Nina Litvinova, a Moscow dissident, scholar, and human rights activist, took her own life at the age of 80, according to a recent social media post from journalist Masha Slonim. Slonim, Litvinova’s cousin, quoted a suicide note in which Litvinova described her despair over Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and her inability to help political prisoners.
“Today, RIA Novosti reported, based on information from law enforcement agencies, that our sister Nina Litvinova took her own life. [...]
Of course, neither RIA nor Gazeta.ru, which reported this, will publish the note. It lays bare the reasons for her passing all too clearly, so we have decided to reveal the real reasons:
Putin killed her! [...] Here is what she wrote about the reasons for taking her own life:
‘I love you all and think of you. But I must go; I can no longer bear to live. Ever since Putin attacked Ukraine and has been killing innocent people, and here at home he has been endlessly imprisoning thousands of people who are suffering and dying there simply because, like me, they are against war and against killing. There is nothing I can do to help them. Zhenya [Evgeniya] Berkovich, Svetlana Petriychuk, Karina Tsurkan, and thousands of others are suffering and dying behind bars. I tried to help them, but my strength has run out, and I am tormented day and night by my powerlessness.
I am ashamed, but I have given up. Please forgive me.’”
Nina Litvinova’s death was confirmed on May 13. She was found unconscious beneath the windows of a residential building on Frunzenskaya Street. Medics who arrived at the scene were unable to save her.
Litvinova was born in 1945 to mathematician Mikhail Litvinov and physiologist Flora Yasinovskaya (Litvinova). She was the granddaughter of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet people’s commissar for foreign affairs from 1930 to 1939. Her brother, Pavel Litvinov, is a physicist, teacher and dissident who took part in the 1968 “Demonstration of the Seven” on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
For more than 40 years, Nina Litvinova worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oceanology, where she studied the biology of brittle stars, a class of bottom-dwelling echinoderms. She published several scientific papers and described several new species of the animals.
Litvinova had helped political prisoners since the 1960s. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights organization Memorial wrote that in the past eight years, she attended the trials of Yury Dmitriev, a Karelian researcher of Stalin-era repression, veteran rights activist Oleg Orlov, and theater director Evgeniya Berkovich. She also helped lesser-known political prisoners who received little media attention. Russian literary critic Anna Narinskaya said Litvinova brought books to the women in the “New Greatness” case who were under house arrest and cared for them.
