Yelena Bonner obituary | World news | The Guardian Yelena Bonner obituary 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 Sunday 19 June 2011 11.57 EDT First published on Sunday 19 June 2011 11.57 EDT Share on Messenger Close 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. • Yelena Georgievna Bonner, human rights activist, born 15 February 1923; died 18 June 2011 Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow, dies at 88 Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow, dies at 88 Share View photos FILE - This 1994 file photo shows Yelena Bonner, the widow of physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, in Moscow. Radio Liberty in Boston cited Pavel Litvinov, another longtime rights activist, as saying the 88-year-old Bonner died Friday June 17, 2011 at her home in Boston. The report on Sunday morning did not give a cause of death.

(AP Photo/Sergei Karpukhin, File) More BOSTON (AP) — Yelena Bonner, a Russian rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, has died, her daughter said early Sunday. She was 88. The 88-year-old Bonner died of heart failure Saturday afternoon in Boston, according to her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich. She had been hospitalized since Feb. 21, Yankelevich said. Bonner grew famous through her marriage to Sakharov, the Soviet Union's leading dissident, but she carved out her own reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities. Bonner and Sakharov's cramped, three-room apartment in Moscow was the unofficial headquarters of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s, and again in the late 1980s after they returned from internal exile in the city of Gorky. Both suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly made caustic, personal attacks against Bonner, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, into turning against his country.

But the attacks only seemed to strengthen their resolve, and neither ever stopped calling for greater personal freedom for Soviet citizens despite the huge personal cost. "I hope to live out my life until the end worthy of the Russian culture in which I've spent my life, of the Jewish and Armenian nationalities, and I am proud that mine has been the difficult lot and happy fate to be the wife and friend of academic Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov," Bonner wrote in her autobiography. After Sakharov died in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Bonner continued to champion human rights, but was less and less visible, and her health began to deteriorate. She had a long history of heart and eye problems and suffered heart attacks in 1995 and 1996. Nonetheless, she edited her husband's memoirs, which were released in 1997, and still occasionally spoke out against President Boris Yeltsin's government, denouncing Russia's bungled war in Chechnya and the shortcomings of the country's young democracy.

In recent years, Bonner lent the weight of her voice to those opposing the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has restored many of the Soviet-era powers of the security services. In March 2010, hers was the first signature on a petition calling for Putin to go. In December 2010, she sent a moving speech that was read at an opposition rally in Moscow in which she asks to be considered among those on the square: "Consider that I have come, again to save my homeland, although I cannot walk." The tough-talking Bonner and her shy, physicist-philosopher husband met through their political activities, and were married in 1971, both for the second time. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, assuring their international standing. For nearly two decades they were the first couple of the dissident movement, confronting the Soviet state regardless of the consequences. After Sakharov criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was banished in 1980 to Gorky, now known as Nizhny Novgorod.

Bonner was found guilty of slander against the state in 1984 and also sentenced to internal exile in Gorky. The couple shared an apartment across the street from the police station, and they were under constant scrutiny. She detailed their plight, often with wit and irony, in a 1986 book, "Alone Together." "Whenever the authorities did not like something, it was our car that suffered. Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue. This was how we knew that we had done something bad by their standards." Under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the couple was allowed to return to Moscow in 1986 and together they pressed ahead with their campaign until Sakharov's death. Yelena Georgievna Bonner lived a turbulent life from her birth on Feb. 15, 1923 in Merv, in Soviet Central Asia. Her mother fled the hospital with newborn Yelena after being warned of an attack by Muslims hostile to the Communists. Political turmoil displaced her again in 1937, when her father, an Armenian and a member of the party elite, was arrested in Moscow. He was shot the following year.

Her mother, a Jew and a government health worker, was also arrested and spent the next 17 years in labor camps and exile before being released. Bonner and her younger brother, Alexei, went to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to live with her grandmother. After high school, Bonner joined the army as a nurse. Though angry over the fate of her parents, she volunteered "as a duty of the heart," according to an autobiography. At the front in 1941, she suffered head injuries in a shelling attack that left severe, lifelong eye problems. After the war, she studied medicine and married a fellow student, Ivan Semyonov. They had two children, Tatiana and Alexei, but grew apart as she became more politically active. They divorced in 1965. She became a pediatrician and wrote for magazines, radio and medical journals. Her circle of friends, mainly Moscow intellectuals, steadily expanded. When the human rights movement in the Soviet Union gained momentum in the late 1960s, she was part of it, helping to produce "The Chronicle of Current Events," which reported rights violations.

