“Her life is a feat”: reaction to the death of Doctor Lisa. Doctor Lisa: her death became a personal grief for thousands of people Doctor Lisa died in a plane crash
A Tu-154 aircraft of the Russian Ministry of Defense crashed off the coast of Sochi, with 84 passengers and eight crew members on board.
The plane with the artists on board took off from the Chkalovsky airfield near Moscow on the night of December 25. It landed in Sochi for refueling and took off again at 5:20 Moscow time.
After 20 minutes, the board disappeared from radar while climbing; It later became known that he fell seven minutes into the flight. Among the passengers were artists from the Alexandrov Ensemble, who were flying to congratulate the Russian military in Syria, as well as representatives of the Russian media and military personnel. The concert, according to a representative of the ensemble, was to take place in Aleppo.
The head of the department of culture of the Moscow government, Alexander Kibovsky, commenting on the disaster, said about the choir. Aleksandrova: “They were called the singing weapons of the Kremlin. And so it was.”
On board the plane were the director of the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Defense Anton Gubankov and his assistant Oksana Batrutdinova.
Also on the plane were three journalists from Channel One (correspondent Dmitry Runkov, cameraman Vadim Denisov and Alexander Soydov, sound engineer), an NTV film crew consisting of correspondent Mikhail Luzhetsky, cameraman Oleg Pestov and sound engineer Evgeniy Tolstoy, three employees of the Zvezda TV channel.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has published a list of passengers of the crashed Tu-154. There are 84 people on the list, including Elizaveta Glinka (Doctor Lisa). According to the Just Aid Foundation, she was accompanying a humanitarian cargo for the Tishreen University Hospital in Latakia. At first it was reported that Glinka could only fly this plane to Sochi, and then decided not to fly to Syria, but Elizaveta Glinka’s husband Gleb confirmed to “Snob” that she had died. Even in the absence of official confirmation, the head of the Human Rights Council, Mikhail Fedotov, published an obituary on the website of the Human Rights Council:
The head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alekseeva, called the death of the director of the Fair Aid Foundation, Elizaveta Glinka, known as Doctor Lisa, a “huge loss.” “She was a saint,” the human rights activist said.
A Fontanka source in the Ministry of Defense reports that the plane was carrying a large volume of military papers, including secret ones, and that investigators do not rule out the possibility of a terrorist attack. Interfax claims that the commission to investigate the causes of the Tu-154 crash is inclined to the version of a technical malfunction.
Aviation experts, however, point out that planes very rarely crash during takeoff, especially of a class like the Tu-154. Major of the Russian Air Force, instructor pilot Andrei Krasnoperov, in an interview with Kommersant, said that the large spread of debris indicates that the plane broke up in the air. In this regard, he allowed an explosion on board. The former shift manager of the main center of the unified air traffic management system of Russia, Vitaly Andreev, in a commentary for RIA Novosti, announced the possible seizure of the Tu-154. In his opinion, only such an extreme situation could prevent the aircraft crew from transmitting a distress signal to the ground.
According to the Ministry of Defense, the crashed plane was produced in 1983, the total flight time is 6,689 hours. The last repair on board took place in December 2014, and scheduled maintenance took place in September 2016. The plane was flown by “an experienced pilot, first class pilot Roman Volkov.”
A government commission has been formed in connection with the plane crash, the Russian Cabinet of Ministers reported. It was headed by Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov, who flew to Sochi. Experts discovered the first bodies of the victims at the plane crash site. Search operations are being carried out by rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations and employees of the Ministry of Defense. The Ministry of Emergency Situations sent divers from the Centrospas detachment and the Leader Center to Sochi. The specialists are equipped with diving equipment, equipment for deep-sea work, mobile pressure chambers and Falcon underwater guided vehicles.
A terrible tragedy occurred on Sunday, December 25, early in the morning. A Tu-154 aircraft of the Ministry of Defense crashed while taking off from Adler airport to Syria. Among the passengers on the liner was the executive director of the Fair Aid Foundation, Elizaveta Glinka, known as Doctor Lisa. People who knew Glinka do not want to believe that the worst thing happened. On Doctor Lisa’s Facebook page they exchange comments in which there is hope that the woman may be alive, that for some reason she remained in Sochi, that she will get in touch soon...
