allah, ‘You love me, and that is probably why I am still alive.’” Zagra answered, “Aishat, it’s because I love you, that’s why you survived.”
In the early 1990s, Aishat Magomedova created the Mother and Child Defense League, one of the first NGOs in Dagestan. Its purpose was to provide free medical aid to women from low-income families. And then she took what many at the time thought to be her most reckless step: she decided to open a charity hospital for women in Makhachkala.
Aishat wanted to help the mountain women, without any hints of under-the-table payments, of the sort many doctors dropped. And she wanted the hospital to be like a sanatorium, a place where women could not only improve their health, but also rest and regain their strength.
She found an abandoned infectious diseases hospital in the center of the city, at 3 Yermoshkin Street. The building was so dilapidated as to be unsafe, yet the bureaucrats didn’t want to let her use it. They just didn’t understand what it was all about, this charity hospital for women. For orphans, for children with disabilities, sure. But why a hospital for women? Aren’t there enough normal hospitals in the republic?
“She went to both the mayor and the head of the republic,” Zagra recalls. “There was a lot of resistance, a lack of understanding. I asked her, ‘Aishat, why do you need to do this? You have no children, no family. Let this go and live your life.’ She answered, ‘No, I will not let it go.’ In the end, they gave her the building to use with no time limit.”
It was 1994. Aishat had no money to renovate the building. At that time, the nonprofit sector was just getting off the ground in Russia, and the plans and dreams swirling in Aishat’s head looked like utter fantasy from the outside.
“She traveled to Godoberi and said, ‘Help me create a hospital for women. I will treat you for free,’” recalls Patimat Labazanova, who grew up in the village with Aishat, then worked as a baker for her, and later became her unofficial bodyguard. “And my husband and I, and others, we went to help. The whole community pitched in to fix up the hospital.”
Aishat had to give up her job as department head, but she continued working at the central hospital, taking night shifts. And everything she earned she poured into the renovation.
Marzhanat got to know Aishat while working as a painter in the central hospital. She painted the walls in the wards. Once, when Marzhanat’s blood pressure spiked, Aishat gave her some medicine, and a friendship developed between them. Marzhanat saw Aishat give money to the poor and orphaned and wanted to support her somehow. So, when Aishat asked her to help with the renovation, she happily agreed. And then she stayed on as the custodian.
Marzhanat recalls how Aishat would go to Yermoshkin Street after her night shift and work on the renovation. To any grumbling that perhaps she needed to rest, Aishat would reply, “Look at the sort of loads women are carrying in the villages! I want to help them.”
Anyone who came to visit Aishat pitched in. They cleared the courtyard, painted walls, repaired the roof, windows, doors. Rural students lived and worked in the building, bartering their labor for a place to sleep. Recalling how scorpions and spiders fell on them from the ceilings, one said “We were afraid, but we kept working!”
As soon as two wards were ready, Aishat began accepting patients.
“In the beginning,” Patimat recalls, “Aishat invited in specialists to consult on cases. Some agreed to treat the mountain women for free, others asked to be paid for their work. In those cases, Aishat paid them out of her own pocket.”
The unusual enterprise soon attracted attention. Businessmen, as well as affluent Dagestanis who lived in Moscow and abroad, began to help Aishat. Foreign nonprofits gradually began collaborating with The Mother and Child Defense League. The first grant came from an Arab fund (whose exact name has been lost). At various times they were helped by the Global Fund, the International Red Cross, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Doctors without Borders, the UNESCO Children’s Fund, and Caritas – Catholic Relief Services. Thanks to foreign donations, the hospital opened a school for children with autism. A Center for Tolerance was created, whose volunteers went around and gave lectures at schools in Makhachkala.
How much money Aishat received, no one knows. But the demand was so great that there was never enough money. The baker Patimat recalls how sometimes the money from abroad did not come and then average people would help out. They would bring dried apricots for compote, fruits and vegetables, cereals, oil. They often brought food to Aishat’s apartment and she would bring it all to the hospital.
Aishat had nothing at home.
“It was a common two-room apartment,” sister Zagra explains. “An old sideboard in the living room, a pull-out sofa bed. Two beds in the bedroom, an ironing board. A small cupboard in the kitchen for dishes. Poor and empty. I said, ‘Aishat, get some new furniture!’ She answered with surprise, ‘I’m needed there (in the hospital). Why do I need furniture here?’”
Even after the renovations were complete and the hospital was up and running, Aishat continued to burn the candle at both ends. She would return home late in the evening, and rush back early in the morning: “There is where my soul is,” she said.
And so it continued for 14 years.
When the renovations were completed, the hospital had 11 wards, Aishat’s office, a cafeteria, a prayer room, an exam room, ultrasound room, rooms where girls were trained as nurses’ aides (later they were used for foreign-language and nursing classes for orderlies).
Soon, not just Dagestanis, but people from other republics realized that, if you needed help, you went to Aishat. People flocked to her hospital from all the surrounding mountain communities. Aishat treated women of all nationalities. And, according to former patients, she treated everyone with the same care and warmth.