Her efforts made her a favorite target of Soviet journalist Nikolai Yakovlev, who portrayed her as a Zionist and CIA agent trying to undermine the Soviet system. In a particularly nasty 1983 magazine article, Yakovlev accused her of imposing her sympathies on Sakharov, turning him against his children and his country and taking control of his finances. Bonner said Yakovlev's writings led to "thousands of irate, malicious letters which we receive recommending Sakharov 'to repent,' 'divorce the Jewess' and 'to live by his own mind, not by Bonnerovsky.'" The campaign also led to threats against Bonner's family, prompting Bonner's mother, son, daughter and two grandchildren to move to Boston in the late 1970s. Bonner herself was allowed to visit Boston for several months in mid-1980s to receive medical treatment before returning to the Soviet Union. Frequently ailing in recent years, she spent increasingly long periods with her family in Boston. But she continued to subject Russia and its leadership to withering criticism for human rights violations.

Bonner's remains will be cremated and eventually buried in a Moscow cemetery alongside her husband, mother and brothers, Yankelevich said. Reblog Yelena Bonner - Telegraph Politics Obituaries Yelena Bonner Yelena Bonner, who died on June 18 aged 88, was a Russian rights activist and widow of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, sharing his tribulations over long years at the hands of the Soviet authorities. Yelena Bonner Photo: REUTERS 6:26PM BST 19 Jun 2011 For nearly two decades they were the first couple of the dissident movement, confronting the Soviet state regardless of the consequences. Bonner met Sakharov, the Soviet Union's leading dissident, in 1970 while picketing a dissident trial outside Moscow. Although they married the following year, Yelena Bonner carved out a reputation on her own account as an active human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities.

The couple's cramped, three-room apartment in Moscow became the unofficial headquarters of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s, and again in the late 1980s after they returned from internal exile in the closed city of Gorky. With Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, Yelena Bonner suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly mounted personal attacks against her, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband into turning against his country. But these assaults only seemed to reinforce the couple's resolve. After Sakharov's death in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, Yelena Bonner continued to champion human rights, but became less and less visible, and her health began to deteriorate. She had a long history of heart and eye problems and suffered heart attacks in 1995 and 1996.

Related Articles Natalya Gorbanevskaya 04 Feb 2014 Nevertheless, she edited her husband's memoirs, published in 1997, and continued to speak out against President Boris Yeltsin's government, denouncing Russia's bungled war in Chechnya and the shortcomings of the country's fledgling democracy. In recent years, Yelena Bonner supported those opposing the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has restored many of the Soviet-era powers of the security services. In March 2010 she was the first to sign a petition calling for Putin to go. Bespectacled, tough-talking and intense, Yelena Bonner cut a contrasting figure to that of her mild-mannered husband, a nuclear physicist and philosopher, who was renowned as the father of the Soviet atom bomb. Last December she sent a moving speech that was read at an opposition rally in Moscow in which she asked to be numbered among those assembled in the freezing square.

"Consider that I have come again to save my homeland," she wrote, "although I cannot walk." Yelena Georgievna Bonner was born on February 15 1923 in Merv, Soviet Central Asia. Both her parents were zealous Communists and, like all female members of the Bonner family, always kept her maternal name. Her Jewish mother, Ruth Bonner, fled the hospital with the newborn child after being warned of an attack by Muslims hostile to Communists. In 1936 her father, Georgi Alikhanov, a founder member of the Armenian Communist party, was arrested in Moscow in a Stalinist purge and shot the following year. Ruth Bonner, a government health worker, was also arrested and spent the next 17 years in labour camps and exile before being released. Effectively orphaned at 14, Yelena and her younger brother, Alexei, went to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to live with their grandmother. After high school and Leningrad University, Yelena Bonner joined the army as a nurse.

Sent to the front in 1941, she was badly wounded in the chest, and in 1943 suffered head injuries in a dive-bomber attack on a hospital train later that almost cost her sight. She bore a scar in the pupil of her right eye for the rest of her life. Early in 1945 she returned to the front and advanced with the Red Army as far as Potsdam. After the war, Yelena Bonner studied medicine and married a fellow student, Ivan Semyonov. But the couple grew apart as she became more politically active, and they divorced in 1965. She became a paediatrician in Leningrad and between 1958 and 1960 was part of a Soviet medical aid team in Iraq. On her return she started writing about her experiences for magazines, radio and medical journals. During the Khrushchev years she joined the Party, reasoning that she could do more from the inside to restore the name of people like her father who were victims of Stalin.

She knew many dissenting intellectuals, and as the human rights movement in the Soviet Union gained momentum in the late 1960s, she was part of it, helping to produce The Chronicle of Current Events, which reported rights violations. In 1968 she was in France visiting her mother's family when Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. "It cured me for ever of revolutionary romanticism," she later told friends. She began sending books to people in prison, attending dissidents' trials and writing reports for The Chronicle. By the time she met and married Andrei Sakharov, she was even more involved with dissident writers and activists. When a monitoring group was set up to watch over any Soviet violations of the 1975 Helsinki agreement on human rights, she was one of the founder members. In January 1980 Sakharov denounced the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and was banished to Gorky, a city 200 miles east of Moscow and closed to foreigners. From then on, Yelena Bonner acted as a go-between, moving from Gorky to Moscow and bringing news of him and his plight to Western journalists.

