Yelena Bonner, 1923–2011

Even after Yelena Bonner and her husband, Russian human-rights activist Andrei Sakharov, were banished to the remote city of Gorky in the 1980s for challenging Soviet authority, the state kept up an endless campaign of harassment. The KGB repeatedly broke into their tiny apartment and sent them gruesome images, but especially targeted the couple’s car. “Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue,” she later wrote. “This was how we knew we had done something bad.”

Bonner had learned at an early age how brutal the state could be, said the Los Angeles Times. Born in Turkmenistan to a Communist Party official and his Jewish wife, Bonner lost both parents to Stalin’s purges by the time she was 15, but resisted pressure to renounce them as enemies of the people. She worked as an army nurse during WWII, and qualified as a pediatrician after it ended. In 1965 she divorced her first husband to turn to anti-Soviet activism full-time.

In 1970 she met Sakharov, a brilliant physicist who had helped to build the Soviet atomic bomb before turning against the state. The pair married in 1972, and were soon “considered royalty” among the “embattled community of dissidents” seeking to overturn Soviet rule, said Alessandra Stanley and Michael Schwirtz in The New York Times. The pair, deeply in love, made a formidable team. When Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 but was banned from travel, Bonner went to Oslo to accept it. He was banished to Gorky in 1980, and she joined him there four years later. Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the couple to return to Moscow in 1986.

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Even after her husband’s death, in 1989, said David Remnick in The New Yorker, Bonner “did not fade away.” She divided her time between Moscow and Boston, where her children lived, and continued to “battle for human rights, liberal values, and democratic norms” in Russia and elsewhere. Even as her life drew to a close, she was still railing against the “betrayals of the Putin era.” When a petition circulated in March 2010 calling for the Russian prime minister to resign, she was the first to sign it.