18 May 2026
Moscow bid farewell to human rights activist Nina Litvinova, who took her own life, as she herself wrote, out of ‘helplessness’
By Zoya Svetova
Source: Novaya Gazeta
Moscow has bid farewell to biologist and human rights activist Nina Litvinova, who took her own life on 12 May. She was 80 years old.
Zoya Svetova recalls what this remarkable woman was like, whose tragic death has shaken everyone who, like her, suffers from a sense of powerlessness and the impossibility of changing what is currently happening.
Nina left her family a suicide note in which she explained the reasons for her decision: “I love you all and think of you. But I must leave; life is unbearable for me…” Nina wrote that her act was linked to the events of 24 February 2022, against which she was protesting; she could not come to terms with the fact that “thousands of people are imprisoned, suffering and dying there, because, like me, they are against the war and against the killings. There is nothing I can do to help them. Zhenya Berkovich, Svetlana Petriychuk, Karina Tsurkan and thousands of others behind bars are suffering and dying. 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.”
Farewell to ‘Angel Nina’
Many people came to say goodbye. Two hundred and fifty, perhaps three hundred people. In the centre of the large funeral hall, a polished, closed coffin stood on a pedestal, beside which a sea of white and red flowers quickly formed. My eyes gradually adjusted to the fact that the coffin was closed; the flowers seemed to shift the focus of my gaze. I knew most of the people who were saying goodbye to Nina Litvinova on that hot May day; I had met them at political trials, at events organised by the Sakharov Centre* and Memorial**. Someone later joked sadly: “We used to meet at rallies, and now we meet at funerals.” Friends, colleagues and relatives approached the coffin and spoke, sometimes addressing Nina, sometimes everyone in the room.
“Mum helped political prisoners. She was particularly concerned about female political prisoners,” Nina’s son Artem was the first to speak. He read an excerpt from one of her letters and his short speech had a heart-wrenching conclusion: “She couldn’t live with all this. She took her own life. Mum is no longer with us.”
His eldest daughter, Marusya, remembered her grandmother as a dear friend:
“In the family, we called her Ninochka. She took everything very much to heart. She gave so much to others — her attention, her strength, her love, her care — leaving nothing for herself. That is what will remain with us.”
Marina Artamonova, who met Nina at one of the trials, travelled with her to Sandarmokh (near Petrozavodsk where executed Gulag prisoners were buried. —Novaya), recalled how they became friends, celebrated birthdays and supported one another: “On that day, the day she died, we spoke in the morning, discussing plans for the following week; we were going to visit a friend of ours. She said: ‘Perhaps, I don’t know yet.’ And at 12 o’clock she suddenly wrote: ‘All the best to you.’ I was slightly surprised by that phrase. That was how she said goodbye to me.”
Nina’s colleagues at the institute spoke of her, as did former prisoners she had supported with letters and parcels.
Olga Bendas (sentenced to two years in a penal colony for using force against a police officer on 23 January 2021 during a solidarity rally with Aleksei Navalny, while protecting an elderly man. — Novaya), whose case Nina Litvinova had taken on and who met her on her release from prison, could not hold back her tears when she recalled her ‘angel Nina’: ‘From the very first lines of her letter, I felt so at ease with her. She was always with me: from the moment we met until last week. She always came to my aid, as if she sensed I needed her help, even when I hadn’t asked. I have one huge request — we should all be there for one another. You can’t leave a person alone when they’re going through a hard time. Call each other more often, talk.”
Photographer Sasha Astakhova and lawyer Maria Eismont, without having agreed beforehand, highlighted the mission that Nina Litvinova, perhaps without even realising it, carried out day after day and year after year by attending court hearings.
“You sit in court, look out into the chamber and see Nina, beautiful, attentive, and you realise that there is support. That was very important, and it wasn’t in vain. Those political prisoners she supported, if they were free, would have come here today,” Masha Eismont said.
Family
It has long been observed that when a person dies, they take a secret with them. After they are gone, we try in vain to find that secret, searching for answers in their life, in the past, recalling fragments of conversations and encounters.
