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  • Yelena Bonner Obituary

    YELENA BONNER OBITUARY
    Isobel Montgomery

    guardian.co.uk
    Sunday 19 June 2011 16.57 BST

    Valiant human rights activist and widow of Soviet dissident Andrei
    Sakharov

    Yelena Bonner addressing the European parliament during the
    award ceremony of the Sakharov Prize in 2008. Photograph: Vincent
    Kessler/Reuters Now that the battles fought by the dissident movement
    and by the thousands of individuals who voiced their opposition to the
    Soviet state have been swallowed up by the larger events of history,
    only a few names will be recalled. Yelena Bonner's will be one of
    them. She and her husband, Andrei Sakharov, symbolised - within the
    Soviet Union and throughout the west - the strength and courage of
    those opposed to state socialism. Bonner, who has died aged 88, was
    often portrayed merely as the wife of the Soviet Union's most famous
    dissident scientist, but her history as an activist was as lengthy
    as her husband's. Her determination, organisational skills and often
    fiery temper consistently drew attention to human rights issues.

    Sakharov and Bonner were a team, bound together by the conviction that
    freedom of conscience was a prerequisite of any civilised state and
    that east and west should move towards reconciliation. This conviction
    helped them survive the ordeals of surveillance, harassment, arrest
    and internal exile.

    The two first met in the autumn of 1970 outside a courtroom in Kaluga,
    central Russia, where a scientist, Revolt Pimenov, and a puppet-theatre
    actor, Boris Vail, were on trial for distributing the samizdat human
    rights journal Chronicle of Current Events. Sakharov had already
    achieved worldwide attention for publishing his essay Reflections
    on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, in the
    New York Times in 1968, but Bonner was the practical and already
    experienced organiser of the group - it was she who found rooms for
    both the defendants and the observers of the trial.

    Like Sakharov, Bonner came from the Soviet elite. Unlike the brilliant
    physicist, who was recruited straight from university to the team that
    developed the Soviet Union's first hydrogen bomb and then became the
    youngest member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Bonner had seen
    the brutality behind Stalin's Soviet Union early on.

    She was born in Merv (now Mary), a town in Turkmenistan, the eldest
    child of Bolshevik revolutionaries, who named her Lusia. Her father,
    Georgy Alikhanov, was first secretary of the Armenian central committee
    and her mother, Ruth Bonner, was a committed party activist.

    Yelena's earliest years were spent in Chita in the Soviet far east,
    where her father had been sent after a political falling out with
    Grigory Zinoviev, a leading member of the politburo. The family then
    moved to Leningrad, where they lived among the city's Bolshevik elite.

    At one stage, they had a flat in a house where Sergei Kirov, secretary
    of the Leningrad party, also lived. In her second book of memoirs,
    Mothers and Daughters (1991), Bonner recalled being taken out by
    Kirov in his car and standing on the dais with him at an official
    demonstration. It was the murder of Kirov in 1934 that signalled
    the beginning of the Terror and Stalin's purge of the old Bolshevik
    cadres. By 1937 the family were living in Moscow, where, some time
    before the winter of 1938, during the first wave of the Terror,
    Bonner's father was arrested and shot.

    Her mother was arrested as the wife of an enemy of the people and
    sentenced to 10 years in a labour camp. Bonner herself was taken
    to the "big house", the secret police headquarters in Leningrad,
    for questioning. She remained in Leningrad to be brought up by her
    grandmother. When she was eligible for her internal passport she
    discovered that her parents had failed to register her birth. Free
    to chose her own name, she picked her mother's surname and Yelena
    after the heroine of Turgenev's novel On the Eve.

    When the Soviet Union was invaded in June 1941, Bonner volunteered for
    the Red Army's hospital trains, becoming head nurse. The after-effects
    of a shell attack that October, which left her temporarily blinded,
    led to her being invalided out of the medical corps in early 1945. She
    returned to Leningrad and in 1947 was accepted as a student at
    the city's medical institute. After graduating, she specialised in
    paediatrics. She met her first husband, Ivan Semyonov, at medical
    school and they had two children, Tanya and Alexei. In the 1950s
    Bonner spent six months working in Iraq for the Soviet ministry of
    health and contributed articles to medical newspapers, as well as to
    literary journals.

    In 1965, after her first marriage had fallen apart, Bonner moved into
    her mother's flat in Moscow. Her upbringing had seemed conventional
    enough: childhood membership of the Komsomol, followed by an
    application for full party membership after her parents had been
    rehabilitated in 1954. However, the fate of her family and friends
    and her Jewish/Armenian parentage - which made her politically
    suspect to the authorities - encouraged Bonner in her scepticism of
    the officially presented party line. The crushing of the 1968 Prague
    uprising marked for her, as for many dissidents of her generation,
    the beginning of her questioning of the basis of the Soviet state.

    Gradually, she moved into dissident circles, although it was not
    until 1972 that she renounced her party membership.

    Bonner and her mother introduced Sakharov to the wider dissident
    movement. As he wrote in his memoirs, it was she who "taught me to
    pay more attention to the defence of individual victims of injustice".

    Their flat became a clearing house for those involved in the Helsinki
    Group, the human rights group set up to monitor Soviet violations
    of the Helsinki Accords, and for groups fighting for the rights
    of Christians, ethnic minorities and of Soviet Jews who wanted to
    emigrate to Israel.

