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.
Along the path of woe
Nina Litvinova read her grandmother Ivy Low’s farewell letter during a brief period when the NKVD archives were opened. The original, written in English in March 1938, vanished somewhere inside the system; her relatives were handed a copy of a poor translation: “I wish that I thought that I would someday see my dear people again, my dear husband and son. Farewell, world. I always loved you.”
Ivy had given that letter to an American architect named Louis Friedheim, who was working in the Soviet Union. He took it to the NKVD — along with a denunciation alleging that the wife of the people’s commissar for foreign affairs condemned the trial of the so-called Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites, said she knew the defendants, and insisted the charges had been invented.
Ivy Low was born in London to an English mother and a father of Hungarian Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Among her relatives were well-known journalists and psychoanalysts; she herself wrote books, was friends with H. G. Wells, and was acquainted with James Joyce.
In 1914, Ivy married Maxim Litvinov, the secretary of the London group of Bolsheviks. A comrade of Lenin’s, he had run an underground print shop in Kyiv, escaped from prison in 1902, and lived mostly abroad after that. Their children were born in 1917 and 1918 — a son, Mikhail, and a daughter, Tatyana. Litvinov was later expelled to Moscow, exchanged for a British diplomat who had been arrested by the Soviet authorities. Two years later, Ivy followed her husband to a country she did not know, her children in tow.
In 1930, Litvinov became people’s commissar for foreign affairs. Ivy taught English. According to her granddaughter, the journalist Masha Slonim, she was “a frivolous Englishwoman who lived as though she weren’t in the Soviet Union at all, but in England.” It is as if an anonymous nineteenth-century verse, quoted in a memoir about the strange Litvinov household, had been written about her:
A little bird goes merrily / along the path of woe, / not foreseeing from all this / its ruinous undoing.
The family loved Marmite — the yeast-extract spread popular in Britain — and often spoke English; above all, a spirit of freedom prevailed, growing more dangerous with each passing year.
By Soviet standards, the family lived comfortably, but parting with their illusions was painful. Before the revolution, Litvinov had dreamed of a Russia without prisons; now he watched in horror as a wave of repression far outstripped anything under the tsars.
The era of the Great Terror was approaching. At night the Litvinovs heard “weddings” — searches of their neighbors in the building. The commissar slept with a revolver under his pillow, so that he would have time to shoot himself. It was in that atmosphere that Ivy wrote her desperate letter — so that, if she were arrested, at least some word of her would reach those closest to her.
The American architect’s denunciation made its way to Stalin himself. Within the family, it was later said that the leader personally tore up the document right in front of Litvinov.
Yet on May 3, 1939, the people’s commissar was dismissed.
“Litvinov’s removal marked the end of an entire epoch,” Winston Churchill wrote. “It signified the Kremlin’s abandonment of any belief in a security pact with the Western powers and in the possibility of forming an Eastern front against Germany.”
Stalin wanted to come to terms with Hitler. Litvinov, a pro-British Jew (born Meir-Henoch Wallach), was ill-suited to that aim, and Vyacheslav Molotov replaced him.
On the night after his dismissal, the former commissar told his son Misha that he was almost certain his arrest was coming. The repression could reach the family, too. Misha — a student at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics and a glider pilot who was already teaching novices to fly — had by then been seeing a young woman named Flora for two years. “The two of us,” she wrote, “rushed off to the registry office to make our relationship official; otherwise, if he were arrested, I would not have been able to learn his fate from the NKVD.…”
But nothing happened. In 1941, Misha and Flora, with their son Pavlik, who had been born in 1940, were evacuated from Moscow to Samara, and Maxim Litvinov was appointed ambassador to the United States, where he served until 1943. On his return, the family was given a six-room apartment in the famous House on the Embankment, where the Soviet elite lived. On August 9, 1945, Flora gave birth to a daughter, Nina.
A generation of the frightened
Flora Litvinova — red-haired and outgoing — shared the freethinking spirit that reigned in her husband’s family. She expected that the repression would ease after victory in the war: “Everything from here on was supposed to be wonderful! In that terrible time, life seemed to me to be full of hope.”
She was wrong. Maxim Litvinov’s ideas for a postwar alliance among the victorious powers collapsed, as the Cold War drew near.
In 1948, the persecution of geneticists under Lysenkoism began. Flora had finished her degree in biology and was planning to enter graduate school, but because of the attacks by the academician Trofim Lysenko, not a single graduate recommended by the former academic council was admitted — herself included. Only the following year did Flora manage, with difficulty, to find a place at Botkin Hospital.
That same year, the Litvinovs’ neighbor in the House on the Embankment, Dmitri Shostakovich, was forced to repent publicly for formalism. The two families were close — Flora and Misha had met at the premiere of the Fifth Symphony, and during the wartime evacuation they had lived near the composer. On December 2, 1941, Flora wrote in her diary that she had ended up at a party at the Shostakoviches’. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was laughing, clowning around, and belting out a ditty from an old, racy operetta called Pupsik:
No matter that they all / have nicknamed me Pupsik. / They gave me that name / back when I was a child…
In the middle of the merriment, Shostakovich suddenly said, quietly, “You know, I finished the Seventh today.”
