15 May 2026
by Novaya gazeta Evropa
Source: Novaya gazeta Evropa
Human rights activist and dissident Nina Litvinova has taken her own life because of the war in Ukraine and her inability to help political prisoners in Russia. This is clear from her suicide note, an excerpt of which was published by her cousin, journalist Maria Slonim.
Litvinova writes:
‘I must go; life has become unbearable for me. It has been unbearable ever since Putin attacked Ukraine, killing innocent people, while here at home thousands of people are being endlessly imprisoned, people who suffer and die in prison simply because they, like I do, oppose the war and oppose the killing. <…>
I have tried to help them, but my strength has run out, and day and night I am tormented by my helplessness. I am ashamed, but I have given up. Please forgive me.’
Slonim noted that the suicide of her cousin was reported by state-run news agency RIA Novosti and by Gazeta.ru. They also mentioned that the human rights activist had left a suicide note but did not publish its contents.
Slonim writes:
‘No one, […] of course, will publish the note. It lays out the reasons for her death far too clearly, so we decided to reveal the real cause: Putin killed her!’
Who Was Nina Litvinova? The human rights activist was the granddaughter of Maksim Litvinov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and the sister of Pavel Litvinov, a participant in the Red Square demonstration on August 25, 1968, protesting against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
For more than forty years, Nina Litvinova worked at the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she studied the biology of brittle stars (ophiuroids), a class of benthic echinoderms. She published numerous scientific papers and described several new species of these animals.
According to an obituary published by Memorial, Litvinova had been helping political prisoners since the 1960s. During the Soviet era, she read and distributed samizdat publications, attended trials, visited her brother and other dissidents in exile, and brought them letters, books, and parcels.
Over the last eight years, Litvinova travelled to Petrozavodsk for the trials of historian Yuri Dmitriev, attended court hearings in the cases of Memorial co-chair Oleg Orlov and theatre director Yevgenia Berkovich, as well as helping many lesser-known political prisoners.
In its obituary, Memorial wrote: ‘This quiet and almost invisible support for those being persecuted was her consciously chosen strategy. For Nina Litvinova, refusing to take part in official lies and providing everyday assistance to political prisoners were natural acts that required no heroization.’
Translated by Annabel Pedgley
