Sakharovs widow blasts Putin

last updated 8 January 2015

Moscow

Human-rights activist Elena Bonner has refused to endorse a planned Moscow monument to her late husband, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Bonner said the government of President Vladimir Putin had no right to honor the Nobel Prize laurette who exposed the evils of the Soviet system. Those evils, she wrote in The Wall Street Journal this week, are still present in Russian life under a thin veil of fake democracy, complete with “sham elections, a servile judiciary, and manipulated media.” Under Putin, Bonner wrote, Russia’s fledgling democratic institutions have been gutted while the country continues its “genocidal war in Chechnya.”