That was how he marked the completion of the famous tragic symphony that would come to be called the Leningrad. The composer later admitted to Flora that the work was not only about fascism, but about any unfreedom of the spirit, the Soviet kind included.
“Shostakovich was afraid,” Flora recalled. “And at the same time he was brave and noble. I know how many people he helped with money, how many he stood up for, despite his fear.…”
And now this man was expected to humiliate himself and repent.
“I was taking little Nina to kindergarten,” Flora wrote in her book of memoirs. “The building next to the kindergarten was being put up by German prisoners of war. They would often stop, look at the children, and say, ‘Kinder, Kinder.’ I would think: they will leave this camp, but Dmitri Dmitriyevich never will.…”
That mix of constant fear and its constant conquering stayed with Flora, and with her daughter, to the end of their lives.
Nina grew up under the influence of two very different grandmothers. The eccentric Ivy raised her grandson and granddaughters until they were eight at a house she rented outside Moscow. Pavlik and Nina grew up there alongside the children of Tatyana Litvinova and the sculptor Ilya Slonim — Vera and Masha, who would become a well-known journalist.
“Our English grandmother raised us in isolation from Soviet life, in the British spirit of freedom, democracy, and independence,” Masha Slonim says. “She shielded us from hard contact with the authorities. We lived in a kind of artificial paradise.”
Nina even started out at a village school rather than the elite one on Bolotnaya Square, where the other children from the House on the Embankment went.
Grandmother Ivy ran a strict household: oatmeal for breakfast, cold-water sponge baths, short haircuts in the English manner, and no sweets.
Both Masha Slonim and Flora saw in Ivy a model of inner freedom. She hid the grandfather’s rank from the grandchildren so they would not feel they belonged to the nomenklatura. Later Nina, too, learned to keep quiet about it: “I didn’t like being known. For some reason I didn’t want it. I suppose I was a very conformist sort: I wanted to be like everyone else.”
On December 31, 1951, Maxim Litvinov died of a heart attack. Before his death, he told his wife, in English, “Englishwoman, go home.” But leaving the Soviet Union proved harder than entering it.
A few days later, in January 1952, The Washington Post published an interview Litvinov had given to the CBS correspondent Richard Hottelet. It had been recorded back in 1946, but while the former commissar was alive, the Americans had not dared to print it. Litvinov warned the West that the Soviet leadership could not be trusted, that concessions would lead only to fresh demands. He said that citizens cannot change a totalitarian state from within: the Italians under fascism and the Germans under National Socialism had not even tried to rebel.
After their grandfather’s death, Nina and Pavlik were brought back from the countryside. By Masha Slonim’s account, they then came under the influence of their second grandmother — Perla, whom everyone called Polina Mironovna.
“My mother’s mother — completely Jewish, from a shtetl, uneducated — finished only a few grades of school: four, maybe five,” Nina recalled.
In her youth, Perla had distributed leaflets in Odessa together with her husband, until he was sent into exile. She emigrated with her family to the United States, then returned after the revolution — it seemed to her that this time, surely, life would work out. The disillusionment came quickly. Her brother fled back to the States; Perla was interrogated by the Cheka and made to renounce him. She went hungry in Ukraine during the Civil War and very nearly gave up her daughter Flora to a charity. Perla had mastered what the Englishwoman Low never did — the art of surviving in constant fear without losing her composure.
In the chaos of the 1941 evacuation, it was she who gathered the things the family needed and warned her daughter: “Soon everything will disappear, there will be nothing left. In the Civil War there was no salt, no matches, to say nothing of bread.”
“My sister and I stayed under the influence of our English grandmother,” Masha Slonim says. “But Nina was taken in hand by the other one, the Jewish grandmother, who instilled in her a wariness toward life. Nina, I think, had an inner struggle between freedom and the caution that Polina Mironovna tried to drum into her.”
“I completely understand all those frightened Jews,” Nina admitted years later, in an interview with Olga Rozenblyum. “I, too, belong to the generation of the frightened. Now Mashka, my cousin — she is different: Mashka is truly free.”
Masha Slonim described her own generation the opposite way: “Ours, it seems, was the first generation that stopped being afraid.” Perhaps that was what set apart the fates of the two cousins, so alike in looks — the open, loud Masha, who took everything life offered, and the quiet, secretive Nina.
‘The Doctors’ Plot’
At the turn of the 1950s, a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” began in the Soviet Union. In 1952, it spilled over into the notorious Doctors’ Plot. The newspapers denounced “murderers in white coats” supposedly tied to the international Jewish organization known as the Joint (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) and bent on doing away with the country’s leadership.
Ivy packed little suitcases of clothing and shoes for her grandchildren — so that, if the parents were arrested, the children would not arrive at the orphanage empty-handed — and she bristled whenever anyone took underwear or socks out of the cases.
“In the family, people whispered,” Masha Slonim recalls. “Mama and Ivy spoke English. We thought our parents were spies. Well, what can you do — those were the parents we got.”
