Yelena Bonner

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Yelena (or Elena) Georgevna Bonner (Russian language: Елена Георгиевна Боннэр, born February 15, 1923) is a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and widow of the late Andrei Sakharov.

She was born in Merv (now Mary), Turkmenistan to Ruth Bonner, a Jewish Communist activist. Her stepfather^[1] was Georgy Alikhanov (né Gevork Alikhanyan, who had fled the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915 to Tbilisi), a prominent Armenian Communist and a secretary of the Comintern. She had a younger brother, Igor, who became a career naval officer.

Her parents were both arrested in 1937 during Stalin's Great Purge; her father was shot and her mother was deported to a forced labor camp near Karaganda, Kazakhstan for eight years. Elena's 41-year-old uncle, Ruf's brother Matvei Bonner, was executed during the Purge, and his wife arrested.

Serving as a nurse during World War II, Bonner was wounded twice, and in 1946 was honorably discharged as a disabled veteran. After the war she earned a degree in pediatrics from the First Leningrad Medical Institute. Her first husband was Ivan Semenov (or Semyonov), her classmate at medical school, by whom she had two children, Tatiana ("Tanya") and Alexei ("Alyosha"), both of whom emigrated to the United States. Elena and Ivan eventually divorced.

Beginning in the 1940s, she helped political prisoners and their families, in the late 1960s, she became active in the Soviet human rights movement. In 1972 she married nuclear physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov. Under pressure from Sakharov, the regime permitted her to travel to the West in 1975, 1977, and 1979 for treatment of her wartime injury. When Sakharov, awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, was barred from travel by the Soviets, Bonner, in Italy for treatment, represented him at the ceremony in Oslo.

Bonner joined the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976. When in January 1980 Sakharov was exiled to Gorky, a city closed to the foreigners, the harassed and publicly denounced Bonner became his lifeline traveling between Gorky and Moscow to bring out his writings. Her arrest in April 1984 for "anti-Soviet slander" and sentence to five years of exile in Gorky disrupted their lives again. Sakharov’s several long and painful hunger strikes forced the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev to let her travel to the USA in 1985 for sextuple bypass heart surgery. Bonner and Sakharov went on a dangerous (given their declining health), but ultimately successful hunger strike together to get Soviet officials to allow their daughter-in-law, Yelizaveta Konstantinovna ("Lisa") Alexeyeva, an exit visa to join her husband, Elena's son "Aloysha", in the USA.

In December 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev allowed Sakharov and Bonner to return to Moscow. Following Sakharov's death December 14, 1989, she established the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, and the Sakharov Archives in Moscow, which she eventually donated to Harvard University.

Bonner remains outspoken on democracy and human rights in Russia and worldwide. She joined the defenders of the Russian parliament during August Coup and supported Boris Yeltsin during the constitutional crisis in early 1993.

In 1994, outraged by what she called “genocide of the Chechen people”, Bonner resigned from Yeltsin's Human Rights Commission and is 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 is also critical of the European Union policy towards Israel.

Bonner is the author of Alone Together (Knopf 1987), and Mothers and Daughters (Knopf 1992), and writes frequently on Russia and human rights.

She is a recipient of many international human rights awards, including the Rafto Prize, the European Parliament’s Robert Schumann medal, the awards of International Humanist and Ethical Union, the World Women’s Alliance, the Adelaida Ristori Foundation, the US National Endowment for Democracy, and others.

Elena Bonner divides her time between Moscow and the USA, home to her two children, five grandchildren, and one great grand-son.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Russia and the Russians - Inside the Closed Society by Kevin Klose, pp. 161-98 (ISBN# 0393017869)

• [2] An appeal to the world regarding suicide terrorism (April 12, 2002)

• [3] An Open Letter to President Bush By Vladimir Bukovsky and Elena Bonner (March 10, 2003)