I Am Always on the Side of the Weak: Diaries, Conversations, Photo-Biography

Elizaveta Glinka (1962–2016), better known as Doctor Liza, was a resuscitation doctor and a specialist in palliative care. She opened the first hospice in Ukraine—in Kyiv—and helped to organize and support the work of hospices in Russian cities, as well as in Serbia and Armenia. She founded the International Charitable Public Organization “Fair Help”; she treated, fed, and provided supplies for homeless people; and she was involved in evacuating sick and injured children from Donbas. On December 25, 2016, she died in an air crash over the Black Sea while accompanying a shipment of medicines and equipment for a hospital in Syria. The nickname “Doctor Liza” stuck to her after, in 2005, she began blogging on “LiveJournal,” telling stories about patients who were spending their final days in the Kyiv hospice she had created.

Glinka believed that every person—regardless of their biography, actions, and reputation—deserves a dignified end of life: without pain, without humiliation, not alone, and not forgotten. She persistently tried to convey this idea to others.

This audiobook is based on Elizaveta Glinka’s diary entries; in the second part, selected interviews are gathered, in which she speaks in detail about her work and her patients, and only a little about herself. The audiobook also includes a foreword by Yevgeny Vodolazkin and a memoir essay by Gleb Glinka.