“She had all sorts of tests performed at the hospital,” Mazhanat recalls. “If the problem had something to do with female anatomy, they stayed there and she treated them. If it concerned other parts of the body, she arranged for them to go to other hospitals or invited in doctors working in other fields.”
Within a few years, Aishat’s hospital was being spoken of as the best in the Northern Caucasus. Aishat approached every diagnosis meticulously, selecting the necessary treatment and drugs.
“I remember how difficult it was for her to get medicines,” says Mesedu Ramazanova, who was treated by Aishat. “They just did not exist at that time, and in ordinary hospitals everyone was treated according to the same protocol. But Aishat went out of her way, using all her connections to find the medicines that were needed. She battled to extend hospitalization periods: my sister was in her hospital for the entire duration of her pregnancy! And, on top of that, was the level of care surrounding the patients in the hospital. Of course there were waiting lists to get in!”
Aishat never turned anyone away. All of her employees received the same instruction: “If a rural woman arrives, and we don’t have space, don’t tell them that. Just accept them, and put them up somewhere. They are from the mountains. They have no idea where to spend the night, where to go.”
“In order to get to Makhachkala from the mountains, you have travel more than 100 kilometers. It takes a good deal of time, and a good deal of what, in current circumstances, is problematic – money,” Aishat said in a 2008 interview with Kavkazsky Uzel (Caucasian Knot). “They cannot get into the hospital right away; they have to get tests. And where do people stay? How do they eat? Hotels are expensive, and villagers don’t want to embarrass their city relatives, so they come to our charity hospital simply to spend the night and eat. We don’t turn anyone away. We have two rooms available for such people.”
Patimat the baker recalls how she ended up in Aishat’s hospital after she was terribly mistreated at the central hospital. She had an operation, and after that her physician there proposed that she purchase and be injected with some expensive drugs. Patimat purchased them, and the nurse started injecting her. Only after Patimat’s condition worsened did she begin to suspect that she was being injected with saline.
“The ampules were in my bedside cabinet,” Patimat says. “The nurse came in, took the ampules, and left to prepare the injection in a different room. I had a reaction from the injections – I was shaking so much I almost bounced out of the bed… It turns out she was stealing my doses, and in exchange was doing some sort of simple injections of some analgesic or other. When all this happened, I told Aishat. She came to the hospital, figured everything out, and after that everyone there treated me as if I was Putin’s wife. After they signed me out of the central hospital, Aishat brought me to her hospital to recuperate.”
According to Patimat, there was a colossal difference in treatment and attitude between Aishat’s hospital and the central hospital:
“In the central hospital, they don’t look after you and demand money for everything. But at Aishat’s everything was set up to benefit the women in the hospital. Beds with proper mattresses. Medical equipment, massage beds.”
But what surprised patients the most is that Aishat herself did morning rounds, asking after the patients’ health.
“She would sit on the end of the bed and stroke their arms. ‘How are you? Are things alright for you here? Do you need anything? If there is a problem, just tell me.’”
When the women didn’t have any way to take care of their kids while they were recuperating, Aishat admitted the women with their children. She organized activities for them.
“Some patients walked all the way from their villages, and they cried when they saw the hospital,” Marzhinat recalls. “One woman was carrying a dead fetus, and didn’t know it. At the regional hospital they told her ‘You have a cyst.’ When it became unbearable, they advised she find Aishat, who escorted her back to the hospital for dilation and curettage. And then Aishat brought her back to our hospital until she recovered. And she gave her money for the trip home.”
The homeless asked the Dagestani Mother Teresa for food. She ordered that they be fed and found them clothing. Gypsies often knocked on the hospital doors, asking to use the restroom, begging for food. “Can’t you see, they have small children. Let them in!” Aishat said to the cook.
When the hospital had leftover food, Aishat had her custodian deliver the food to pregnant women at other hospitals. “Are they going hungry there?” Marzhanat asked, surprised. “They are pregnant,” Aishat replied, “they want badly to eat. And no one comes to visit them.”
Aishat regularly traveled to remote regions of Dagestan and other republics. She would tell the story of her hospital, consult, and give as much help on site as possible. In the villages, Aishat would gather the women together and explain to them how to care for themselves, how to preserve their health. She would talk about menopause, menstruation, intimate hygiene, medications. They were the same lectures she gave at the hospital.
“When Aishat arrived in a village, it was an event,” villagers recall. “Everyone waited for her and came to her with questions, be it on medicine, Islam, or secular topics. Poor thing, she never slept, and she gave her time to everyone.”
Aishat spoke with men as well. She asked them to create conditions to ease the burden on women: install indoor plumbing, build roads, help around the home. In the film The Fate of Dagestani Women,* which Aishat produced in 2008, she has a telling exchange where she asks a man who hauls the hay.
“Women.”
“Why?”
“Men don’t haul, that’s how it is.”
“How can that be changed?”
“It’s impossible to change! It is part of our heritage.”
“But it’s so difficult for women! They have to give birth…”
“Our women are strong!”
During the Second Chechen War (1999-2009) Aishat traveled to a refugee camp. In 2005, after the tragedy at Borozdinovsky village,º she and Marzhanat took 15 girls out of the camp and got them into a school (they had only finished eighth grade), then into a dormitory, continuing to take an interest in them.