In November 1981 the couple began a hunger strike in protest against the refusal of the authorities to allow her son's fiancée to join him in the United States. After they had spent 17 days on mineral water, the authorities relented and an exit visa was granted. In September 1982 Yelena Bonner announced the dissolution of the Helsinki Group on human rights because KGB harassment had forced it to disband. Only three members were left of the original two dozen or so; the rest were either imprisoned or forced to emigrate. In January 1984 Sakharov smuggled a letter to the Stockholm Conference asking delegates to help his wife leave Russia for adequate medical treatment. He revealed that as well as eye disease she had suffered a heart attack a year earlier. In May he began a second hunger strike in support of his wife's claim. The Soviet response was to confine Yelena Bonner to Gorky and accuse her of anti-Soviet agitation. The following August, after a secret two-day trial on charges of anti-Soviet activities, Yelena Bonner was sentenced to five years' internal exile at Gorky.

Several appeals failed, as did numerous hunger strikes by both she and her husband, but in October 1985 Yelena Bonner was unexpectedly given an exit visa, and after bidding Sakharov a tearful farewell flew to Italy. There she had an eye checkup and an audience with Pope John Paul II. From Italy she flew to Boston, Massachusetts, for more extensive medical treatment, including a sextuple heart bypass operation. On her way home in the spring of 1986 Yelena Bonner had a meeting in London with the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the French president, Francois Mitterand before being reunited with Sakharov in Gorky. Just before Christmas, Sakharov received a personal telephone call from Mikhail Gorbachev in which he announced that both he and Yelena Bonner would be allowed to return to Moscow to live and work. Frequently ailing in recent years, she spent increasingly long periods with her family in Boston. But she continued to criticise Russia and its leadership for human rights violations.

"I hope to live out my life until the end worthy of the Russian culture in which I've spent my life, of the Jewish and Armenian nationalities, and I am proud that mine has been the difficult lot and happy fate to be the wife and friend of academic Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov," Bonner wrote in her autobiography Alone Together (1986). Her favourite reading, in the original English, were the novels of Agatha Christie, Rex Stout and John le Carré. Yelena Bonner married Andrei Sakharov in 1971. With Ivan Semyonov, she had a son and a daughter. Russian rights activist Yelena Bonner dies - World - CBC News Russian rights activist Yelena Bonner dies The Associated Press Posted: Jun 19, 2011 6:47 AM ET Last Updated: Jun 19, 2011 5:38 AM ET Yelena Bonner, a Russian rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, has died, her daughter said early Sunday. She was 88.

Yelena Bonner carved out a reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities. (Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press) The 88-year-old Bonner died of heart failure Saturday afternoon in Boston, according to her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich. She had been hospitalized since Feb. 21, Yankelevich said. Bonner grew famous through her marriage to Sakharov, the Soviet Union's leading dissident, but she carved out her own reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities. Bonner and Sakharov's cramped, three-room apartment in Moscow was the unofficial headquarters of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s, and again in the late 1980s after they returned from internal exile in the city of Gorky. Both suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly made caustic, personal attacks against Bonner, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, into turning against his country.

But the attacks only seemed to strengthen their resolve, and neither ever stopped calling for greater personal freedom for Soviet citizens despite the huge personal cost. "I hope to live out my life until the end worthy of the Russian culture in which I've spent my life, of the Jewish and Armenian nationalities, and I am proud that mine has been the difficult lot and happy fate to be the wife and friend of academic Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov," Bonner wrote in her autobiography. Husband died in 1989 After Sakharov died in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Bonner continued to champion human rights, but was less and less visible, and her health began to deteriorate. She had a long history of heart and eye problems and suffered heart attacks in 1995 and 1996. Nonetheless, she edited her husband's memoirs, which were released in 1997, and still occasionally spoke out against President Boris Yeltsin's government, denouncing Russia's bungled war in Chechnya and the shortcomings of the country's young democracy.

In recent years, Bonner lent the weight of her voice to those opposing the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has restored many of the Soviet-era powers of the security services. In March 2010, hers was the first signature on a petition calling for Putin to go. In December 2010, she sent a moving speech that was read at an opposition rally in Moscow in which she asks to be considered among those on the square: "Consider that I have come, again to save my homeland, although I cannot walk." The tough-talking Bonner and her shy, physicist-philosopher husband met through their political activities, and were married in 1971, both for the second time. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, assuring their international standing. For nearly two decades they were the first couple of the dissident movement, confronting the Soviet state regardless of the consequences. 'Whenever the authorities did not like something, it was our car that suffered. Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue.

