Mick Hartley

From Tom Parfitt in the Times:

A death in Moscow last week seemed to mark the end of an era.

State media first reported the news: an 80-year-old woman, the granddaughter of the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs Maxim Litvinov, had been found lifeless below the windows of her flat in the south of the Russian capital. She had left a suicide note.

With a jolt, I realised this must be Nina Litvinova, the daughter of an elderly couple I befriended in the early 2000s because they lived in the apartment above mine, opposite Gorky Park.

Nina’s parents, my former neighbours in Moscow, were Mikhail, a mathematician and origami enthusiast who was the son of Maxim Litvinov, and his wife Flora, a physiologist.

I never met her but Nina, known affectionately to relatives as Ninochka, lived across the way from us on 3rd Frunzenskaya Street. She was a marine biologist known for her quiet but passionate support of political prisoners….

The first reaction to her death on Tuesday was a ripple of shock and grief that passed through émigré circles and the smattering of oppositionists still inside Russia. The banned human rights group Memorial said she was “the personification of modest but unbending courage and nobility”.

Then came anger. Nina’s cousin Masha Slonim, the Russian-British former BBC journalist who lives in Devon, wrote on Facebook that she had learnt the content of the suicide note that Nina had left before ending her life.

“I love you all, and think about you,” Nina had told her family, “but I must leave; to live has become intolerable ever since Putin attacked Ukraine and began killing innocent people, while thousands here are constantly being put in prison, where they suffer and die for being, as I am, against the war and the murders … I tried to help them, but my strength has ended and night and day I am tormented by my powerlessness. I am ashamed, but I have given up. Please forgive me.”

Masha Slonim made a bald conclusion. “Putin killed her,” she wrote.

A reminder that while we obsess about Labour in-fighting, others live – and die – in an altogether grimmer world.