One day Pavlik, Nina’s older brother, was conducting a chemistry experiment and accidentally set the apartment curtains on fire. Grandmother Perla called the fire department, and everything was put out. The next day the telephone rang.
“Litvinova? This is the building manager of the Council of Ministers’ house. What’s all this — you’re starting fires? Planning to burn down the Government House? That won’t fly with us. Tomorrow, clear out of the apartment with that little family of yours.”
“And go where?”
“Wherever you like. We have no intention of keeping you in our building. You shouldn’t have started a fire.”
“But we have nowhere to go.”
“That’s your problem. I’ve warned you. See that it’s done.”
Flora panicked, but her husband told her firmly, “We’re not going anywhere.” And nothing came of it; they were not thrown out.
At Botkin Hospital, where Flora worked, the arrests, the recantations, and the public denunciation campaigns began. The head of the laboratory, Professor Miron Vovsi, was first on the list of “killer doctors.”
Flora remembered forever how a doctor hanged himself after being pressed to give evidence against a friend; how Professor Vovsi’s resident publicly repented that she had failed to recognize in her chief an inveterate enemy who had “disgraced the high calling of physician”; and how Professor Frumkin said of those who had been arrested, “These unfortunate people” — and then, frightened, immediately corrected himself: “I meant to say, these outcast enemies of our people.…”
And then, suddenly, in March 1953, Stalin died. The Doctors’ Plot fell apart. When Tatyana Litvinova brought the news that those who had been arrested were being freed, all the adults in the family jumped for joy. And the children, seeing them rejoice, shouted, “Hurrah, we don’t have to drink cod-liver oil today!” They were dosed daily with that unappetizing liquid, rich in omega acids, with a reprieve granted only on holidays. And that day, of course, was a holiday.
Professor Vovsi returned to Botkin Hospital. The first to rush to him, in tears and clutching an enormous bouquet, was the resident who, just two and a half months earlier, had denounced him from the podium as an “inveterate enemy.” Now she swore, “I was always certain of your innocence.”
“Vovsi embraced her,” Flora wrote in her memoirs. “Everyone was crying. Having lived through all the torments of self-incrimination, he forgave and understood everyone.”
Quiet inner resistance
Following her mother’s example, Nina became fascinated by biology and attended the Young Biologists’ Club at the Moscow Zoo (KYuBZ). One of its members, the future dissident Elena Sannikova, described it as a brotherhood bound together by “a love of freedom, personal independence, devotion to the cause, a volunteer’s … enthusiasm, and a loathing for careerism.” It was at the club that Nina met Genka — Yevgeny Syroyechkovsky, her future husband: “The boys there showed off, swore. And Genka just sat and sketched it all.”
By then her character had already taken shape — reserved but firm. “She had absorbed an important quality of her father’s,” Masha Slonim reflects. “He adored music, and he had a perfect ear for falseness and vulgarity.
“A false word would make her wince, like a false note. Once, when we were already grown, I was writing for some website and adopting its voice, so I used the word sestrenka — ‘little sis’ — about my sister Vera. Nina noticed it right away and said, ‘You never talk like that.’”
Another inherited trait was a love of quiet: “When Vera and I shrieked, Uncle Misha physically could not bear the sound. And neither could Nina. She was a soft-spoken person and could not stand noise. There was a great deal of the English about Misha. Restraint, nobility, refinement. And a quiet inner resistance, too. That passed to Nina.”
The family greeted Khrushchev’s Thaw with hope, though older friends urged caution. By Flora’s recollection, Shostakovich warned, “There will be frosts, and hard ones at that.” Korney Chukovsky, another friend of the Litvinovs’, urged them to breathe their fill during the short stretch of freedom, recalling that the same sensation had come after the February Revolution.
Flora’s grown children saw their futures in science — Pavel taught physics, and Nina enrolled in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the Faculty of Biology and Soil Science at Moscow State University.
The Thaw did indeed prove short. In 1964, Khrushchev was forced out. The crackdown on “slanderous” literature intensified and became systematic. In 1965, the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested — they were not published in the Soviet Union, and they had been smuggling their books to the West. They were sentenced to five and seven years in the camps for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”
In 1966, Article 190-1 — “Dissemination of fabrications known to be false that defame the Soviet state and social system” — was added to the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The KGB hounded freethinkers and confiscated samizdat — literature and commentary circulated unofficially. On January 22, 1967, a demonstration was held on Pushkin Square. Two or three dozen young people demanded the release of dissidents and a review of the criminal statute on anti-Soviet agitation. They were seized in an instant by plainclothesmen. Nina and her husband had meant to go, but they arrived too late.
In 1968, a collection titled Justice or Reprisal?, about the trials of the demonstrators, was published in London. It was compiled by a young physicist, Pavel Litvinov.
For your freedom and ours
The commissar’s grandson had entered the emerging circle of dissidents as early as 1960. After the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, he became one of its leaders. His relatives and friends helped him — Yevgeny, Nina’s husband, who had an exceptional memory, served as a living tape recorder at the court hearings for the collection Justice or Reprisal?