This was how we knew that we had done something bad by their standards.' —Yelena Bonner After Sakharov criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was banished in 1980 to Gorky, now known as Nizhny Novgorod. Bonner was found guilty of slander against the state in 1984 and also sentenced to internal exile in Gorky. The couple shared an apartment across the street from the police station, and they were under constant scrutiny. She detailed their plight, often with wit and irony, in a 1986 book, "Alone Together." "Whenever the authorities did not like something, it was our car that suffered. Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue. This was how we knew that we had done something bad by their standards." Under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the couple was allowed to return to Moscow in 1986 and together they pressed ahead with their campaign until Sakharov's death. Yelena Georgievna Bonner lived a turbulent life from her birth on Feb. 15, 1923 in Merv, in Soviet Central Asia.

Her mother fled the hospital with newborn Yelena after being warned of an attack by Muslims hostile to the Communists. Political turmoil displaced her again in 1937, when her father, an Armenian and a member of the party elite, was arrested in Moscow. He was shot the following year. Mother sent to labour camps and exiled Her mother, a Jew and a government health worker, was also arrested and spent the next 17 years in labour camps and exile before being released. Bonner and her younger brother, Alexei, went to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to live with her grandmother. After high school, Bonner joined the army as a nurse. Though angry over the fate of her parents, she volunteered "as a duty of the heart," according to an autobiography. At the front in 1941, she suffered head injuries in a shelling attack that left severe, lifelong eye problems. After the war, she studied medicine and married a fellow student, Ivan Semyonov. They had two children, Tatiana and Alexei, but grew apart as she became more politically active. They divorced in 1965.

She became a pediatrician and wrote for magazines, radio and medical journals. Her circle of friends, mainly Moscow intellectuals, steadily expanded. When the human rights movement in the Soviet Union gained momentum in the late 1960s, she was part of it, helping to produce "The Chronicle of Current Events," which reported rights violations. Her efforts made her a favorite target of Soviet journalist Nikolai Yakovlev, who portrayed her as a Zionist and CIA agent trying to undermine the Soviet system. In a particularly nasty 1983 magazine article, Yakovlev accused her of imposing her sympathies on Sakharov, turning him against his children and his country and taking control of his finances. Bonner said Yakovlev's writings led to "thousands of irate, malicious letters which we receive recommending Sakharov 'to repent,' 'divorce the Jewess' and 'to live by his own mind, not by Bonnerovsky."' The campaign also led to threats against Bonner's family, prompting Bonner's mother, son, daughter and two grandchildren to move to Boston in the late 1970s.

Bonner herself was allowed to visit Boston for several months in mid-1980s to receive medical treatment before returning to the Soviet Union. Frequently ailing in recent years, she spent increasingly long periods with her family in Boston. But she continued to subject Russia and its leadership to withering criticism for human rights violations. Bonner's remains will be cremated and eventually buried in a Moscow cemetery alongside her husband, mother and brothers, Yankelevich said. W5 Team Russian rights activist Yelena Bonner dead at 88 Yelena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, speaks to the media, in Moscow, in this Thursday Nov. 30, 2000 file photo. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev, File) The Associated Press Published Sunday, June 19, 2011 7:57AM EDT BOSTON - Yelena Bonner, a Russian rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, has died, her daughter said early Sunday. She was 88. The 88-year-old Bonner died of heart failure Saturday afternoon in Boston, according to her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich.

She had been hospitalized since Feb. 21, Yankelevich said. Bonner grew famous through her marriage to Sakharov, the Soviet Union's leading dissident, but she carved out her own reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities. Bonner and Sakharov's cramped, three-room apartment in Moscow was the unofficial headquarters of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s, and again in the late 1980s after they returned from internal exile in the city of Gorky. Both suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly made caustic, personal attacks against Bonner, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, into turning against his country. But the attacks only seemed to strengthen their resolve, and neither ever stopped calling for greater personal freedom for Soviet citizens despite the huge personal cost.

"I hope to live out my life until the end worthy of the Russian culture in which I've spent my life, of the Jewish and Armenian nationalities, and I am proud that mine has been the difficult lot and happy fate to be the wife and friend of academic Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov," Bonner wrote in her autobiography. After Sakharov died in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Bonner continued to champion human rights, but was less and less visible, and her health began to deteriorate. She had a long history of heart and eye problems and suffered heart attacks in 1995 and 1996. Nonetheless, she edited her husband's memoirs, which were released in 1997, and still occasionally spoke out against President Boris Yeltsin's government, denouncing Russia's bungled war in Chechnya and the shortcomings of the country's young democracy. In recent years, Bonner lent the weight of her voice to those opposing the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has restored many of the Soviet-era powers of the security services.