Svetlana Anokhina, a journalist from Makhachkala who was the last to interview her before her death, said that Aishat often hid Russian or Chechen women who were victims of domestic violence in her hospital. A special rehabilitation program was created for them.
“She said to me, ‘You understand, it’s still very difficult for them to live there (at home). Even if they have washing machines.’ She recounted the story of one woman who had recuperated with her several times, including with broken ribs. The sons came and said ‘Mama, please don’t leave Papa. Come home, or else I will have to get married.’ In short, they sacrificed their mother. They made her keeper of the family hearth, and fed her into that hearth…”
At Aishat’s hospital there were often women there who simply needed to rest from their difficult home life.
“She told their husbands,” Anokhina continues, “Your wife has a serious female malady. She needs to rest.” And the men allowed them to go to the hospital. Aishat gave them a breather, so that they could keep breathing.”
“Once,” recalls Patimat, “a husband came for his wife, a patient. But she said to him, ‘I am not going home!’ What an uproar that was. He urged her to come home, and she cried out, ‘I don’t want to go. I am not going. Shovel your own manure!’”
Aishat truly loved children and wanted to have her own, but “Allah did not send any.” Perhaps that is why she often said that children are a gift, that you need to protect them. Many of her patients understood this to mean, “You give birth. I will take them.” Aishat only performed abortions for medical reasons.
Zagra Asadulayeva became pregnant at 39. She already had a son and two daughters. She did not want to give birth at her age and asked Aishat to “remove the child.” Aishat answered, “What do you mean?! Leave it. As a last resort, I will take it myself.”
“In the ninth month,” Zagra recalled, “she called me in: ‘It is, after all, a very late pregnancy, you will be under my supervision.’ I went and lived with her in her home. Before giving birth I had insomnia, I was very worried. Aishat lay down next to me and calmed me down, stroking my hair, my shoulders. My contractions began about five a.m. I went into the living room. She woke up to find me gone. She jumped up, ‘Zagra, where are you?’ And I said, ‘I am here, alive. It’s begun.’ And she says ‘What do you mean?!’ We got ourselves ready quickly, called for a taxi, and drove to her department at the central hospital. At nine a.m. I gave birth.”
Aishat proposed naming the little girl Patimat. When Zagra and her daughter were discharged from the hospital, Aishat asked, “Well, are you going to leave Patimat with me? I will hire a nanny. Everything will be fine.” Zagra answered, “I will breastfeed her for three months, then bring her to you.”
“Then,” Zagra recalls, “she was constantly calling me and teasing me, ‘Well, hasn’t it been three months by now?’ I tell my daughter constantly, ‘Thanks to Aishat, I had you.’ And I love her the best, probably because she was the last.”
The influx of patients increased over the years, and, as before, Aishat treated them for free as a matter of principle. The doctors, nurses, and the rest of the staff worked for very modest pay. Aishat racked her brains, trying to figure out how to raise money to cover the hospital’s needs. As a result, they opened a bakery, followed by a sewing workshop and a laundry. Patimat baked bread for sale and for the hospital, and cooked savory pies (pirogi) to order. In the mornings, the smell of freshly baked bread wafted over the hospital grounds. Everyone who remembered the hospital had the same recollection: it never smelled of medicine there, it smelled of bread and home.
The sewing workshop was run by Khadizhat Gitinova, a work-skills teacher from Godoberi whom Aishat invited to come work with them. Young women learned the seamstress’ art here, making curtains, sheets, medical uniforms, and patient gowns for the hospital in the process. They also took private orders.
“I taught sewing and tailoring to girls from needy families,” Gitinova says. “Their training was free, and they were fed and taught the Quran at the hospital. Aishat came up with the idea of sewing robes and pajamas for the patients. She sought out the most beautiful fabrics she could find, bringing back rolls from her travels. As a result, the patients in our hospital looked very different from patients at state hospitals.
Gitinova also sewed dresses for Aishat, who would wear them to haul construction material or sacks of vegetables about.
Patimat grumbled: “Aishat Shuaybovna, you are such a respected woman, you cannot be walking about like that! You have nice, expensive clothing, and you are carrying around boards, lifting sacks, dirtying your things! You need to say ‘Patimat, come here!’ And I will do it. You are the director, the head doctor. Sit behind a desk!”
The sewing instructor Khadizhat recalls the strong impression Aishat made on her when she first saw her in Makhachkala.
“I went to meet her, since I needed help. And I looked in the window and she was so beautiful, indescribable! Aishat was not yet covered. She had wavy, ruby hair down to her shoulders, a skirt and shoes. She caught your eye.”
“She had glossy skin,” Patimat recalls. “Smooth, beautiful cheeks. And her hands, even as she got older, were like those of a young girl.”
Aishat was late covering herself, hiding her gorgeous hair from prying eyes. All her headscarves were white or light-colored. At that time, open religiosity was not welcomed – Aishat’s former colleagues said that, as a result, she became something of an outcast to many, an “eyesore.” Aishat wore her headscarves like a cross.