    When Sakharov's children complained to him about his increasingly vocal
    opposition to the Soviet state, as well as about his friendship with
    Bonner so soon after his first wife's death from cancer, he moved
    into the Bonners' flat. He and Bonner married in 1972.

    With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974,
    they became the central focus of the dissident movement. Sakharov went
    on his first hunger strike in 1974, during Richard Nixon's visit to
    Moscow, to publicise the plight of political prisoners.

    That winter, Bonner's eyesight - already damaged by her wartime
    injury, thyroid problems and glaucoma - deteriorated sharply and she
    was warned that, without an operation available only in the west,
    she would go blind. While she was in Italy in 1975 recovering from
    the eye operation, Bonner heard of Sakharov being awarded a Nobel
    peace prize, and she remained in the west to attend the prizegiving
    ceremony and to deliver her husband's Nobel lecture that December.

    The KGB had now resorted to sending the couple obscene pictures and
    photographs of dismembered corpses through the post, and accusing
    Bonner in particular of being a "money-grubbing Jew" who had married
    Sakharov for his privileged position. Despite such harassment, the
    couple continued to highlight the plight of political and religious
    dissenters in Leonid Brezhnev's stagnant Soviet state. Sakharov's
    position as a state scientist and Bonner's status as an Invalid Veteran
    of the Great Patriotic War prevented the KGB from attacking them too
    openly. But their friends and fellow human-rights activists were picked
    off the streets, given summary trials and exiled or imprisoned. The
    Sakharovs, both in poor health, remained at liberty to speak, write
    and give interviews to foreign correspondents. However, at the start
    of 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Sakharov's open call
    for an international boycott of the Moscow Olympics led to his arrest.

    Sakharov was stripped of his awards and exiled to Gorky (now Nizhny
    Novgorod) by decree. Bonner remained free to travel between Moscow
    and Gorky, give interviews and publicise her husband's plight. She
    was Sakharov's lifeline to the outside world. She was, as Sakharov
    put it, "always a doer" and refused to stop her activities because
    of her husband's arrest. But the strain immediately began to affect
    Bonner's health. Stripsearched on a train on her way back from Gorky
    in the winter of 1982 and left to find her way back to Moscow alone,
    she suffered her first heart attack the following spring and another
    more severe one a year later.

    Then, in 1984, she too was arrested, charged with slandering the Soviet
    state, sentenced and exiled to Gorky. Bonner's health deteriorated
    further and Sakharov went on hunger strike on three occasions to demand
    that she be allowed to travel to the west for treatment. Finally,
    in 1986, she was allowed to travel abroad for heart surgery. She took
    with her a volume of memoirs of their internal exile, which appeared
    as Alone Together in the same year.

    The release of Bonner and Sakharov from their exile came suddenly and
    unexpectedly. One day an engineer turned up at the flat in Gorky to
    install a telephone. The following morning they received their first
    telephone call. It was from Mikhail Gorbachev, telling them they were
    free to return to Moscow. Their release was one of the most tangible
    signs that glasnost had begun.

    Although some of Gorbachev's policies seemed close to fufilling
    demands made by the dissidents of the 1970s, the Sakharovs continued
    to dissent from the official party line. They were instrumental in
    forming the unofficial organisation Memorial, set up to campaign
    for the rehabilitation of political prisoners. In 1989 Sakharov
    was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies and during its
    first session criticised Gorbachev for refusing to relinquish the
    Communist party's monopoly on power. On 14 December that year, after
    a particularly tense session of the congress, during which Gorbachev
    had demanded Sakharov sit down, he returned home and told his wife
    that he had work to prepare for the next day's session. In the morning
    she found him dead from a heart attack.

    Bonner, grief-stricken, had to face Yevgeny Primakov, one of
    Gorbachev's aides, who wanted to give the former dissident a state
    funeral. She also had to endure the row that had erupted when the
    congress did not honour Sakharov with a day's recess. In distress,
    Bonner shouted to waiting reporters from the flat where her husband's
    corpse still lay: "You all worked hard to see that Andrei died sooner,
    by calling us from morning to night, and never leaving us to our life
    and work. Be human beings. Leave us alone."

    When Gorbachev appeared at the funeral and asked her if there was
    anything he could do, she requested that Memorial should be registered
    as an official organisation. Many reformist politicians rushed to her
    side. Boris Yeltsin was not slow to show his support of her ideas,
    but Bonner distrusted politicians wanting to use Sakharov's memory
    for their own ends. In early 1991, when Gorbachev, also a Nobel peace
    prize winner, crushed a pro-independence demonstration in Vilnius,
    the capital of Lithuania, with force, she requested that Sakharov's
    name be removed from the list of laureates. Later the same year she
    spoke to the crowd outside the White House, the Russian parliament
    building, in support of Yeltsin during the abortive coup.

    As the Soviet Union fell apart, Bonner continued working to support
    human rights and democracy. By 1996, she was calling for democrats
    not to vote for Yeltsin in the presidential elections; the war in
    Chechnya had dashed her hopes for him as a democratic leader. She
    became an outspoken critic of Yeltsin's successor Vladimir Putin,
    and last year was among the prominent signatories of a petition
    calling for his resignation.

    Bonner divided her time latterly between Russia and Boston,
    Massachusetts, where her son and daughter, who survive her, had lived
    since the 1970s, and where she died.

    ~U Yelena Georgievna Bonner, human rights activist, born 15 February
    1923; died 18 June 2011

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