Nina Litvinova’s death is not just a mark in the calendar for May 2026. However grand it may sound, it is a ‘message to the city and the world’ about what is happening to all of us in Russia ‘here and now’. Her cousin, the journalist Masha Slonim, compared Nina’s death to that of the Czech student Jan Palach, who set himself on fire on 19 January 1969 in protest against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries.
So what was Nina Litvinova really like?
Over the last ten years, and even before that, when political trials became a common thing in Russia and attending them was considered a matter of honour for the intellectual and activist community, I, as a court reporter, always studied the public closely. As a rule, at such court hearings, apart from relatives, close friends and colleagues, there is always a so-called support group present. These are people of different ages, social standing and professions. Among them, I once spotted an elderly silver-haired woman with a stylish haircut, a beautiful and noble face, and a surprisingly attentive and kind gaze. She seemed very familiar to me; I had often seen her before at rallies, protests, and meetings of human rights activists and Soviet dissidents. This was Nina Litvinova, the younger sister of the legendary Pavel Litvinov, who on 25 August 1968 took part in the ‘Demonstration of the Eight’ on Red Square, protesting against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Many of those with whom Nina sat for hours at court hearings or travelled to Petrozavodsk for the trial of historian Yuri Dmitriev, were, like me, largely unaware of Nina Litvinova’s family history. She was not at all a public figure; she gave no interviews, preferring to remain ‘in the shadow’ of her famous relatives.
Yet it was precisely her family and circle of friends who raised her to be independent and courageous, with a keen sense of justice and a desire to help anyone in need. Her mother, the physiologist Flora Yassinovskaya, met her future husband, the mathematician Mikhail Litvinov—son of Stalin’s People’s Commissar (1930–1939) Maksim Litvinov—at the first performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in 1937. In her memoir, she writes that after Stalin dismissed People’s Commissar Litvinov, he feared arrest and thought that his wife and children might also be imprisoned. Therefore, writes Flora Yassinovskaya, ‘Misha and I rushed to the registry office to legalise our relationship; otherwise, if he were arrested, I would not have been able to find out his fate in the NKVD. However, the expected tragic turn of events did not occur. Our marriage lasted sixty-seven years’.
In 1940, the Litvinovs’ son Pavel was born; he graduated from the Faculty of Physics at Moscow State University and taught at the Lomonosov Institute. In the 1960s, Pavel became one of the most active dissidents. In 1968, he and Larisa Bogoraz published an appeal ‘To World Public Opinion. It was dedicated to the ‘trial of the four’ – Aleksandr Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Vera Lashkova and Aleksei Dobrovolsky. This appeal, broadcast on Western radio stations, received an unprecedented response, because for the first time the protesters addressed not the Soviet party leadership but public opinion, and described ‘progressive public opinion in the Soviet Union as part of the world’s’. Pavel Litvinov also helped compile the human rights bulletin Chronicle of Current Events, and on 25 August 1968 he took part in the ‘Demonstration of the Eight’ on Red Square. He was sentenced to five years’ exile in the Chita region, in a mining settlement where he worked as an electrician. In 1974, under pressure from the KGB, he was forced to leave the country; he now lives in the USA. Nina was five years younger than Pavel. They were very close. She travelled to see him in exile and often visited him in his new home abroad; right up until her final moments, they spoke on the phone every day.
An unsung heroine of our time
Nina was a marine biologist who specialised in the biology of ophiuroids — a class of echinoderms that live at the bottom of the sea. She worked for over forty years as a senior research fellow at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and defended her PhD thesis. Her husband, Evgeny Syroechkovsky, was an ornithologist and Doctor of Biological Sciences. Like Nina, he had been fascinated by biology as a child in a young naturalists’ club at the Moscow Zoo. They lived a long life together; he died in March 2024.