In the fall of 1967, Pavel was summoned to the KGB and advised to destroy his latest samizdat material, with the threat of criminal charges. The dissident Andrei Amalrik recounted: “From the KGB’s point of view, this was a mild warning, but it had an unexpected result: Pavel wrote down his own conversation and began to circulate it. It was published abroad, and the BBC even broadcast a dramatized recording of it to the USSR.”
In early 1968, Pavel was dismissed from his job. He set to work on a new collection, The Trial of the Four, about a case involving samizdat activists. Litvinov spent more and more time with like-minded people — Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Larisa Bogoraz, Anatoly Marchenko.
Nina lived with her husband and infant son in the same apartment as Pavel. The dissidents tried to take precautions and even built a hiding place for documents right inside a door, but it did not go very well. There was no telephone, so visitors came unannounced. Along with the journalists and samizdat people who were forever emptying the family refrigerator, police spies slipped in — on “open Tuesdays,” anywhere from two dozen to a hundred people crowded into the apartment, and there was no keeping track of them all.
Flora often came to help Nina with the baby, saw the throng, and “sympathized, but was afraid.” She watched as Pavel and Natalya Gorbanevskaya began work on the famous dissident bulletin A Chronicle of Current Events. Flora read “the first copies, on thin, rustling sheets” — and it stunned her that “not in the Stalin years, which had passed, but now,” political prisoners went on rotting in the camps.
On August 21, 1968, the Soviet Union sent troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring reforms launched by Alexander Dubček. The invasion meant the final death of the Thaw’s ideals, a farewell to the hope of “socialism with a human face,” to the naïve dreams that found their way into a folk ditty Flora recorded:
I know that things will get better, / for across the land there goes / our own Soviet Dubček — / soon he’ll be in the Kremlin.
On August 25, a handful of dissidents went out onto Red Square and unfurled banners. Pavel Litvinov held a slogan that had first appeared during the Polish uprising of 1830: “For your freedom and ours.” He explained its meaning by loosely quoting Engels: “A people cannot be free if it forcibly suppresses the freedom of its smaller neighbor.”
The protest lasted mere seconds. Plainclothesmen came running. Fabric tore; two of them at once — a man and a woman — beat Pavel with a briefcase and a heavy bag. “You fool,” a police officer said to Litvinov, without malice, as he filled out the report. “If you’d sat quietly, you’d have lived in peace.”
In his closing statement at the trial, Pavel declared: “Our innocence of the acts we are charged with is obvious. And yet the guilty verdict awaiting me is just as obvious to me. … No one cared whether I believed in what I stood for; the question was never even put to me. But if I believed, then Article 190-1 — on knowingly false fabrications — automatically falls away. And I did not merely believe; I was convinced!”
Two of the demonstrators were declared legally insane, and the rest were sent into internal exile. Pavel received five years; he was banished to the village of Usugli in the Chita region, where he took work as an electrician.
Of course, the demonstrators did not force a withdrawal of the troops; the Prague Spring was crushed. But the day after the protest, the Czechoslovak newspaper Literární listy wrote: “Seven people on Red Square — that is at least seven reasons why we will never again be able to hate the Russians.”
The perfect underground operative
In her mind, Nina set her brother alongside their grandfather, who had printed leaflets in an underground print shop and circulated the newspaper Iskra. But she barely remembered her grandfather, and the comparison would not come. Before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, she had read samizdat and “always helped if it was needed, but wasn’t active. Well, later, once they’d jailed [Pavel], and all the arrests of every kind — then yes.”
Now the whole family of the late commissar was drawn into dissident work — all but the sculptor Ilya Slonim, who “was simply terrified.” Ivy wrote an appeal to Mikoyan (“Such a funny letter,” Nina recalled afterward). Even the cowed, cautious grandmother Perla astonished her granddaughter by telling relatives who condemned the dissidents, firmly, “No, Pavel did everything right.”
“People who stood a little apart, just acquaintances, friends, started taking part in this work more and more. Simply because others had been arrested,” Masha Slonim explains. “Things had to be passed along, retyped, carried to the camps. Nina was in the shadows and worked in the shadows. Unlike me, she was never searched, never interrogated. But she did more, probably. I didn’t hide much. She was secretive — the perfect underground operative.”
Nina traveled to those in exile from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s: “We carried everything. … Some food, letters, books.… In short, we were loaded down like I don’t know what. I … couldn’t even lift the backpack myself: if someone helped me get it on, I could carry it.…”
The hardest part was hauling the backpack alone through the Chita airport onto the little plane to Usugli, where Pavel lived.
“They never frisked me, by the way,” Nina marveled. “Not once: I delivered every letter, all of it.… Letters, some books, samizdat.”
Pooling their money, relatives and friends bought Pavel a village house. In Nina’s words, “the family simply carried him through it in their arms — there was so much that had to be sent and done.”
The dissidents were being squeezed out of the country. In the mid-1970s, the KGB, under threat of arrest, urged the family friend Anatoly Marchenko — who was not even Jewish — to emigrate to Israel: “Leave; you only dream of going abroad anyway. Here you’re of no use to anyone, you only bring harm to people.”