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense provided a passenger list for the Tu-154, which includes the name of Elizaveta Glinka. Information about the death of his wife was confirmed by the husband of the human rights activist, Gleb Glinka. An obituary was published on the Human Rights Council website. It says, in particular, that Elizaveta Petrovna was heading to Syria to deliver medicines to the university hospital in the city of Latakia.
“Dr. Lisa was everyone's favorite. And there was a reason: for many years, she provided palliative medical care almost every day, fed the homeless, clothed them, and gave them shelter,” the message says.
Doctor Elizaveta Glinka's mission was to save other people. Everyone remembers how, under bullets, she organized the removal of children from the warring Donbass so that they could receive medical care in hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It was through her efforts that a shelter was organized for children with amputated limbs, where they undergo rehabilitation. Dr. Lisa tirelessly knocked on the doors of officials, knocking out money to help hospices, hospitals, and boarding schools. Doctor Lisa could not remain indifferent to the fate of the Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko - she collected money for medicine for the arrested woman, which helped save her life during a long hunger strike. Doctor Lisa was one of the first to respond to the request for help from Syrian doctors. “This is very similar to the war being waged in Ukraine: similar injuries, poverty, dirt, lack of medicine,” Elizaveta Glinka said about Syria.
“Lord, why is this? You couldn’t die... I don’t believe it!”, “Woe... Lord, what grief... Eternal memory. Elizabeth... Lisa. So much goodness, strength, faith. And in an instant. We mourn”, “Terrible. Great sorrow. Blessed memory, Doctor Lisa”, “Irreparable loss. Everlasting memory. Condolences to your loved ones and especially to all of us. How can it be without her now,” these are the notes left on Elizaveta Glinka’s page by people shocked by the news of her death.
A little less than a year ago, Dr. Lisa’s friend Ksenia Sokolova told about what Elizaveta Glinka was like, how she knew how to sympathize and accept other people’s pain as her own.
Norwich Terrier Asya tried to console Doctor Lisa // Photo: Facebook
“Yesterday a friend came to visit me - upset and sad. Since I love her very much, I tried to console her in every way: I lit the fireplace, we listened to Nick Cave and the band “Spleen”; my Norwich Terrier Asya sat on her lap all evening, also trying to give warmth to a person who was very cold - and not from the wind and snow. But nothing helped - my friend sat and cried bitterly. To more accurately guess her desires, I asked: “Darling, what do you like to do most? How would you like your life to turn out?" She replied: “I just want everything to be like before the war...” My friend’s name is Doctor Lisa.”
Elizaveta Glinka was born on February 20, 1962 in Moscow. By training she is a resuscitation doctor, in life she is an incredibly kind person who knows how to empathize with other people’s pain and misfortune. She was the executive director of the Fair Aid charity foundation, which she herself created in 2007. She was a member of the Russian Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights.
There is no tragedy to which the heart of Elizaveta Glinka would not respond. Her foundation provides financial support and medical care to dying cancer patients, low-income non-cancer patients, and the homeless. In 2010, Elizaveta Glinka, on her own behalf, collected material assistance for the benefit of victims of forest fires. In 2012, Glinka and her foundation organized a collection of items for flood victims in Krymsk.
Since 2015, during the war in Syria, Doctor Lisa has repeatedly visited this country on humanitarian missions - she was engaged in the delivery and distribution of medicines, and organizing the provision of medical care to ordinary citizens of Syria.
Elizaveta Glinka is survived by her husband and three children, one of whom is adopted.
The husband of Elizaveta Glinka, known as Doctor Lisa, confirmed that she was on board at the time of the Tu-154 plane crash, Snob magazine reports. The Fair Aid Foundation also reported the death of its executive director.
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Its website contains confirmation that Elizaveta Glinka flew on a Russian Ministry of Defense flight to Syria. “She accompanied a humanitarian cargo for the Tishreen University Hospital in Latakia,” the organization said.
The Ministry of Health reported that all passengers and crew members on board died in the Tu-154 crash, Life.ru reports. All employees of forensic morgues in Sochi have been returned to work. The bodies of those killed in the plane crash are expected to be delivered for identification by relatives.
