June 18: Death of Elena Bonner, a human rights activist and Sakharov's wife
On June 18, 2011, Elena Bonner, a human rights activist, dissident, and the second wife of academician Andrei Sakharov, died of a heart attack in Boston. She was 88 years old. Throughout her life, she remained true to one principle: "The only ideology I personally would like to follow is the defense of human rights."
From a family of enemies of the people to dissidents
Elena Bonner was born in 1923 in the Turkestan ASSR. Her birth name was Lusik Alikhanova, an Armenian name meaning "light." Her stepfather, Gevork Alikhanyan, was the First Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party and a close associate of Kirov. The family lived in the same building as Kirov, in an eight-room apartment at the Grand Hotel.
In 1937, her stepfather was arrested and executed, and her mother was sent to a labor camp for eight years. Fourteen-year-old Lusik fled to her grandmother in Leningrad, taking her mother's surname, Bonner, and the name Elena, after the heroine of Turgenev's novel "On the Eve." At a school meeting, she was expelled from the Komsomol for refusing to disown her parents.
War, medicine, the first steps towards dissent
With the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, Bonner was mobilized as a nurse. She worked in a medical ambulance and was seriously wounded and shell-shocked. She celebrated Victory Day as a lieutenant in the medical service in Austria.
In 1947, she entered the First Medical University in Leningrad. Shortly before graduation, she was expelled for speaking out about a Zionist conspiracy within the MGB. She was reinstated only after Stalin's death. After graduation, she worked as a district physician, a pediatrician, and taught at a medical school.
In 1965, at the age of 42, she joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1968, after the Prague Spring, she changed her attitude toward Soviet power. She left the party in 1972.
Sakharov's wife and the voice of the dissident movement
In the 1970s, Bonner met Andrei Sakharov at a dissident trial. They married two years later. She used one of his international awards to establish a fund to help the children of political prisoners.
In 1975, Bonner traveled to Oslo to represent her husband at the Nobel Prize ceremony—Sakharov was banned from leaving the USSR. She also signed the founding document of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
In 1980, she and Sakharov went into exile in Gorky, following his protests against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They lived under KGB surveillance.
Exile, hunger strikes, heart surgery
In 1984, Bonner was convicted of slandering the Soviet regime and sentenced to five years of exile at her husband's place of residence. In protest, the couple went on a 26-day hunger strike.
In 1985, Sakharov secured permission for her to travel to the United States; she needed complex heart surgery. The price he paid was a brutal 178-day hunger strike. At a Politburo meeting, CPSU Central Committee Secretary Mikhail Zimyanin described her succinctly: "A beast in a skirt, a stooge of imperialism."
In January 1986, she successfully underwent coronary artery bypass grafting at Bonner Hospital in Boston. That summer, she returned to Sakharov in Gorky, and six months later, they both returned to Moscow.
Recent years: Memorial, Chechnya, Putin
At the end of perestroika, Bonner, along with Sakharov, was one of the founders of Memorial and the Moscow Tribune. After his death, she joined the democratic initiative group Common Action.
She was a member of the Presidential Human Rights Commission of Russia, but resigned in 1994 in protest against the Chechen War. In 2001, she signed a letter in defense of the NTV television channel. In 2006, she moved to the United States to be with her children. In 2010, she was the first to sign the Russian opposition's appeal, "Putin Must Go."