Pavel Litvinov left for the United States in 1974, where he became a teacher at a private school — in Nina’s words, he was told bluntly, “You’ll go either to the West or to the east.” Masha Slonim emigrated at the same time.
Two years earlier, the authorities had finally allowed grandmother Ivy to return to her homeland. She spent the last five years of her life in the town of Hove, in the south of England. In 1976, her daughter Tatyana joined her. But Nina stayed in the Soviet Union and, despite her constant fear, went on helping the dissidents: “I’m afraid myself. I go there — everywhere you’re not supposed to go — but I very much don’t want to be taken. And then my mother once told me she wouldn’t survive it if I were jailed.”
An unbending inner core stood in for fearlessness in Nina and would not let her retreat, just as it had not let her perpetually frightened grandmother put up with abuse aimed at her dissident grandson. Fear became her ally; it helped her work carefully, without drawing attention.
“She did nothing loud. Quietly, quietly, unnoticed,” Masha Slonim says. “She had no use for unnecessary motion, noise, showing herself off. She simply acted clearly and deliberately, according to her conscience. She was very stubborn. No one could have made Nina do what she thought was wrong.”
Anatoly Marchenko, too, refused to leave. He was convicted twice more and sentenced first to exile, then to a maximum-security penal colony.
In 1981, in his closing statement at trial, he said: “Nowhere in the world, except in countries with communist or fascist regimes, are people tried for criticizing the state, for journalism, for literature. Only the communist and fascist regimes defend their ideology this way: instead of fighting an ideology, they crack skulls.”
That same year, Flora Litvinova wrote in her diary in despair: “After all the arrests and departures, any resistance may drown in a deadening silence. And the authorities achieved all of this methodically, gradually, over the past several years.”
Anatoly Marchenko died in December 1986, after perestroika had already begun, without ever regaining his freedom. His body was not released to his relatives and friends, Flora among them — even in the morgue, three security men guarded the dead dissident. In the end, Marchenko was allowed a church funeral and a burial. And just two months later, the mass release of political prisoners began.
‘A provocation’
Dissidence was only one part of the Litvinovs’ lives. All of them were passionately devoted to science. But the stigma of belonging to a famous freethinker’s family got in the way even here. In 1976, Flora was asked to leave the work she loved at the Institute of Cardiology — “the arrest and imprisonment of our son and his subsequent emigration, our contact with dissidents, our meetings with foreigners, and our ties with foreign scholars did not sit well with the institute’s leadership.”
By Nina’s account, Mikhail, who worked at aviation research centers, lost his clearance for classified projects. He then took up origami — so seriously that the magazine Nauka i Zhizn (Science and Life) would later write: “Practically every origami master in Russia today is a student of Litvinov’s, or a student of his students.”
In 1969, Nina was accepted, with difficulty, into the benthic fauna (bottom-dwelling marine life) laboratory of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The problem was not only her dissident brother. She had also stated on her application that she did not belong to the Komsomol: “And I had been a Komsomol member. But when I finished university, I took back [my papers] and submitted them nowhere, said I was not a Komsomol member. The head of the personnel department says, ‘Never mind, your son will be a Komsomol member!’ I said, ‘Never!’”
In Nina’s telling, the lab chief did not want to take on such a troublemaker, even at the lowest salary. But several professors at once threatened to stop shaking his hand. Litvinova was hired. And her son, in the 1980s, did become a Komsomol member after all — in secret from his mother.
At the institute, Nina would pointedly walk out of mandatory political briefings whenever she heard “something indecent.” She brought colleagues samizdat. Some took it, others refused, still others informed. Litvinova never forgot the words of a friend: “Life is hard enough for me as it is; I don’t want to know this.”
Unsurprisingly, Nina was not allowed out of the country until perestroika. While her husband, a leading specialist on waterfowl, studied birds in Alaska, Litvinova traveled to the White Sea and the Far East. She loved the water, swam beautifully, and chose brittle stars — close relatives of the starfish — as her research subject.
Nina adored these strange creatures. Once, in the mid-1970s, she coaxed a diver who had fallen ill into lending her his scuba gear so that she could see them alive in the Sea of Japan. He made her promise not to go deeper than three meters; anything more is deadly for a novice. Nina came back happy: “Can you imagine, I saw the brittle stars standing on their arms, their disks raised upward!”
The diver was alarmed: such a thing happens at a depth of 30 meters. But Nina had been so absorbed that she had not noticed the danger.
Litvinova did not earn her academic degree until 1985 — the result of being unable to study brittle stars abroad. Only 120 of the 2,000 species are found in Russia; most live in the tropics. Her defense nearly fell through: Nina refused to take the examination in dialectical and historical materialism. The biologist Yuri Arshavsky, who worked with her, was shaken: ”‘Nina!!! What’s happened? Why?’ ‘I cannot take an exam in this lying philosophy,’ she answered. However much we tried to talk her out of it, telling her it was an empty formality, Nina — always so gentle and kindly — turned out to be extraordinarily steadfast.”
An instructor saved the day: for a bribe, he filed paperwork showing she had passed, without ever administering the exam.