Earlier, Elizaveta Glinka's press secretary Natalya Avilova neither confirmed nor denied information about her fate. “We will hope until the last moment that she might not have reached this plane, might have been late... We hope to receive information from the Ministry of Defense, but until that moment we don’t want to cause panic. Perhaps she doesn’t get in touch because she’s flying now to Syria on another flight,” she said.
Let us note that earlier information appeared that, despite being on the passenger lists, Dr. Lisa might not have been on board the crashed airliner. “It didn’t pass control and was removed from the lists,” said a source in the Russian Ministry of Defense. Later, however, the department confirmed that Elizaveta Glinka did take off on that fateful flight.
“The mind refuses to understand that she is no longer with us. The heart refuses to believe in it,” admitted the head of the Human Rights Council under the President of Russia, Mikhail Fedotov. “Doctor Lisa was everyone’s favorite. And there was a reason for it: for many years, she provided palliative medical care almost every day, fed the homeless, clothed them, and gave them shelter,” he said.
“It was she who took sick and wounded children from Donbass under bullets so that they could get help in the best hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It was she who organized a shelter for children with amputated limbs, where they undergo rehabilitation after the hospital,” recalled Mikhail Fedotov.
“Saving the lives of others was her mission everywhere: in Russia, in Donbass, in Syria... We hoped until the last for a miracle. And she herself was a miracle, a heavenly message of virtue,” he concluded.
Content
When on December 25, 2016, a report was received about a transport disaster - a crashed plane - no one thought that “Doctor Lisa” was on board - an activist and social activist, a doctor and an incredibly generous soul, Elizaveta Petrovna Glinka. But DNA testing confirmed that Lisa was on board the plane that crashed in the Sochi area.
Study, work and social activities
Lisa was born in the Russian capital in 1962 in the family of a military man, Pyotr Sidorov, and a nutritionist, Galina Ivanovna Poskrebysheva, the author of books on the proper use of vitamins and cooking. Mom also worked on television. In addition to the daughter and son, the family raised orphaned cousins. After school, the girl became a student at the Second Medical Institute. Pirogov, choosing the specialty “pediatric resuscitator-anesthesiologist”.
But the turning point in her fate was the meeting with her future husband, an American lawyer of Russian origin, Gleb Glinka. In 1990, she and her husband emigrated to the United States of America, where Elizaveta Petrovna began working in a hospice. She saw how a man doomed to death leads a dignified life, feeling surrounded by attention and without losing human dignity.
In the States, Lisa Glinka continued her studies - she graduated from medical school at Dartmouth - she was interested in palliative medicine, in which doctors strive to improve the quality of life of doomed patients with cancer or other fatal diseases. This direction of medicine does not involve treatment, but psychological assistance and learning to live every second. At the end of the 90s, the Glinkas moved to Ukraine - Gleb had a contract for temporary work in Kyiv. Here Elizaveta Petrovna organized the first palliative wards at oncology centers and helped create the first hospice.
She created the Fair Aid Foundation after her seriously ill mother passed away in Moscow in 2007. The fund was financed by parties and patrons of the arts in Russia and the USA. Here, not only seriously ill people, but also disadvantaged people without a specific place of residence could receive help and psychological support. “Doctor Lisa” (that’s what they began to call her) visited the capital’s train stations, trying to feed the homeless and treat their wounds.
She attracted famous politicians, popular actors, singers, and media personalities to her activities. For some period she became actively involved in the political life of Russia. She had high awards. With the height of the conflict in the South-East of Ukraine, Lisa Glinka rushed to help wounded children and seriously ill people who found themselves on the line of fire. She helped the hearing impaired through the charity organization “Country of the Deaf” and contributed to the opening of hospices in many Russian cities. She was loved and hated, criticized and threatened. And she did what she considered necessary.
The tragic death of Doctor Lisa
In the last week of 2016, a transport disaster occurred - a Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs plane crashed near Sochi. The flight flew from Moscow to Latakia, a Syrian city. This happened near the runway of Sochi airport. There were 92 people on board this flight, including artists from the Alexandrov Song and Dance Ensemble, journalists from several TV channels, the crew and Lisa Glinka, head of the Fair Aid Foundation.