In March 2010, hers was the first signature on a petition calling for Putin to go. In December 2010, she sent a moving speech that was read at an opposition rally in Moscow in which she asks to be considered among those on the square: "Consider that I have come, again to save my homeland, although I cannot walk." The tough-talking Bonner and her shy, physicist-philosopher husband met through their political activities, and were married in 1971, both for the second time. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, assuring their international standing. For nearly two decades they were the first couple of the dissident movement, confronting the Soviet state regardless of the consequences. After Sakharov criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was banished in 1980 to Gorky, now known as Nizhny Novgorod. Bonner was found guilty of slander against the state in 1984 and also sentenced to internal exile in Gorky. The couple shared an apartment across the street from the police station, and they were under constant scrutiny.

She detailed their plight, often with wit and irony, in a 1986 book, "Alone Together." "Whenever the authorities did not like something, it was our car that suffered. Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue. This was how we knew that we had done something bad by their standards." Under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the couple was allowed to return to Moscow in 1986 and together they pressed ahead with their campaign until Sakharov's death. Yelena Georgievna Bonner lived a turbulent life from her birth on Feb. 15, 1923 in Merv, in Soviet Central Asia. Her mother fled the hospital with newborn Yelena after being warned of an attack by Muslims hostile to the Communists. Political turmoil displaced her again in 1937, when her father, an Armenian and a member of the party elite, was arrested in Moscow. He was shot the following year. Her mother, a Jew and a government health worker, was also arrested and spent the next 17 years in labour camps and exile before being released.

Bonner and her younger brother, Alexei, went to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to live with her grandmother. After high school, Bonner joined the army as a nurse. Though angry over the fate of her parents, she volunteered "as a duty of the heart," according to an autobiography. At the front in 1941, she suffered head injuries in a shelling attack that left severe, lifelong eye problems. After the war, she studied medicine and married a fellow student, Ivan Semyonov. They had two children, Tatiana and Alexei, but grew apart as she became more politically active. They divorced in 1965. She became a pediatrician and wrote for magazines, radio and medical journals. Her circle of friends, mainly Moscow intellectuals, steadily expanded. When the human rights movement in the Soviet Union gained momentum in the late 1960s, she was part of it, helping to produce "The Chronicle of Current Events," which reported rights violations. Her efforts made her a favourite target of Soviet journalist Nikolai Yakovlev, who portrayed her as a Zionist and CIA agent trying to undermine the Soviet system.

In a particularly nasty 1983 magazine article, Yakovlev accused her of imposing her sympathies on Sakharov, turning him against his children and his country and taking control of his finances. Bonner said Yakovlev's writings led to "thousands of irate, malicious letters which we receive recommending Sakharov 'to repent,' 'divorce the Jewess' and 'to live by his own mind, not by Bonnerovsky."' The campaign also led to threats against Bonner's family, prompting Bonner's mother, son, daughter and two grandchildren to move to Boston in the late 1970s. Bonner herself was allowed to visit Boston for several months in mid-1980s to receive medical treatment before returning to the Soviet Union. Frequently ailing in recent years, she spent increasingly long periods with her family in Boston. But she continued to subject Russia and its leadership to withering criticism for human rights violations. Bonner's remains will be cremated and eventually buried in a Moscow cemetery alongside her husband, mother and brothers, Yankelevich said.

Yelena Bonner, Sakharov's Widow, Dead at 88 Yelena Bonner, Sakharov's Widow, Dead at 88 June 19, 2011 — 23:00 Yelena Bonner, Sakharov's Widow, Dead at 88 June 19, 2011 — 23:00 Yelena Bonner addressing the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 2008. Vincent Kessler BOSTON — Yelena Bonner, a rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, has died, her daughter said Sunday. She was 88. Bonner died of heart failure Saturday afternoon in Boston, according to her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich. She had been hospitalized since Feb. 21, Yankelevich said. Bonner grew famous through her marriage to Sakharov, the Soviet Union's leading dissident, but she carved out her own reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities.

Bonner and Sakharov's cramped, three-room apartment in Moscow was the unofficial headquarters of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s, and again in the late 1980s after they returned from internal exile in the city of Gorky. Both suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly made caustic, personal attacks against Bonner, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, into turning against his country. But the attacks only seemed to strengthen their resolve, and neither ever stopped calling for greater personal freedom for Soviet citizens despite the huge personal cost. "I hope to live out my life until the end worthy of the Russian culture in which I've spent my life, of the Jewish and Armenian nationalities, and I am proud that mine has been the difficult lot and happy fate to be the wife and friend of academic Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov," Bonner wrote in her autobiography. After Sakharov died in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Bonner continued to champion human rights, but was less and less visible, and her health began to deteriorate.

