Human rights defender and dissident Nina Litvinova died by suicide amid the war in Ukraine and her inability to help political prisoners in Russia. This follows from her suicide note, a fragment of which was published by Litvinova’s cousin, journalist Maria Slonim.
“I must leave, life has become unbearable for me. Ever since Putin attacked Ukraine and has been killing innocent people, while here thousands of people are endlessly being thrown into prison, suffering and dying there because they, like me, are against the war and against killing.
I tried to help them, but my strength ran out and I suffer day and night from helplessness. I am ashamed, but I gave up. Please forgive me.”
Slonim noted that the death of her cousin was reported by the state outlets RIA Novosti and Gazeta.ru. According to her, those outlets also mentioned the existence of a suicide note but did not publish its contents.
“No one, <...> of course, will publish the note. The reasons for her departure are shown there far too plainly, and we decided to show the real reasons: Putin killed her!” Slonim wrote.
Who Nina Litvinova Was
Nina Litvinova was the granddaughter of foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov and the sister of Pavel Litvinov, a participant in the Red Square demonstration on August 25, 1968, against the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia.
For more than forty years, she worked at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she studied the biology of brittle stars, a class of benthic echinoderms. She published a number of scientific works and described several new species of these animals.
According to an obituary by Memorial, Litvinova had been helping political prisoners since the 1960s. In the Soviet period, she read and circulated samizdat, attended court hearings, traveled to visit her brother and other dissidents in exile, and carried letters, books, and parcels.
Over the last eight years, Litvinova traveled to Petrozavodsk for the trials of historian Yury Dmitriyev, attended hearings in the cases of Memorial co-chair Oleg Orlov and theater director Yevgenia Berkovich, and also helped many lesser-known political prisoners.
“It was precisely this quiet and almost invisible support for those being persecuted that was her consciously chosen strategy. For Nina Litvinova, refusing to take part in official lies and providing everyday help to political prisoners were something natural that required no heroization,” Memorial said in the obituary.