“The first story I heard,” says Inna Ayrapetyan, head of the Sintem Resource Center, “was how, after the Chechen War, Aishat went to Grozny to tell women there about her hospital and bring some of them back for treatment (it was in part because of this that rumors started to circulate that Aishat was helping the rebels). One time, she witnessed a conflict between Chechens and Dagestanis near the Grozny hospital. The conflict was serious; it turned into a brawl. And Aishat, not knowing how to resolve the situation, took the white scarf from her head and threw it at the feet of the fighters. There is an ancient tradition that, when a woman takes off her headscarf and throws it between some men, they must throw down their arms and stop fighting. And the men actually stopped. That was a very cool thing she did.”
Aishat had a habit of giving away her favorite headscarf, or even a dress. All someone had to do was compliment her clothing. She had a similar response to gifts: anything anyone gave her, she passed on to others. When she received a tea service as a gift, she gave it to workers at the hospital.
As far as jewelry, she had just one Kubachi ring (Inna Ayrapetyan now has it as a keepsake) and a watch. She carried a Quran in a bag and faithfully performed the namaz (Muslim prayers). She made the Hajj pilgrimage several times and was pained that many of the people dear to her did not have that opportunity.
“She decided everything herself. That’s how she was from childhood,” says Shakhrulabazan Kamilovich, a male resident of Godoberi. “She had more courage than many a man. If I am going to be honest, I myself was afraid of her.”
According to Aishat’s former colleagues, her entire life consisted of prayers and work. She had a surprising combination of deep faith and progressive views.
Svetlana Anokhina recalls being surprised the first time she heard Aishat speak at a conference.
“At that time, I did not know Aishat,” Anokhina says, “but I had heard about her hospital. A conference was held there about the situation of women in the Northern Caucasus. I went there imagining that, once again there would be all sorts of empty talk about our values, our wonderful culture. And suddenly Aishat, who looked like a typical rural woman, stood up and spoke very eloquently about very simple things. That it is hard for mountain women, because, for example, they have no running water. And why is that? Are there no funds? There are funds, it is simply that no one feels the need to run plumbing lines. Men say to their wives, ‘My grandmother did laundry this way, my great grandmother did laundry this way, and you will do laundry this way.’ It was the first time I had heard such a human discussion on an official level. At that meeting I nonetheless said something confrontational, like ‘What are you telling us here, what a hard life you have? We know!’ At the next meeting, she recognized me, unexpectedly hugged me and stroked my cheek. It was the way a relative who had not seen you for a long time would hug you, because they missed you. It was such a human, warm hug… and I quickly felt warmed by it.”
From that day on, whenever Anokhina and Aishat met, they always chatted.
“Once,” Anokhina recalls, “Aishat said something that, for me, sounded revolutionary: ‘I don’t care who I admit [to my hospital], whether she is a perfect mother or a prostitute. I feel very sorry for prostitutes. Everything inside them is so pink and mother-of-pearl, and it gets treated so carelessly. Poor women are often deprived of the opportunity to give birth.’ I was blown away! An Avar woman from a village voicing such feminist ideas! It is customary to say ‘najasa’ (that which is unclean, that which should not be touched or is disgusting) about prostitutes. She spoke of a sort of precious mechanism that is treated barbarically and winds up being ruined.”
Inna Ayrapetyan also recalls meeting Aishat at a peace conference.
“There were many public figures and activists there. We talked about security. In the middle of my speech, Aishat jumped up from her seat and said, ‘You young people, if you are afraid, then you don’t have to get involved in activism! You are not activists if you don’t understand that it is a struggle! And you should be ready for the worst possible outcome.’ She seriously scared me at that point. I asked, ‘You talk about going to the end. Does that mean even dying for our ideas?’
“During the break, Aishat came up to me, hugged me and started to explain, ‘You work in a very complex region. It’s difficult for you. I understand that you see lots of grief and hear lots of difficult stories. Me too. But you have to decide if you want to be with these women to the end. In order to be with them, to work with them, you have to love them very much.’”
In the early 2000s, officials made their first attempt to take away Aishat Magomedova’s hospital. Representatives from Goskomimushchestva (the State Property Committee) arrived with questions about “incorrectly” filled-out paperwork. Even today, no one can say for sure why this effort was started. The most common explanation is that the land on which the hospital sat, right in the city center, had attracted the attention of some businessman. Rumor has it that it was a former high-ranking official at the Ministry of Health.
According to Valentina Cherevatenko, who heads up the nonprofit Women of the Don (Женщины Дона), and who at that time was collaborating with Aishat on some projects, it was the same people who signed the original agreement with her who first demanded the return of the hospital complex: the Ministry of Health’s Committee for Property Management.
“We took a look at the documents (the agreement that transferred the hospital to Aishat for perpetual use),” says Cherevatenko, “and it turned out that, from a legal standpoint, there were some big holes, and the transfer of the hospital to Aishat would be rather easy to reverse. Unfortunately, Aishat did not examine the documents very carefully back in the beginning. She was in the sway of the Caucasian mentality: “But we had an agreement.” Aishat in her headscarf gave the impression of a weak, submissive woman. And my hypothesis is that when they transferred the premises to her, they were sure that they would be able to take the property back with the snap of their fingers. And so the documents were specially drafted for that. Yet when they snapped their fingers, they were met with resistance from her side. She held out to the death. In the truest sense: her death is directly connected with what she had to endure.”