This news shocked everyone - no one wanted to believe in the death of so many people and the representative of the Russian charitable movement, “Doctor Lisa.” The causes of the plane crash were never named - either an error by the pilots, or dispatchers, or overload on board. There was even a version of a deliberate terrorist attack. Elizaveta Petrovna accompanied a batch of medicines to Syria for the Tishrin University Hospital and this was not her first trip to a hot spot in the world. She has already brought medicines and clothes, water and food here. She was identified after a DNA examination, which was carried out in January 2017. On January 16, 2017, a farewell took place on the territory of the Novodevichy Convent, in the Assumption Church. Here lies the ashes of the one who had no idea of peace during her lifetime.
But Elizaveta Glinka, whose cause of death was a plane tragedy, continues to live in the hearts of millions of people.
Personal life
Lisa met her husband Gleb Glinka, the son of a Russian poet and literary critic who emigrated from Russia in the second wave, the grandson of journalist Alexander Sergeevich Glinka, during her student years, at an exhibition of expressionists. The young man immediately drew attention to the miniature girl. But it took her time to understand - she fell in love! Gleb was 14 years older than Lisa, but this did not stop the lovers and they soon got married.
They had to experience a lot and test the strength of the family rear - the husband was always her support and wall, comrade-in-arms and like-minded person. And she constantly accompanied him on business trips and gave birth to two sons - Konstantin and Alexei. They also had an adopted son, Ilya. Now the older boys live in the USA, the younger one lives in Saratov.
Almost no one knew about that trip to Syria... All the more unexpected and tragic was the news about the plane crash... It seemed that Elizaveta Glinka and death were incompatible phenomena. She was a great lover of life and managed to generously give this feeling to those around her. For many, the scale of her social activities became clear only after the death of “Doctor Lisa.” On January 16, 2017, a military children's sanatorium in Yevpatoria and the Republican Children's Clinical Hospital in Grozny, and a hospice in Yekaterinburg were named in her honor.
Both during the Doctor's life and after his death, there was a lot of controversy about whose side she was on (for our people or for the bad ones). The answer is in her diaries, which were recently published as a separate book (AST, Edited by Elena Shubina). It’s called “I’m always on the side of the weak.” This is her position - beyond disputes, she makes any confrontation senseless and criminal.
Throughout her life, Elizaveta Petrovna built a different chronicle of events, parallel and even opposite to the political one.
2004 First Maidan. "Orange Revolution. Glinka has been in Kyiv since the early 2000s, working in a free oncology hospice. In her diaries, a brother dies in his brother’s arms, a murderer and a homeless man asks to take a photograph of him (so that the photo hangs after his death somewhere other than the board “They are wanted by the police”), the dying professor with a trembling hand writes “Against All” on the election ballot. If anything can be called a revolution of dignity, it is this. People who were unable to live with dignity (and these are, unfortunately, the majority of us) came to the Doctor to die with dignity. She fought for it and most often won.
About a degraded drunk, a bottom man who is sure that everyone has abandoned him:
“I came to him a day later. He shaved and washed. The bottle stood on a stool. The jar of sputum was covered with a napkin.
- Hello, Sergey.
- Don't leave me.
- I won’t give up.
- And your sisters, your heifers, let them come.
- Fine.
“Just don’t leave me.”
She didn't leave anyone.
Summer 2010. Forest and peat fires are raging around Moscow. On the street I could, I couldn’t breathe. Even in the metro, visibility is about six steps, the end of the lobby is in smoke. I went down to the basement of “Fair Aid” on Novokuznetskaya. Without any purpose, purely reflexively. It’s ingrained in my head that in a difficult situation I have to go there.
A small woman was sleeping on the sofa, her cap pulled down over her eyes. When she lifted her cap, I saw a face black with fatigue. She spent days collecting and sending supplies to fire victims and equipping teams of volunteer firefighters. Then she said in an interview:
“It’s obvious to me that officials see us as competitors. It seems to them that this is a substitution of their functions, an invasion into their sphere of activity. It turns out that even fires cannot be extinguished without putting yourself under the control of the system. Certificates, contributions, orders...
2010-2011 - an explosion of volunteer activity. Fires, searching for missing people, Krymsk, helping the elderly, Khimki forest... Thousands of people were eager to help. Before our eyes, a real civil society was being born, a society of people who think not only about themselves. About others - first of all. But then it turned into a stupid political game and ended very ugly. It ended in war, if you think about it. The idealists have lost once again.