The Institute of Oceanology’s website states: “Across the floor of the world’s oceans there now roam 33 species of brittle stars and two species of starfish described and named by Nina. She also established three new genera of brittle stars.” In the twenty-first century, two brittle star species were named in Litvinova’s honor — Ophiocymbium ninae and Amphiophiura litvinovae. She chose everything once and for all — the husband she had met as a schoolgirl, the work to which she gave more than 40 years, the help she extended to prisoners, which reached even sea creatures. During one expedition, her companions caught an octopus and put it in a tub. Nina and a colleague set the mollusk free.
In the mid-1980s, liberal reforms began. Nina was glad that she no longer had to carry parcels to political prisoners. Masha Slonim returned to the Soviet Union, where she worked as a BBC correspondent, taught, and even ran a political club.
In December 1987, something unheard of took place — dissidents held an International Human Rights Seminar in Moscow.
The leadership of the Communist Party tried to wreck the “provocation.” The banquet hall where the opening was to take place was, at the last moment, “urgently shut down by sanitation inspectors who had turned up the day before.” The dissidents moved into private apartments. The main one was Nina Litvinova’s.
“There were more than a hundred people,” she recalled 24 years later. “Crimean Tatars described how their arrival had been blocked. There were people with disabilities, the priest Edelstein, the Czech dissident Urban, a young ‘journalist’ who talked to everyone and then disappeared, probably a state-security man, Hare Krishnas who fed everyone little balls of something, … Sergei Kovalyov, Gamsakhurdia, and Kostava. … People who came in from the street said there was a car parked downstairs in which everything happening in the apartment could be seen and heard.”
Four years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Two months before that, the law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression” was adopted. It seemed the era of short thaws was over, and spring had arrived.
A rifle and a toilet seat
Artyom, Nina’s only son, also trained as a biologist, but in the new era he became an entrepreneur. Litvinova’s grandchildren were growing up. Like many, they called her Ninochka and felt no distance from her at all. They went to the movies with her and discussed books.
“She was always ready to get up and go, especially in a good mood,” her granddaughter Marusya says, smiling. “It was easy to be with her. She was friends with a lot of my friends, too, and there was none of that ‘I’m so much older.’ She was always interested in understanding another person.”
If Nina was quiet, her husband, Yevgeny — Genka, as his friends called him into old age — was a born storyteller. He stunned his listeners with incredible tales — for instance, how on an expedition in Alaska the toilet was outdoors. Polar bears roamed nearby, so going out without a weapon was dangerous. And the seat had to be kept indoors so it wouldn’t ice over. So that was how Genka went to the toilet — with a rifle and a toilet seat slung around his neck.
Flora remained the life of the party. Even at ninety, she took a lively interest in everything new. But even so, this indomitable woman was growing old. Nina had to care for her mother, and in 2007 she left her job — after putting the brittle-star collection in order one last time and publishing a catalog, so that those who came after her would have an easier time.
Nina got herself an Irish terrier named Becky. She chose the same breed for the dogs that followed and gave them the same name, showing her constancy in this, too. She still loved to swim and said she came alive in the water. Every year she took part in the commemoration of the victims of repression, “Returning the Names,” and helped the creators of the memorial at the spot where the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered. She also kept in close touch with relatives, especially her brother Pavel. A distance of thousands of miles did not get in the way of their friendship.
Dmitri, Pavel’s adopted son, became the press secretary of the Russian branch of Greenpeace. In September 2013, he was arrested after a protest on the Prirazlomnaya oil platform. He was amnestied at the end of December.
On holidays, friends came to visit the Litvinovs — Nina’s comrades from the Young Biologists’ Club, the human rights defender Sergei Kovalyov, the musician Yuli Kim. Her granddaughter Marusya became a documentary filmmaker. For her, the stories about her great-great-grandmother Ivy were already the distant past — and yet from the eccentric Englishwoman she had inherited one ineradicable habit: a taste for Marmite.
The steadfast tin soldier
Nina had always supported those she considered victims of the system, but the turning point came in 2019, when the trials in the so-called “Network” and “New Greatness” cases began — groups of young people accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Until then, Litvinova had posted on Facebook rarely, and on neutral subjects; from 2019 on, her page turned into one unbroken chronicle of arrests, trials, and trips to the sites of repression — so much so that it was even compared to the dissident Chronicle of Current Events. From Nina herself there were mostly short comments: cries of anger and pain, demands to free political prisoners, demands that, of course, no judge heeded.
Nina was not a lawyer or a politician. She did what she could — going to the trials as though to a job, corresponding with prisoners, sending them money, paying for lawyers’ travel.
“It felt important to her to come and offer support, so that a person could see he wasn’t facing the system alone,” Nina’s granddaughter Marusya recalls. “It distressed my grandmother terribly, the sense that everything was moving backward, toward harsher repression.”
As in the 1970s, Nina avoided publicity, but people began to notice the stately, gray-haired woman who never missed a single trial.