At about that time, Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, arrived in Dagestan. Cherevatenko staked her out in her hotel to explain how officials wanted to take away Aishat’s hospital. One of Robinson’s aides proposed that Cherevatenko attend an official breakfast.
“I arrived at the breakfast,” Cherevatenko recalls, “and on one side of the table sat Mary Robinson, her aide Tanya Smith, and a translator. Opposite her was [Oleg] Mironov, Russian Commissioner for Human Rights, the head of the government of Dagestan, Magomedali Magomedov, and the Press Minister Salikh Gusayev. It was not possible to speak directly about what was going on with the hospital. So I said, ‘In this republic there is a unique hospital for women, and it is functioning well. There is not another like it anywhere in the country, perhaps in the world. But there is one problem – the head of the republic has never visited it.’ I was counting on them to seize on this. Indeed, a delegation that included Magomedov and Gusayev did visit.”
For a few years after the visit, Magomedova was left in peace. But then, in 2007, they showed up again, this time to scrutinize her finances. Just prior to this, Gusayev, who had been helping Aishat, was assassinated, and, as Cherevatenko put it, Aishat no longer had a defender.
“Her financial statements, to put it mildly,” Cherevatenko says, “had weaknesses. An insufficiently serious attitude to accounting – many in the nonprofit world suffer from this problem, to say nothing of Aishat! Suddenly she has not five but fifteen women show up and she needs to think about where to house them, how to treat them, where to get medicines.”
Simultaneously with the audit, rumors began to circulate that Aishat was helping the Chechen rebels. The hospital was visited by FSB agents who told Aishat that her Mother and Child Defense League was a pro-Wahhabi organization.
“I don’t know what he meant. It doesn’t matter to me if a woman who comes for treatment is wearing a headscarf or not,” Aishat said in an interview at the time with The Caucasian Knot. “Anyone who comes to us for medical aid, we are obligated to help them – we swore the Hippocratic Oath. I am first and foremost a doctor, not a politician.”
According to Inna Ayrapetyan, Aishat actually did treat wives of rebels in the hospital in 2000. But she did not know it at the time.
“Two pregnant women came to her in the hospital,” Ayrapetyan says, “and she didn’t know who they were. One night, armed men entered the ward. Aishat was afraid, but they thanked her for helping their wives, and one of them took his wife away. Aishat asked him not to take her, since she was at risk of miscarriage. Later, that woman wrote to Aishat, saying she had had a hemorrhage while traveling and lost her child. It was then that this information was leaked and that Aishat started to be accused of aiding the militants.
In the end, the Property Committee issued a decree repealing its decision to transfer the hospital building to Aishat’s foundation and asked her to evacuate it. Aishat refused and the Property Committee made its demand through the courts. The Charitable Hospital for Women Foundation filed a countersuit against the Property Committee. Endless court wranglings ensued.
“Every day, different people came to the hospital and tormented Aishat,” Patimat recalls. “They asked where she got the money for her hospital. Made threats.”
Aishat began to fear for her life.
“The story of Aishat is archetypical,” says journalist Anokhina. “A little woman, without an army, without anything, stands up to a huge system. Then the state unites with certain unpleasant people, and they start shoving her: “Why are you standing here?” And she stands her ground. Because it is her ground. She has grown deep roots there. Where else is she going to go?”
According to Anokhina, Aishat at one point became too prominent a public figure: a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize (in 2005), one of the best doctors in the republic, the main speaker at every human rights conference. Aishat herself said that, if they could, they would have accused her of espionage.
“First the Nobel Prize. Second, all of her foreign trips, where she spoke about the state of affairs in Dagestan, made people uncomfortable. Third, she publicly said unpleasant things. That a woman has a right to a divorce. That we have crazy laws. This worried them [the officials].”
Shakhrulabazan Abduldibirov was one of the few men who testified on Aishat’s behalf in court. In his words, the state health authorities “did not like the fact that people were being healed at Aishat’s hospital.”
“The things people were saying were too good. She became too successful in medicine. She implemented things that others did not want to implement. It turned out that, when compared with her, state medicine was limping along. She was 100 steps ahead of them, and that made them angry.”
Ayrapetyan says that some envied Aishat and others just generally wished her ill. And so, when state authorities began to apply pressure on her from all sides, people perceived her as weak and turned their backs on her.
She became too successful in medicine. She was 100 steps ahead of them, and that made them angry.
“Overnight, she became persona non grata,” said Ayrapetyan. “I remember how she was not invited to a certain conference, because they were afraid. And we, her colleagues, raised a ruckus: ‘Why isn’t Aishat here, the most important person?’ The organizers were embarrassed, and quickly invited her. To this day I remember that moment when she entered. The entire hall was instantly astir. And everyone stood up, both those who were afraid of her and those who loved her.
“Aishat’s hospital was constantly being compared with state hospitals. People would say that hers was much better, people were paid more attention, the treatment was good. This infuriated the bureaucrats. No one knows who actually needed her hospital [building]. Even Aishat could not identify a specific culprit. She said to me, ‘If they had been willing to leave me just one small part of it, so that I could continue to treat women for free, I would have made peace with that. I tried to talk with them about this, but they would not speak with me.’ In short, they wanted her to just go away. Completely.”