She had a long history of heart and eye problems and suffered heart attacks in 1995 and 1996. Nonetheless, she edited her husband's memoirs, which were released in 1997, and still occasionally spoke out against President Boris Yeltsin's government, denouncing Russia's bungled war in Chechnya and the shortcomings of the country's young democracy. In recent years, Bonner lent the weight of her voice to those opposing the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has restored many of the Soviet-era powers of the security services. In March 2010, hers was the first signature on a petition calling for Putin to go. In December, she sent a moving speech that was read at an opposition rally in Moscow in which she asks to be considered among those on the square: "Consider that I have come, again to save my homeland, although I cannot walk." The tough-talking Bonner and her shy, physicist-philosopher husband met through their political activities, and were married in 1971, both for the second time. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, assuring their international standing.

For nearly two decades they were the first couple of the dissident movement, confronting the Soviet state regardless of the consequences. After Sakharov criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was banished in 1980 to Gorky, now known as Nizhny Novgorod. Bonner was found guilty of slander against the state in 1984 and also sentenced to internal exile in Gorky. The couple shared an apartment across the street from the police station, and they were under constant scrutiny. She detailed their plight, often with wit and irony, in a 1986 book, "Alone Together." "Whenever the authorities did not like something, it was our car that suffered. Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue. This was how we knew that we had done something bad by their standards." Under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the couple was allowed to return to Moscow in 1986, and together they pressed ahead with their campaign until Sakharov's death. Yelena Georgievna Bonner lived a turbulent life from her birth on Feb. 15, 1923, in Merv, Turkmenistan.

Her mother fled the hospital with newborn Yelena after being warned of an attack by Muslims hostile to the Communists. Political turmoil displaced her again in 1937, when her father, an Armenian and a member of the party elite, was arrested in Moscow. He was shot the following year. Her mother, a Jew and a government health worker, was also arrested and spent the next 17 years in labor camps and exile before being released. Bonner and her younger brother, Alexei, went to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to live with her grandmother. After high school, Bonner joined the army as a nurse. Though angry over the fate of her parents, she volunteered "as a duty of the heart," according to an autobiography. At the front in 1941, she suffered head injuries in a shelling attack that left severe, lifelong eye problems. After the war, she studied medicine and married a fellow student, Ivan Semyonov. They had two children, Tatiana and Alexei, but grew apart as she became more politically active. They divorced in 1965. She became a pediatrician and wrote for magazines, radio and medical journals.

Her circle of friends, mainly Moscow intellectuals, steadily expanded. When the human rights movement in the Soviet Union gained momentum in the late 1960s, she was part of it, helping produce "The Chronicle of Current Events," which reported rights violations. Her efforts made her a favorite target of Soviet journalist Nikolai Yakovlev, who portrayed her as a Zionist and CIA agent trying to undermine the Soviet system. In a particularly nasty 1983 magazine article, Yakovlev accused her of imposing her sympathies on Sakharov, turning him against his children and his country and taking control of his finances. Bonner said Yakovlev's writings led to "thousands of irate, malicious letters which we receive recommending Sakharov 'to repent,' 'divorce the Jewess' and 'to live by his own mind, not by Bonnerovsky.'" The campaign also led to threats against Bonner's family, prompting Bonner's mother, son, daughter and two grandchildren to move to Boston in the late 1970s. Bonner herself was allowed to visit Boston for several months in the mid-1980s to receive medical treatment before returning to the Soviet Union.

Frequently ailing in recent years, she spent increasingly long periods with her family in Boston. But she continued to subject Russia and its leadership to withering criticism for human rights violations. Bonner's remains will be cremated and eventually buried in Moscow's Vostryakovskoye Cemetery alongside her husband, mother and brothers, Yankelevich said. shares Russian Dissident Yelena Bonner Dies Russian Dissident Yelena Bonner Dies June 19, 2011 RFE/RL Yelena Bonner (left) with Czech President Vaclav Havel at RFE/RL's 50th anniversary celebrations in Prague in 2001 Share See comments Russian human rights activist Yelena Bonner, widow of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, died at her home in Boston on June 18 at the age of 88. The cause of death has not been announced. Following a memorial service in the United States, Bonner will be buried alongside her husband and parents in Moscow's Vostryakovskoye Cemetery. Bonner's voice was frequently heard on RFE/RL's Russian Service.

She last appeared on December 10, 2010, when she commented on decisions by Russia and China to boycott the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo. "Russia didn't surprise me. Russia does foolish things regularly. China upsets me, because it does such things even though it seems like a developed country," Bonner said. "It ends up doing bad things, because economic development cannot exist without political change. And if there is a conflict between these two, the old policy wins -- that is what I am afraid of." In addition, at the end of December 2010, she left the following comment on the website of RFE/RL's Russian Service. It was about a December 26 demonstration in Moscow's Pushkin Square, at which journalist Viktor Shenderovich read the following message from Bonner. "I am a Muscovite," Bonner's web comment said. "I am a Jew of 'Caucasian nationality.' In 1941, I defended my country and in 1945, I wept with joy. In 1953, I protested against the so-called Doctors' Plot.