By the way, about the war. Remember 2008, the operation to enforce peace in Abkhazia. What is Doctor Lisa doing at this time? Feeds homeless people at Paveletsky railway station. Every week he methodically distributes hot soup and provides medical assistance. Queues are forming at her old van, and refugees are pouring into the basement on Novokuznetskaya.
And another quote from that old interview:
“For some reason, everyone is annoyed that I feed them. Yes, they don't work. So what, they need to die? If a rich man feels bad because I feed the poor, let him come too, I have three hundred portions of food, I will give it to him too. But let him stand in this line first. Not a single person has yet come to me from a good life. If we talk about my views, they are rather socialist. I am for free medicine, for the state to be responsible for all its citizens, both rich and not so rich. You can call me a socialist, I won’t be offended.”
There was a harsh reaction to all this. And not from the state, but from society. They shit in front of the “Fair Aid” office, stole a suitcase with medical instruments, and damaged the car. And in winter they started setting homeless people on fire in their hallways. They doused it with gasoline and left it to burn. Doctor's assistant Lana Zhurkina writes that now, almost ten years later, such cases have resumed. You will inevitably doubt progress. Who said that people become better people with the passage of time and the development of technology? Well, except that the new iPhone was invented, but otherwise everything is about the same.
At the same time, the smile never left her face, and neither did her employees. They looked least like dried up ascetics with the seal of holiness on their foreheads. Glinka drove a car at breakneck speed, jumped with a parachute, could easily tell an obscene joke, and once organized a charity striptease evening at the Kurskaya. At first I was shocked: charity really doesn’t fit in with striptease. But when I saw huge boxes of clothes for the homeless for the winter, all doubts disappeared. All this was done easily, without pathos or effort. The most common journalistic question to the Doctor is: “Do you often cry?” She cried, and, I think, often, but never in public. One can only imagine how difficult it was for her.
And then the war began in Donbass. The last thing the doctor thought about was who was right, she thought about something else. The fact that in hospitals there are no basic dressing materials, no anti-tetanus serum. She carried medicines in that direction, and seriously ill children in this direction, who were doomed in the conditions of shelling and devastation. Everyone taken by her to Russia has parental permission. In fact, they left, accompanied by their parents. And if there were no documents, she took the children to the Ukrainian side, which was much more difficult. They shot at the car; it could have hit a mine many times. The doctor rode one step away from death, sang songs to the children, stroked them, and told them that there was no need to be afraid. I don’t know what it was like for her to listen to reproaches from armchair analysts about “she’s stealing our children,” but it all sounded disgusting.
One of these cases happened before my eyes. In the summer of 2015, my friend Lesha Smirnov took a girl with blood cancer from the Luhansk town and handed it over to Glinka. She brought little Lisa and her mother to Moscow, got them into a hospital, and found housing. They helped them with the whole world. In September 2016, Lisa entered first grade and went into remission. For a long time they were afraid to tell her that the Doctor was no more.
What does politics have to do with this? Glinka came to Nadezhda Savchenko, persuading her to stop the hunger strike. Do you think Savchenko’s views mattered here? And if the Doctor knew that after Savchenko’s release he would start saying completely different things, would that change anything? Does the value of life, of any kind, have anything to do with all this nonsense?
Elizaveta Petrovna’s husband Gleb Glinka writes in the afterword to the book:
“She couldn’t stand not only the scale of the disaster (“I didn’t imagine that so many children would be killed... That there would be so many wounded among them”). First of all, she could not stand the fact that everything that was happening was not the consequences of a natural disaster, physical or mental illness, ruin, personal or social catastrophe. No, people deliberately did this to each other, including children, the disabled, orphans, the elderly, the sick, the helpless, and deliberately caused suffering to the innocent. She couldn’t come to terms with this, she couldn’t get through it.”
Now, a year later, I think: what did she teach us? Kindness, mercy - this is clear, although the lesson was not taken, judging by the way we mock every dead person today on both sides of the political barricade. What is there to argue about if life, any life, whether for patriots or liberals, ends in fear and pain? What truth should be born in such a dispute, what, in principle, can be born in it, except hatred, which is already in abundance in the atmosphere?
This does not mean that the truth is “somewhere in the middle.” She's in a different place altogether.