Once, some strange men came into the hospital building. One of them pointed a pistol at Aishat’s leg. She didn’t cry out, but simply stared him down. The man holstered his pistol and shoved Aishat on her shoulder. She later told Ayrapetyan that this had caused her considerable pain. Not physically, but because the man who pushed her was about the age her son would have been, had she had one.
“We feared everyone,” recalls Aishat’s sister Zagra, who often came to visit. “I remember how late one night someone knocked on our door. I said ‘Ashat, if it’s a man, don’t open it.’ I thought that they would simply murder us. But it turned out that some of her acquaintances were delivering cheese, butter, and tvorog for the hospital.”
The seamstress Gitinova once saw Aishat in the courtyard of the hospital, watching a cat play with a mouse:
“He catches it, then lets it go. Then he catches it again. And Aishat is standing there and watching. She stood there for a very long time. I had never seen her like that before, wasting her time in that way. She was probably comparing herself to that mouse. They were toying with her the same way.”
The baker Patimat recalls that Aishat received countless threats, including death threats. The police burst into her home to conduct searches. She was followed. But Aishat did not want others to become entangled in her problems. She once described how, on the way home, she was surrounded by three men who threatened to kill her. Aishat was so scared she wet herself on the spot. Patimat asked her why she wouldn’t hire a bodyguard. Aishat replied, “Allah is my bodyguard. He will protect me.” After that Patimat became Aishat’s unofficial bodyguard.
“The Ministry of Health headquarters are not far from the hospital entrance,” Patimat says. “Once, two men approached her – one young and thin, another haughty and overweight, wearing a gold chain around his neck. ‘Aishat Shuaybovna, we are putting in a road, and your bakery is in the way. You need to remove your bakery!’ She stood silently in front of them, like a quiet, covered woman. He is threatening, yelling. And I am standing behind her. I knew she didn’t want me to intercede, to cause a fuss. But he was pushing her, so I couldn’t stop myself. I stepped forward and said, ‘Why did you come here!? Why are you threatening her, humiliating her? Do you think she has no one? You know what they say in our village? It just takes one whistle, and tomorrow there will be a load of people here.’ And he had this finger with a long fingernail. Rings. And the gold chain. And I say, ‘You are not a man! She is a respected doctor. She helps women! Maybe your sister even gave birth at her hospital! Maybe your wife! Aren’t you ashamed to humiliate her? Get out of here. Leave her!’ And they left. But not before asking who I was. ‘I’m her bodyguard,’ I said.”
After that, Patimat always followed Aishat wherever she went.
At the same time her legal woes were mounting, Aishat started having serious liver problems. Her colleagues and friends were certain that she became ill due to the stress of the threats and pressure.
“Prior to the eviction, Aishat was perfectly healthy,” Patimat says. “She ate well. No fats, sweets, plenty of vegetables. But what they were doing to her...”
The entire time the authorities were ramping up the pressure on Aishat, she continued seeing patients. But she never took the time to look after her own health: along with the legal troubles and work in the hospital, Aishat devoted time to children.
At the same time she was enduring this harassment, Aishat adopted three of her nephew’s children. Their mother had been stripped of her maternal rights, and the nephew, according to relatives’ accounts, was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Aishat cared for the children as if they were her own. She tried to get them an education, to make them “good, smart people.”
Irina Kosterina, program director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which collaborated on some projects with Aishat, recalls that “when I visited her for the last time, she was already in great pain, she could barely walk. But she could not ignore this misfortune and adopted the children, despite her relatives’ objections. At the time she was getting the girl, Suaybat, ready for school. She adored her, and kept lamenting, ‘What will happen to her when I die?’”
“They started calling her from various numbers,” Inna Ayrapetyan recalls, “threatening to take away the children. Those children were her most valuable possession. These kids, especially the girl, were her final glimmers of happiness. She said that when she hugged Suaybat, the whole word was wrapped in her arms… And when they started threatening to take away her children, that was a tremendous blow.”
The charity hospital’s eviction was widely covered in local and national media, and human rights activists and representatives of Russian and foreign nonprofits spoke out in support of Aishat. Under public pressure the bureaucrats sought to conclude a rental agreement with Aishat for use of the building as a hospital. The initial proposal, according to Aishat, suggested the unrealistic price of R2 million per year (about $30,000). Later, the price was lowered to R400,000, but even that was beyond Aishat’s means. She explained that the donations they received were spent on medicine, food, and equipment. There was no extra money for rent. Aishat, who had been saving lives all her life for free, could not wrap her head around the idea that the bureaucrats were demanding money from her. After all, she was helping the government do its job!
The court cases dragged on interminably. Former patients, relatives, and strangers from all across Dagestan showed up to support Aishat.
“I attended the hearings,” recalls Timur Isayev, a journalist from The Caucasian Knot. “At the last one there were over 100 women from our village and from all across the republic! They lined up in front of the courthouse holding signs and chanting slogans. In the courtroom, Aishat behaved with dignity and calm. If she cried, then it was only where she could not be seen.”