For many years, since the spring of 1937, I waited for my mother somehow, some way to return from the gulag camp where she'd been sent. And when she returned and rang the doorbell, I didn't recognize her. I took her for a beggar. Andrei Sakharov (left) and Yelena Bonner in Gorki, 1985 "And all these years, my dreams have been filled with tears for my father, who was shot dead. My father had a stomach ulcer and I remember how in the evening he'd call me and say: 'Lusya-jan, prepare me a hot water bottle. My stomach is killing me.' And I cried for my grandmother, who raised three children orphaned by the 1937 Great Terror and who took her last breath during the blockade of Leningrad. And all my life I tormented myself -- was I to blame that my mother was arrested, that I didn't recognize her? Was I to blame that my father was shot in the head, that the headstone for him in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery marks an empty grave?

Was I guilty for not remaining in blockaded Leningrad and dying together with my grandmother? "But I had to go and save my motherland! The motherland. And after that there was no strength left to save my family. There isn't even enough strength to go prepare a hot water bottle. But how does one save one's motherland? I didn't know then and I don't know now. Count me among those who come out to Pushkin Square on December 26. Consider me one of those who came out to once again save the motherland -- even though my legs no longer have the strength." Victims Of Stalin's Terror Yelena Bonner was born on February 15, 1923, into a family of Communist Party activists in Turkmenia (now Turkmenistan). Her parents were caught up in the 1937 Stalinist Great Terror. At age 18, she went to the front lines of World War II and served as a nurse on a military hospital train. After the war, she graduated from the Leningrad Medical Institute. She was kicked out of the institute for her statements against the so-called Doctors' Plot and was reinstated after Stalin's death.

In 1965, she joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which she later said was one of the most serious mistakes of her life. In 1972, she quit the party and took up human rights activism. Also in 1972, Bonner married physicist Andrei Sakharov. Much later, she said in an interview: "I don't like it when they call me Sakharov's wife or Sakharov's widow. I am my own person." Bonner was among those who helped smuggle the diaries of Eduard Kuznetsov to the West and in 1973 she was repeatedly interrogated about this. In 1975, she created a fund for the children of Soviet political prisoners, using the money that Sakharov was given for winning the Prix Mondial Cina Del Duca the previous year. Sakharov And Nobel Bonner represented Sakharov at the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. On May 12, 1976, she signed the founding documents of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

Together with Sakharov, she was sent into internal exile in the city of Gorki (now, Nizhny Novgorod) in 1980. In 1984, a regional court found her guilty of under Article 190-1 of the Criminal Code, which outlawed "slandering the Soviet social or state structure." She was sentenced to a month of house arrest. In December 1986, she and Sakharov were allowed to return to Moscow. Sakharov died in 1989. WATCH: Yelena Bonner talks about her husband: "He always felt the wind of change, but at the same time, he said he supported Gorbachev to varying degrees depending on what he was doing." Copy and paste the embed code below. The code changes based on your selection. The code has been copied to your clipboard. Video size ▶ ▶ On December 28, 1994, she joined the Russian president's Commission on Human Rights. She later quit the commission, saying she could not work for a political regime that was conducting the war in Chechnya. Bonner headed the Sakharov Foundation.

In the last years of her life, she lived in the United States. On March 10, 2010, she was the first person to sign the statement of the Russian political opposition to the public entitled "Putin Must Go." Remembering Yelena Georgiyevna The current chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group and one of Russia's oldest and most respected human rights activists, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, paid tribute to Bonner: "She lived a long, vivid, and very productive life. We can envy her in many ways -- how much she managed to do and the happiness that she had in her life. "She had wonderful children and a beloved husband -- what a husband! And her public work, the wide circle of her friends, the people who knew her and respected her courage and her intellect, her readiness to work for the good of humanity. We can only envy such a person." Longtime activist Sergei Kovalyov, chairman of the NGO Memorial, called Bonner "a happy person": "Yelena Georgiyevna lived an uncommonly bright, uncommonly full, and therefore, I would say, happy life. She was the devoted and beloved wife of Andrei Sakharov.

She was a passionate person, and that passion was felt both by those whom she loved and those whom she did not love. "She made mistakes, both in her personal and her political judgments -- but there was never falseness. There was always integrity, and she managed to accomplish a lot. But the main thing was her bright mutual love with Andrei Sakharov. About this there have been many slanderous and wrong hypotheses such as that, for instance, Bonner told Sakharov what to do, that she smothered him with her personality and forced him to do or not do certain things. "But this is not true. Sakharov was a person who was absolutely free from any kind of outside pressure. He was attentive and willing to listen to various points of view, including first of all, Bonner's. You could convince him. You could change his mind, but you could never have a decisive influence over him. Bonner understood this and they lived together in harmony. I think this is far from her least important service in life.

