Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner (; 15 February 1923 – 18 June 2011) was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the physicist, activist and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov. During her decades as a dissident, Bonner was noted for her characteristic blunt honesty and courage.
Biography
Early life and education
Lusik Georgiyevna Alikhanova was born in Merv, Turkestan ASSR, Soviet Union (now Mary, Turkmenistan). She was born to Ruf "Ruth" Bonner, a Jewish communist activist from Siberia, and Levon Kacharyan, an Armenian. Her father died a year after her birth, and her mother remarried to Gevorg Alikhanyan, founding First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia and a Comintern executive. She had a younger brother, Igor, who became a career naval officer. Her family had a summer dacha in Sestroretsk and Bonner had fond memories there.
In 1937, Bonner's father was arrested by the NKVD and executed as part of Stalin's Great Purge; her mother was arrested a few days later as the wife of an enemy of the people, and served ten years in the Gulag near Karaganda, Kazakhstan, followed by nine years of internal exile. Bonner's 41-year-old maternal uncle, Matvei Bonner, was also executed during the purge, and his wife internally exiled. All four were exonerated (rehabilitated) following Stalin's death in 1953. In 1941 she volunteered for the Red Army's Hospital when the Soviet Union was invaded, and she became head nurse.
Marriage and children
In medical school she met her first husband, Ivan Semyonov. They had a daughter, Tatiana, in 1950, and a son, Alexey, in 1956. Her children immigrated to the United States in 1977 and 1978, respectively. Bonner and Semyonov separated in 1965, and eventually divorced.
In October 1970, while attending the trial of human rights activists Revol't (Ivanovich) Pimenov and Boris Vail in Kaluga, Bonner met Andrei Sakharov, a nuclear physicist and human rights activist; they married in 1972.
Activism
Beginning as early as the 1940s, Bonner had helped political prisoners and their families. Although Bonner had joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1964 while she was working as a physician, only a few years later she was becoming active in the Soviet human rights movement. Her resolve towards dissidence was strengthened in August 1968 after Soviet bloc tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in order to crush the Prague Spring movement. That event strengthened her belief that the system could not be reformed from within.
In 1994, outraged by what she called "genocide of the Chechen people", Bonner resigned from Yeltsin's Human Rights Commission and was an outspoken opponent to Russian armed involvement in Chechnya and critical of the Kremlin for allegedly returning to KGB-style authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin. She was also critical of the international "quartet" two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and expressed fears about the rise of antisemitism in Europe. In 1999, Yelena Bonner received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom.
Bonner was among the 34 first signatories of the online anti-Putin manifesto "Putin must go", published 10 March 2010. Her signature was the first.
Last years and death
From 2006, Bonner divided her time between Moscow and the United States, home to her two children, five grandchildren, one great-granddaughter, and one great-grandson. and Mothers and Daughters (Knopf 1992), and wrote frequently on Russia and human rights. She was a recipient of many international human rights awards, including the Rafto Prize in 1991, the European Parliament's Robert Schuman Medal in 2001, the awards of International Humanist and Ethical Union, the Lithuanian Commemorative Medal of 13 January,
In 2005 Bonner participated in "They Chose Freedom", a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement. Bonner was on the Board of Advancing Human Rights (NGO).
Depiction in media
Bonner was portrayed by Glenda Jackson in the 1984 film Sakharov.
References
Works
Further reading
- - article on Yelena Bonner's son