‘I tried to help them, but my strength gave out’. For half a century, Nina Litvinova stood with Soviet and then Russian political prisoners. In May, at 80, she took her own life.

On May 12, the dissident and human rights activist Nina Litvinova died by suicide in Moscow.

From the late 1960s on, she devoted her whole life to helping political prisoners, first in the Soviet Union and later in Russia.

Litvinova’s cousin, the journalist Masha Slonim, made public the note she left behind.

“Putin has attacked Ukraine and is killing innocent people, and here at home he endlessly jails thousands of people who suffer and die there because, like me, they are against the war and against killing.… I tried to help them, but my strength gave out, and day and night I am tormented by my own helplessness,” the letter read.

“Putin killed her!” Slonim said.

The outlet Glasnaya has told the story of Nina Litvinova’s family — a family that reflected “the fears and hopes, the victories and disappointments of many generations of the Russian intelligentsia.” Meduza is republishing Glasnaya’s article in full, translated into English. ...