Roza Aitmatova

Roza Aitmatova died on 26 October 2026, aged 89. She had been ill and died at home; the writer Topchugul Shaidullaeva, who was with her shortly before she died, confirmed the death to BBC Kyrgyz. The Chyngyz Aitmatov Foundation announced her death, describing her as a public figure, educator, Honoured Education Worker of Kyrgyzstan and younger sister of Chyngyz Aitmatov, and relatives confirmed it to Sputnik Kyrgyzstan. The public figure Assol Moldokmatova confirmed it to the state news agency Kabar.

No cause of death beyond her illness was made public, and funeral arrangements had not been announced when her death was first reported.

Rozetta Torokulovna Aitmatova, always known as Roza, was born in Moscow on 8 March 1937. Her father, Torokul Aitmatov, was a prominent party and state official of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, and her mother, Nagima Aitmatova, was a public figure in her own right. Her elder brother Chyngyz became the most celebrated Kyrgyz writer of the twentieth century, and another brother, Ilgiz, was a scientist.

She was born in the year of the Great Terror. Her father was arrested in 1937 and shot on 5 November 1938, and for years afterwards the family suffered the hardships and stigma faced by relatives of those branded "enemies of the people". She grew up in Kyrgyzstan and finished secondary school in Talas.

In 1963 Aitmatova graduated from the faculty of physics and mathematics of the Vladimir Mayakovsky Kyrgyz Women's Pedagogical Institute in Frunze, now Bishkek. She went on to research in crystallography and earned the degree of Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

She began her working life at the Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz SSR. In 1977 she returned to the institute where she had studied, working as a lecturer, docent and head of department and later as vice rector for educational work. She taught there until 1999, helping to train generations of schoolteachers, and was awarded the title Honoured Education Worker of Kyrgyzstan.

From the 1990s her public work centred on women's rights and gender equality. She attended the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and in 1996 she and colleagues founded the Women's Support Center, a public association that worked to raise women's legal awareness and widen their social and economic opportunities. She served as its president. In 1997 she translated the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women into Kyrgyz and prepared commentaries on its articles. She also wrote training materials on women's rights and led a Gender School programme that helped develop women leaders in regions across Kyrgyzstan.

Alongside this she wrote on history. Her book on the blank spots of history drew on archival documents to tell the story of her father's life, the Stalinist repressions and the fate of the family. In 2022 she published a book of her brother Ilgiz Aitmatov's recollections of his childhood and youth, including his wartime years as a village postman.

Aitmatova was a lifelong guardian of her family's memory. She spoke frequently in interviews, at commemorations and on social media about her father and about her brother Chyngyz, and in later years stepped in publicly to defend the writer's legacy in debates about how it was being preserved. In recognition of her services to the country she received a personal pension of the Kyrgyz Republic.

Aitmatova is remembered in Kyrgyzstan for her contribution to science and education, for helping to build the country's women's rights movement after independence, and for preserving the history of the Aitmatov family, including the truth about her father's fate in the purges. Her Kyrgyz translation of the convention on discrimination against women and her Gender School training programme reached women far beyond the capital. BBC Kyrgyz wrote that she would be remembered as a person who contributed to the development of science, education and the women's rights movement in Kyrgyzstan.