‘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.

According to Meduza, the human rights activist Nina Litvinova has died by suicide in Moscow at the age of eighty. From the late nineteen sixties onward, she devoted her life to helping political prisoners, first in the Soviet Union and later in Russia. Her cousin, the journalist Masha Slonim, made public the note Litvinova left behind. In it, she wrote that Putin had attacked Ukraine and was killing innocent people, while at home jailing thousands who oppose the war, and that she was tormented night and day by her own helplessness after her strength to help them gave out. Meduza reports that it is republishing, in full English translation, a Glasnaya article tracing the story of Litvinova's family across generations of the Russian intelligentsia.

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