Yelena Bonner dies; Russian rights activst and widow of Andrei Sakharov
was 88
By Kevin Klose, Sunday, June 19, 2011
Yelena G. Bonner, the Russian human rights activist who was the widow of
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov and came under repression
by the secret police, died of heart failure in Boston on Saturday,
according to the Associated Press.
Mrs. Bonner, decorated for valor and wounds during World War II, was 88.
She had been hospitalized since Feb. 21, her daughter Tatiana
Yankelevich told the AP.
Mrs. Bonner was a founder of one of the most active rights groups in the
Soviet dissident movement of the 1970s, the Helsinki Monitoring
Committee. The organization, which for a time disbanded in 1982 after
most of its members were jailed for political crimes against the state,
sought to publicize Soviet violations of human rights guarantees made
when Moscow signed the 1975 Helsinki Agreement on European Cooperation
and Security.
The Helsinki Act recognized Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe in return
for Soviet assurance to nurture fundamental freedoms, such as free
speech, assembly and religion.
The Helsinki Act caused numerous unofficial rights groups to form, and
they became an unusual phenomenon in the life of the Soviet capital in
the mid-1970s. There were groups delving into invalids’ rights,
religious oppression, political abuse of psychiatry, workers’ rights and
emigration demands.
Mrs. Bonner signed hundreds of zayevlenie, or statements, supporting
victims of KGB reprisals. She and her husband traveled through Siberia
and remote parts of Russia, visiting courtrooms and jails to aid
imprisoned activists.
By the decade’s end, however, many activists were in prison or labor
camps. The luckier were expelled from Russia or sent into internal exile
far from Moscow. Mr. Sakharov was arrested in January 1980, and was
confined to Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow. Mrs. Bonner had a special
status as wife of Mr. Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb.
She was allowed to travel to Moscow until May 1984, when the KGB
detained her in Gorky on allegations she had committed anti-state
crimes.
During a period of reform under Mikhail Gorbachev, the couple was
allowed to return to Moscow in 1986, where they pressed on with their
calls for greater freedom and revived the monitoring committee.
Mrs. Bonner’s activism entered a new phase after Mr. Sakharov
died in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later.
She went on to promote human rights in the post-Soviet era by
challenging President Boris Yeltsin’s and President
Vladi-mir Putin’s government.
When a petition circulated in 2010 calling for Putin to step down, Mrs.
Bonner was among the first to sign it.
Mrs. Bonner was physically striking, with a robust frame, a no-nonsense
voice deepened by years of chain-smoking acrid Russian cigarettes. She
frequently wore heavy wool shawls, accentuating her swarthy features.
Born Feb. 15, 1923, Mrs. Bonner’s father was Gevork Alikhanyan, an
Armenian Bolshevik revolutionary who once was party chief in Armenia.
Her mother, Ruf Bonner, was the daughter of a Jewish family born into
Siberian exile.
Stalin’s secret police arrested and shot her father in 1937, then sent
her mother to slave labor camp as `the wife of an enemy of the
people.’ Elena and her younger brother lived with relatives for
years. She became a Red Army nurse during World War II. She was badly
wounded during the siege of Leningrad and almost lost her eyesight later
when a German plane strafed the medical train on which she was tending
wounded soldiers.
After the war, she married Ivan Semyonov, a doctor, and they had two
children. Mrs. Bonner lived in Iraq for two years as part of a Soviet
medical team there. She was divorced in the early 1960s and married Mr.
Sakharov a decade later.
Mrs. Bonner’s activism prompted threats against her family,
leading her mother, son, daughter and two grandchildren to move to
Boston in the 1970s, according to the Associated Press. In the
mid-1980s, she visited the city for medical treatment and then returned
home.
In increasingly poor heath, she spent more time on her visits to Boston
in recent years, according to the AP. Her daughter said her remains will
be cremated and buried next to her husband, mother and brothers in
Moscow.
Klose is dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the
University of Maryland. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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