Zoya Svetova, a columnist for Novaya Gazeta, explains: “As a rule, at hearings like these, besides relatives, close friends, and colleagues, there is always a so-called support group. These are people of varied ages, standing, and professions. Among them I once spotted a gray-haired older woman with a stylish haircut, a beautiful and noble face, and an astonishingly attentive, kindly gaze. She seemed very familiar to me; I had often seen her before at rallies, at protests, at gatherings of human rights advocates and Soviet dissidents.”
Litvinova’s example inspired others.
“It’s easy to support heroes,” the journalist Natalia Savoskina says. “But there are some political prisoners I feel no empathy for. I support them only because Nina did. For her there was no dividing people into heroes and others, unworthy of attention.”
Nina was already well past seventy, but she always dressed elegantly, and her movements stayed lively, young, and full of energy.
“Sometimes you could tell she was afraid. But she believed fear had to be overcome,” Marusya says.
On January 23, 2021, after Alexei Navalny returned to Russia and was arrested, unsanctioned rallies swept the country. They were broken up, and more than 4,000 people were detained.
“My brother, my ex-boyfriend, my grandmother, and I decided to go, too,” Marusya recounts. “I’m seeing on all sorts of channels that people are being beaten, detained. I say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t.’ And my grandmother answers, ‘No, let’s go, let’s take a look.’ We made it just a tiny way into that crowd, and riot police surrounded us. They closed a ring around 25 or 30 people and started yanking us out one by one, beating us with batons — and into the vans. They detained my brother and my boyfriend. I think, ‘Right, they’re about to grab Nina, God forbid they hit her, I have to do something.’ I edge my way over to a riot policeman and say, ‘I’m with my grandmother. Maybe you could let us through?’ And in the gentlest voice he answers, ‘With your grandmother? Why, of course, go on through!’ My brother was fined that time, and my boyfriend spent 10 days in a special detention center.”
At those same protests, the 35-year-old Olga Bendas became famous. A video circulated online showing this muscular woman with shaved temples brandishing a rubber baton she had taken from a police officer and declaring: “Whoever comes at us with a sword is gonna get fucked up by that same sword.” She was sentenced to two years in a general-regime penal colony.
Bendas received a flood of letters with the usual words of encouragement: “Hang in there, don’t lose heart, we’re with you!” She would reply politely, “Yes, thank you, all right, I’ll hang in there, write again.” But with Nina it was different. Their correspondence quickly grew into a friendship. Two women who had never met shared their innermost thoughts.
“I didn’t feel the 40-year age difference at all. We could discuss anything. Things I couldn’t have raised with anyone else, not even someone my own age. I never expected that to happen in my life,” Bendas marvels.
When Bendas was released from the colony, Nina came to meet her.
“I had assumed a woman of such venerable years would look a certain way,” Bendas recalls. “But before me stood a lively, active woman, brimming over with life.”
By her account, over all the years that followed, the two of them wrote or called each other every week. And there were many people like Bendas. When Marusya checked her grandmother’s mailbox, letters from prisoners were almost always there — Nina often received them the old-fashioned way, in envelopes, and wrote back by hand.
On the day the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Nina signed a collective antiwar appeal by scientists and posted on Facebook lines that Alexander Galich had written in 1968:
Again, again — like thunder through the idle calm, / a lump in the throat, a bullet in the bore: / Citizens, the Fatherland’s in danger! / Citizens, the Fatherland’s in danger! / Our tanks are on foreign soil!
The laws, already repressive, were tightened further. Now opponents of the war, too, ended up behind bars, charged with “publicly disseminating knowingly false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” That wording bears a striking resemblance to the text of the criminal statute “Dissemination of fabrications known to be false that defame the Soviet system,” which the Soviet dissidents had fought against. As before, “knowing falsehood” meant any departure from the state’s official position.
On April 12, 2022, Nina was shoved by a police officer outside the Dorogomilovsky court building, according to the Novaya Gazeta journalist Natalia Demina. She fell. Fortunately, she escaped serious injury.
Relatives and friends suggested she emigrate. The family was well off, and she would have wanted for nothing abroad. But Litvinova refused.
“I asked a hundred times, ‘What’s keeping you here? Pack up and leave. You’ll be welcomed with open arms anywhere,’” Olga Bendas recalls. “But this was a matter of principle for her. She would say, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’”
The people who, alongside Nina, had supported the prisoners were leaving the country. The older generation of the Litvinov family was passing away. In 2020, the life-loving Flora died at the age of 102. And in 2024, Genka — Yevgeny Syroyechkovsky — died.
“Caring for her husband held Nina together,” Olga Bendas says. “She understood that when you have a sick person on your hands, you have to be like the steadfast tin soldier. And when he was gone, that inner core bent a little.”
A friend will walk free from prison
In 2024, Nina traveled to the Seychelles with Masha Slonim. There was the beautiful, gentle sea she loved so much. Above it, incredible sunsets blazed. And Nina, instead of enjoying the vacation, talked about Moscow trials and wrote letters to prisoners. Helping had become the central meaning of her life. But she could not keep up. It was impossible to keep up. With each year there were fewer and fewer people helping, and more and more political prisoners: over 10 years their number rose 15-fold and had already passed 600.
“She reacted with her skin, on instinct. Toward the end of her life, Nina believed she could do nothing but human rights work. She had an outsized capacity for empathy,” Masha Slonim says.
