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This article draws on many years of fieldwork experience in Chechnya and addresses the methodological and ethical challenges of researching the memory of armed conflicts under conditions of its total securitization. Analyzing the practice of collecting a corpus of more than 150 semi-structured interviews with former combatants and witnesses of the events of 1994–2009, the author examines the specificity of the Chechen field as a “sensitive” one in a threefold dimension: as a zone of political taboos, where public speech about the past is strictly regulated; as a space of unspoken trauma, protected by complex cultural mechanisms; and as an environment where the figure of the researcher itself becomes a source of potential risk for informants, necessitating special safety protocols and ethical reflection.Attention is focused on interview strategies under conditions of the constant probing of the boundaries of the permissible, the key marker of which is the filter question “How do you call it?” that determines the very possibility of conversation. The analysis covers the negotiation practices of choosing neutral lexicon, the mechanisms of internal censorship and self-censorship, and the problem of archiving “inconvenient” narratives in a situation where their publication could be unsafe for respondents. Special attention is paid to reflecting on the position of a female researcher in a field dominated by male narratives of war, and to how the gendered and ethnic markedness of the “outsider” can, paradoxically, become a resource for building trust.The central thesis asserts the necessity of a methodological shift: from attempts to record “facts” towards an analysis of the very conditions of the production of oral history, where silences, pauses, lacunae, and defensive speech strategies rooted in a confessional vision of lived experience become key sources for understanding the workings of memory in a post-conflict society. This approach allows us to see the constraints imposed by the sensitive field not as an obstacle, but as valuable material for analyzing how the traumatic past continues to live in the present, interpreted through the prism of religious tradition and collective notions of fate and fortitude.