Born: 15 February 1923, Turkmenistan
Died: 18 June 2011
Country most active: Turkmenistan
Also known as: Lusik Alikhanova, Елена Георгиевна Боннэр
Soviet human rights advocate Yelena Bonner is known in part as the wife of physicist, activist and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, but was an award-winning activist in her own right. Part of this overshadowing is likely because, like many widows, she worked to preserve her husband’s legacy, establishing the Andrei Sakharov Foundation and the Sakharov Archives following his death.
Bonner was raised by her mother, a Jewish communist activist from Siberia, and stepfather, the founding First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia and a Communist International executive. When she was 14, Bonner’s stepfather was executed in Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937 and her mother arrested, imprisoned for a decade in a gulag, then exiled for a further nine years.
In 1941, Bonner volunteered as a nurse with the Red Army; she was wounded twice and was honorably discharged in 1946 as a disabled veteran. After World War II, she completed a degree in pediatrics at the First Leningrad Medical Institute, later renamed First Pavlov State Medical University of St. Petersburg. Although she joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1964, she had been aiding political prisoners and their families since the 1940s. She became active in the Soviet human rights movement in the late ‘60s, particularly after the violent Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring movement in 1968.
In 1970, Bonner met Sakharov while attending the trial of two human rights activists, and the couple married in 1972. Each had children from previous marriages (she was divorced, he was widowed). At that 1970 trial, the couple also met Natan Sharansky, and began working with him to defend Jews sentenced to death for trying to escape the USSR on a hijacked plane.
Sakharov pressured the government to allow Bonner to travel outside the country in 1975, 1977 and 1979 for treatments for her eye injury sustained during World War II. Her daughter and son emigrated to the United States in 1977 and 1978, and again in 1985 for a sextuple bypass heart surgery. When Sakharov won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, Soviet authorities would not allow him to travel and Bonner, who was in Italy for treatment at the time, represented him at the ceremony in Oslo.
In 1976, Bonner was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, which would become one of Russia’s leading human rights organizations. She was arrested in 1984 and sentenced to five years of exile in Gorky for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” but was allowed to return to Moscow in 1986. She was an outspoken defender of the parliament during the failed August Coup in 1991 and supported Boris Yeltsin during the 1993 constitutional crisis. However, the following year, she resigned from Yeltsin’s Human Rights Commission due to Russia’s violence in Chechnya.
As a writer, she published Alone Together in 1987 and Mothers and Daughters in 1992, among other works on democracy and human rights. She also served on the board of the international NGO Advancing Human Rights. Bonner’s was the first signature on the online anti-Putin manifesto “Putin must go”, published 10 March 2010.