Nina went out on pickets. By her granddaughter Marusya’s account, she was never detained; police only took down her passport details. In the thinned-out courtroom support group, Litvinova behaved calmly, making no effort to attract attention. And yet, in August 2025, the lawyer Karinna Moskalenko wrote to her: “Nina Mikhailovna, you are my bright angel. I remember well how my eyes would search for you in spite of themselves: is She here? Because you carry hope into every trial you enter. Be happy!!!”
But there was no happiness. There was only endless exhaustion.
“When I asked how things were, she would say, ‘This case is going badly, and that one’s in prison,’” Masha Slonim sighs. “She was steeped in the repression all the time; she found it hard to hit pause, to attend to her own life. To take a walk, to get her mind off it.”
In the fall of 2025, Nina stopped going to the trials. It had become too much for her. Not physically — Litvinova paid almost no attention to her own ailments. There was simply no strength of spirit left; even those close to her sometimes called her efforts a Sisyphean labor.
She went on corresponding with prisoners, endlessly reposting accounts of political trials and commemorations, and handing out to acquaintances Masha Slonim’s book of memoirs, in which even the names of the proofreader and the typesetter were concealed for their safety. She kept meeting with those close to her — later, they would recognize in those meetings a wish to say goodbye.
On May 5, 2026, Nina posted her last entry on Facebook — about the torture of Azat Miftakhov, convicted of “justifying terrorism,” at the Polar Owl (Polyarnaya Sova) penal colony.
On the morning of May 12, she was discussing plans for the coming week with Marina Artamonova, a friend she had met at a trial. Litvinova answered evasively: “Maybe, I don’t know yet.” And at midday she suddenly sent a message: “All the very best to you.”
That same day, Nina, 80, was found unconscious beneath the windows of the building. She could not be saved.
The police found a farewell letter. The original was not given to the Litvinovs.
As had happened many years earlier, when the family searched the archives for Ivy’s note, they were left with a copy. Masha Slonim posted a fragment of it: “I love you all and think of you. But I have to go; living has become unbearable for me. Ever since Putin attacked Ukraine and began killing innocent people, while here at home he endlessly throws thousands of people into prison, where they suffer and die because, like me, they are against the war and against the killing. I can do nothing 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 gave out, and day and night I am tormented by my own helplessness. I am ashamed, but I have given up. Please forgive me.”
Pavel Litvinov, with whom she had stayed in touch until the very end, wrote, briefly: “My angel sister Nina is gone.”
More than 150 people gathered to bid farewell to quiet Ninochka, a woman who had spent her life trying to go unnoticed. Like the ceremony for Alexei Navalny, who perished two years before, the sendoff felt less like a memorial than a political demonstration. In an era when opposition gatherings are outlawed, only death can still get a permit issued for one.
“The kind of crowd that no longer fears anything had gathered,” Olga Bendas says with a wry smile. “We’ve done our fearing.”
And then this mighty Amazon, who took a baton from a police officer and served time in a penal colony, suddenly adds: “Ninochka became the closest person in the world to me. The closest. And now I am left entirely alone.”
“Half the people I talked with at the wake said, ‘How did we fail to keep watch!’ And the other half said, ‘We understand her completely, and we’re thinking about it ourselves,’” the lawyer Maria Eismont sighs. She has just returned from a grueling, fruitless trip. She was not allowed to see her client, a Ukrainian prisoner of war, even though her papers were in order. They told her he himself did not want the visit.
Eismont’s suit is neat, without a single crease; her manicure is flawless — that is how she fights chaos and futility, telling herself: when people in the camps despair so deeply that they stop looking after themselves, they die quickly. Eismont admits that she herself burned out long ago: “People see no way out. Usually, action is the psychological salvation. And now even those who are doing something are tired. Nina was simply a person who couldn’t be indifferent. And so she couldn’t take it. This situation traumatizes everyone who cares. The work has to be successful in at least some way. Even just a little. You cannot spend years at a task that pathologically fails. You need some victories.”
And still Eismont sets off to see the next prisoner. And others go on attending trials whose outcomes are foregone conclusions. They hope. So, too, hoped the future commissar who printed the newspaper Iskra, and his grandson who circulated A Chronicle of Current Events, and Nina, who turned Facebook into an endless record of political trials. Millions upon millions of people hoped — people who, in the dead of winter, century after century, dreamed of spring and received only a thaw, just enough for a new generation to draw a little of freedom’s air into its lungs. And all of them could repeat the short poem by Flora Litvinova, who dreamed of Anatoly Marchenko’s release:
I’ll live, I’ll live to December’s end, / when at the solstice the Earth hangs still. / Through cold and blizzard and frost / the day will lengthen, / and brittle slivers of ice will gleam in the sun. / How I long to believe — that turning out of the dark / a friend will walk free from prison! / A friend will walk free from prison!
If you are having thoughts of suicide, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org in the United States. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116-123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13-11-14. Support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300-22-4636, Lifeline on 13-11-14, and at MensLine on 1300-789-978. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
Story by Vladimir Sevrinovsky
