The grey zone

摘要

PEOPLE WHO devote themselves to helping the unfortunate are not always loved by the more comfortable. They are a pain in the conscience; they can be gratingly pious. But in her heyday as a friend of Moscow's dying and destitute, Elizaveta Glinka, a medical philanthropist known as Doctor Liza, was likeable as well as inspiring. Whether she was ministering to rough sleepers at a Moscow railway station or visiting patients facing lonely deaths at home, her style was both sensitive and practical. She could cajole awkward bureaucrats and relieve the afflicted. She frankly acknowledged her own fear of death; it came to her three years ago, when a flight carrying visitors to the Russian garrison in Syria crashed into the Black Sea.