According to close friends, Nina Litvinova was a deeply passionate scientist; she loved her profession and was distressed when, following her brother’s arrest, her participation in scientific expeditions was restricted, with a ban on long-distance overseas voyages. Yet she continued to work in the Far East and elsewhere. At her funeral, a colleague from the institute recounted how, during one of the expeditions, she and Nina had released an octopus—which had been caught earlier and placed in a vat—back into the sea. It was important to Nina to ‘set it free’. Indeed, it was precisely those who found themselves in captivity that Nina Litvinova thought about all her life, and all her life she helped them.
Following the arrest of Pavel Litvinov, his mother, Flora Yassinovskaya, became actively involved in the human rights movement. Issues of the human rights bulletin Chronicle of Current Events were printed in their flat. She was close friends with Larisa Bogoraz and Anatoly Marchenko, the family of Petr Grigorenko, and Sergei Kovalev. She took part in fundraising and providing aid to political prisoners. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Nina Litvinova joined the circle of Soviet dissidents; many knew her and remember her. This is how she described that time:
‘I’m like that myself: I’m afraid. I go there—everywhere—where I shouldn’t go, but I really don’t want to be arrested.’
‘Then my mum once told me that she wouldn’t be able to bear it if they put me in prison. It meant quite a lot to me that she said that. Well, anyway: I too belong to the frightened generation… Because we lived in the centre — I mean, on Aleksei Tolstoi Street — it was a bit of a thoroughfare, in every sense of the word. And we were living without our parents, after all. Lots of people came round, but I wasn’t an active participant. But I read everything that was lying about, of course. Perhaps not everything…
I wasn’t active. I tended to help out whenever needed, but I wasn’t active’ (from an interview with Olga Rosenblum, a researcher of the dissident movement. — Novaya).
Nina’s cousin Masha Slonim says Nina was very modest, always avoided the limelight, didn’t like having her photograph taken, yet ‘she had a perfect ear for what was false, for hypocrisy and meanness. And a perfect ear for human suffering.’
‘She reacted instinctively, with her whole being. Human rights activism was an important part of her life, and towards the end of her life it was the only thing she felt she could do. Nina had an extraordinary capacity for empathy,’ she adds.
One of her fellow biologists recalls how Litvinova rejoiced at Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power; at the time, she had high hopes that she would no longer have to send parcels to political prisoners or travel to their places of exile.
But things turned out differently, and when political prisoners began to reappear in Putin’s Russia, Nina Litvinova devoted herself entirely to them. She brightened the lives of so many by corresponding with them, sending parcels, providing financial assistance, and covering the costs of lawyers’ travel. She did all this without fanfare, privately; only her close friends and those she helped knew about it. She did not want to leave Russia, hoping that her very presence here, her constant support, was more important than a life in exile.
But with every passing year, month and day, the situation grew worse and more tragic. Nina Litvinova’s Facebook page*** became, in essence, a new Chronicle of Current Events. There is nothing personal there; it consists of reposts of news about jailings, torture and the deaths of political prisoners in penal colonies, accompanied by a few brief comments: ‘Horrible’, ‘Freedom for women political prisoners’, ‘Free the women! It is despicable to keep them behind bars!’ It is a page of pain and anger. Human rights activist Yan Rachinsky*, who knew Nina for over thirty years, wrote: ‘She was a link to the former tradition of political prisoners, and there are very few such links, and they are very important.’
It has been six months since Nina stopped attending court hearings, her friends told Novaya gazeta. Apparently, she no longer had the strength; she had lost hope that her presence could change the situation.
Unfortunately, over the past year, court support groups have been dwindling before our very eyes: there are ever more political trials, yet ever fewer people are willing to attend them.
Nevertheless, at Nina’s funeral, it was said that, in her memory, we must continue the work of her life: supporting political prisoners. And it seemed that some of those who had come to say goodbye to ‘Angel Nina’ will try to take her place.
Although it is impossible to replace her.
* Designated a ‘foreign agent’ by the Russian authorities.
** Designated a ‘foreign agent’, dissolved by court order, and declared undesirable and extremist in the Russian Federation by court order.
*** Owned by the company META, whose activities in the Russian Federation are deemed extremist and prohibited.
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See also our recent Russian-language podcast in which Teresa Cherfas talks to Masha Slonim, Nina Litvinova’s cousin.