“Our entire village went to court three or four times,” says the sewing teacher Gitinova. “There were lots of people; entire busloads showed up. But who is going to listen to simple people? No one, especially if there is pressure from above.”
“A woman is unable to defend her rights,” says Aishat’s relative, Zhariyat Gayirbekova.
In between court appearances, Aishat was able to travel to Germany for medical treatment. Cirrhosis of the liver was setting in, her legs were very swollen, and she could barely walk. She was treated, but her condition was still bad. Hospital workers started noticing Aishat sitting for long periods, staring at a point outside the window. She started acting strangely, absent-mindedly.
“Aishat would fall asleep on her feet,” says Gitinova. “It was clear that she was having trouble running the hospital. But she kept coming in until the very end, treating patients, and paying attention to every detail.”
Aishat lost her final case on April 29, 2008. Afterwards, a crowd of crying supporters gathered in the hospital courtyard. But Aishat could not make herself leave her office and go out to see them.
Patimat went into her office: “‘Aishat Shuaybovna, why don’t you go outside?’ I said. ‘These people came from the village to support you! Go out and say thank you to them!’ But she replied, ‘Patimat, I am embarrassed, I cannot go outside…’ And I say, ‘Let’s go, Aishat, don’t be shy. You only have to say three words: “May Allah grant you health.”’ She went out, thanked them with difficulty, and nearly cried. She was so embarrassed because people had had to travel to come support her, yet nothing good had come of it.’”
“I wish we could have helped her, defended her,” says Shakhrulabazan Abduldibirov. “We cannot understand all that she went through, not even one percent of it.”
On May 19, 2008, over 100 women from the mountain regions of Dagestan and other republics gathered on Makhachkala’s main square. It was the final attempt to protest the closing of the women’s charity hospital. That morning they rode together in minibuses to the capital, their spirits high. The night before, they had made signs:
“Hands off the Women’s Charity Hospital!”
“Look Around, Change Your Mind, Stop! Fear Allah!”
“We, the Women of Dagestan, Will Defend our Rights!”
Makhachkala had never seen such a mass demonstration by women. The mountain women sat on the square until evening. They yelled, cried, and prayed. But no one from the government came out to meet with them.
Officials gave the hospital six months to vacate the premises, but no one was planning on going anywhere. The women hoped until the very last that the officials would just leave the hospital in peace. On the second floor, the operating theater that Aishat had dreamed of for many years was ready to open. Aishat said she would continue to fight, but just before the final eviction date she was in Moscow, in critical condition in an intensive care unit.
Lidia Grafova, Executive Committee Chairwoman of the Forum of Migration Organizations, who knew Aishat well, visited her in the hospital. “Dagestan’s Mother Teresa lies in intensive care in a Moscow hospital,” she said at the time, “while at the same time in Makhachkala they are destroying the unique charity hospital that she created. Aishat’s life directly depends on the fate of this, her brainchild… I visited Aishat again the other day. She didn’t recognize me, and she herself was unrecognizable. Her white scarf had come off her head, her gray hair was scattered across her pillow, and she whispered something incomprehensible through lips that were chapped and rimmed with black. Only once did she open her eyes and say very clearly, without any evidence of self-pity, “It’s painful. You have no idea how painful it is…”
The hospital was forcibly vacated in February 2009.
Akhmat Kadyrov, president of Chechnya, proposed that Aishat open a charity hospital in that republic, and promised to offer a building and everything needed for her work. He invited Aishat and Inna Airepetyan to come see him in Chechnya, but Aishat was categorically against leaving Dagestan.
Under pressure from Ella Pamfilova, who stood up for Aishat (and who has since held various positions in the Putin government), officials offered the hospital a building at 16 Beybulatova Street. It needed repairs, water, and power. There was no place there for a kitchen, a bakery, or a laundry. Aishat was exhausted. Nevertheless, with all of her remaining strength she tried. A colleague, physician Malikat Dzhabirova, helped her move and settle in at the new place.
“At that time, Aishat was already very sick,” Dzhabirova recalls, “and before she died, she said to me, ‘Please, I ask you, don’t abandon my life’s work.’ She made me head doctor, I created the Mother and Child nonprofit, and from 2009 to 2014 built up this hospital. That was when I learned the word ‘fundraising.’ I went around begging for building materials, for food, doors, screens for the windows, because the building sat on a swamp, and there were clouds of mosquitoes. I hustled around to all the organizations, asking for money. Today we have plans and grants, but back then they looked at us like we were crazy.
“We spent a long time fixing up the building, but the health inspectors would not grant us a license. Either we didn’t have this, or lacked that. And how were we supposed to do our job if we had no money? Maksud Sadikov, rector of the Theological Institute, supported us. He had helped Aishat and helped us to move, to get on our feet. In May 2011, he was murdered. I was all alone, but we kept on working, trying. And then the Migration Committee took my name off all the documents, took everything for itself. And they kicked us out. I was at a conference in Tbilisi, got back a week later, and all our things were lying in the street, in the rain and mud. The hospital was already being renovated, all the partitions had been knocked down… All our work was down the drain. It was so devastating. All I could do was gather up some of Aishat’s photos and books. Some of the things we gave to the mosque, some were taken by relatives.”
Svetlana Anokhina conducted an interview with Aishat six months before her death. She recalls that it was painful to look at her.
“She was swollen, yellow. Her feet did not fit in her slippers. It was a truly agonizing interview, because she was often unable to form a thought, so we formed them together. In the past, my impression was always of Aishat running here and there. Because she was always saying, ‘The mountains, the mountains... I was here, and I was there..’ And also because the work of a doctor and human rights defender means you’re always on the move. But now her legs were simply tired, they could no longer run or even carry her. And so, for me, her legs became a symbol of all her activity that had been brought to a halt. She fought for the hospital, for herself, and for her cause, and for the women who depended on her. And now she was broken, although the truth was still on her side.”
Aishat Magomedova died on December 26, 2010, in a Makhachkala hospital. She was 66. Before her death, Marzhanat held the Quran up for Aishat so she could read the Surah Yasin.* She was able to read two pages, then became weary and closed her eyes forever.
Marzhanat kept that Quran with a bookmark on those final pages in Aishat’s life.
In her native village of Godoberi, Aishat is remembered fondly.
“No one will say a bad word about Aishat Shuaybovna. She was good, very good,” say some women at the local market, offering story after story about how she helped each one of them. They say that the hospital is back to taking bribes again, asking to be paid for services. And it is still a long way away, but the roads in some villages have gotten better, and you can now travel there by car.
I was shown the rebuilt home where Aishat lived, and the school she attended. Nowhere is there a plaque with her name on it. There is nothing to commemorate her. There was one recent tribute, however: Magomedova’s nephew had a little girl and named her Aishat.
Little has changed in Godoberi since her death. It has the same old paramedic station (Aishat had wanted to renovate it, to hire a doctor and install a massage table). The women still plow the fields, drive the cattle out to pasture in the morning, and collect pinecones and hay high in the mountains. The men work on construction sites throughout the country. Yet the number of good homes in Godoberi has increased, and women no longer have to trek high up the mountain for water. In 2017 the seamstress Khadizhat Gitinova, who now owned a small café, paid to install a water line into Godoberi. Her son died in a car crash, after which she sold the apartment she had purchased for him and invested the money in her native village. She says that she was inspired by Aishat to help the women.
Aishat asked to be buried in Godoberi.
“You need to dig my grave…” she said to her bodyguard Patimat.
Surprised, Patimat replied, “Aishat, are you crazy? You are alive, healthy. Why do you need a grave?”
“I could die any day now… Don’t leave me here. Take me back to the village.”
Her friends fulfilled her wishes. Aishat’s grave is at the very top of the graveyard. Three frayed silk ribbons adorn the rectangular headstone. This is the custom here: if you visit a grave, tie a ribbon around the headstone. Many other tombstones have more ribbons; they are more recent. Aishat gets few visitors.
Before her death, Aishat made a will and ordered that her apartment be sold and the proceeds be distributed in part to her adopted children. But 20 percent was to be given to those who wanted to make a pilgrimage to the Hajj; 30 percent to those who wanted to receive an Islamic education, and 10 percent for construction of roads in those distant mountainous regions where she often traveled to treat women.
“If it had been a man in Aishat’s place, he would have done an incredible amount,” said her executor Aishat Ahmed. “But even as a woman, she achieved a lot.”
When they shut down the hospital at 3 Yermoshkin Street, former custodian Marzhanat went inside the abandoned building, huddled in a corner and prayed.
In the 11 years that have passed since Aishat and her hospital were evicted, nothing has been built here, although a residential building was erected directly alongside the hospital’s former building. Nothing gets built, Aishat’s friends say, because “Allah doesn’t allow it.”
“They can’t sell this place,” says the seamstress Gitinova. “All the owners die. One died, then they sold it to another, and he died. And then the third died. And the mayor, under whom all this took place, has been put in jail.”
After the second hospital’s eviction, therapist Malikat Dzhabirova continued helping women. Her organization Mother and Child provided legal, informational, and humanitarian aid, helping them defend their rights.
In 2020, a post appeared on Facebook over Dzhabirova’s name, in which she apparently railed about Russia’s political and legal system. The prosecutor’s office filed a lawsuit.
“Investigative authorities broke into her home, conducted a search, and dragged in her neighbors as witnesses,” says Inna Ayrapetyan. “She became very afraid for her husband and family. In court, her lawyer proved that the interview was fake, yet the organization nonetheless was forced to shut down. Malikat said to me, ‘It’s the same thing that happened with Aishat. I don’t want to end up like her.’ And so nothing remains of Aishat’s legacy.”
Malikat Dzhabirova did not reply to requests for an interview.
There is no monument to Aishat Magomedova in Dagestan. Svetlana Anokhina suggests that, if there were, it could be created to look like the headscarf that Aishat often wore: huge, white, with a fringe that would envelope everyone. But, since no one is likely to create such a monument, let the dilapidated hospital be her memorial. With a small memorial tablet hanging from the rusty gates.
“Nothing should ever be built there,” says Anokhina “Let it all be overgrown with wild grass and trees. At least those will be living things.”
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