I'd even say, it was her greatest one." Yelena Bonner Remembered The leader of the For Human Rights movement, Lev Ponomaryov, also remembered Yelena Bonner: "I worked closely with Yelena Georgiyevna. I met her during the last two years of Andrei Sakharov's life, when he was running for the post of deputy in the Supreme Soviet and later when he was working in the so-called interregional group of deputies. He was working on his own draft constitution and was fighting for various pieces of legislation at the congress. He announced a national strike. "These were all pretty intense moments in the political life of the country. There were a lot of meetings, discussions, and the first thing I remember about Yelena Georgiyevna was that all the decisions Sakharov made, he made together with her. This was a union of people -- not just a personal union (I saw how they loved one another), but it was a union of like-minded people who were carrying out a joint social and political program of activity. For me this was a surprising and impressive example that made a personal impression on me for my whole life.

"When Sakharov died, I remember that together with Bonner we created a public commission that worked against the state commission, because the government wanted to bury Sakharov quickly and quietly. But we had worked out our own plan. "And I remember that I was one of the first to arrive after Sakharov's death and I was struck by the courageous calm with which she accepted this death and how she took upon herself all the heavy responsibility of the funeral. She understood that we were not simply burying a person but a massive public figure and that the funeral had to be a public event. She understood that and did everything to make that happen. "After Sakharov's death, Bonner was a very active human rights defender. The positions of the human-rights community were worked out together with her. I didn't always agree with her, but all of my interactions with her were interesting and necessary and useful. Together we created a rights organization called Common Action and, even when she left for the United States and even after she became ill, she always closely followed events in Russia and was part of the united human-rights movement. "And, of course, her death is a huge loss for all of us.

In general, we must realize that the dissidents of the Soviet era are leaving us and this will likely have an impact on the strategy of our work in Russia. Something irreversible is happening and, of course, this weighs heavily on us. For us, this is an enormous loss." translated from RFE/RL's Russian Service material Related Articles about Yelena Bonner - tribunedigital-chicagotribune A Token Named Yelena November 11, 1985 A State Department official has confirmed that Yelena Bonner, wife of dissident Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, has been given permission to leave her city of exile and travel to the West for medical care. Any time the Soviets` tyrannical fist relaxes its grip, that is good news. But the "humanitarian" act may be little more than a cynical Soviet token to Washington before the Geneva summit. So the elation accompanying Yelena Bonner's voyage west is pretty hollow. If the Kremlin wanted to make... NEWS On Jan. 22, 1528, England and France declared war on the... January 22, 2004 On Jan.

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In 1941 Adolf Hitler dismissed his chief of staff and took command of the German army in World War II. In 1957 "The Music Man," starring Robert Preston and with songs by Meredith Willson, opened on Broadway. ... NEWS On Jan. 22, 1788, George Gordon, who became famous as the... January 22, 1998 On Jan. 22, 1788, George Gordon, who became famous as the poet Lord Byron, was born in London. In 1901 Queen Victoria died at the age of 81. (She was succeeded by her son, Edward VII.) In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson pleaded for an end to the war in Europe, calling for "peace without victory." (By April, however, the U.S. had entered the war.) In 1944 Allied forces began landing at Anzio, Italy, in World War II. In 1953 Arthur Miller's drama, "The... NEWS The Undefeated Sakharovs December 28, 1986 Andrei Sakharov's return to Moscow made wonderful reading.

The bare facts were cheering enough: After keeping him and his wife isolated and under crushing pressure for years, the Soviet government had given up and restored them to relative freedom. Just as heartening as the event was the way people responded to it. Talking to reporters at the Moscow train terminal--where crowds welcomed him and Yelena Bonner--the 65-year-old Sakharov took up exactly where he left off in 1980, criticizing the Soviet... NEWS On Dec. 10, 1520, Martin Luther publicly burned the papal... December 10, 1993 On Dec. 10, 1520, Martin Luther publicly burned the papal bull excommunicating him from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1830 poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Mass. In 1896 Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, died, leaving his estate for the Nobel prizes to those "who . . . shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." (The first prizes were awarded on this date five years later.) In 1917 Rev. Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town...

NEWS Sakharov Threatens To Quit Group March 25, 1985 Dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov has told the Soviet Academy of Sciences he will resign from the influential body if it does not help improve conditions for him and his wife in their exile home in Gorky, knowledgeable sources said. In a letter, Sakharov said he would resign on May 10 if his demands were not met, said the sources, who spoke Saturday on condition that they not be identified. They said Sakharov wrote he was taking this step because of his "complete isolation" in the closed city of... FEATURES Seeking Peace September 15, 1991 U.S. Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) has asked the United Nations to send peace-keeping troops to Azerbaijan, which declared independence from the Soviet Union last month. Boxer visited Moscow shortly after the ill-fated Soviet coup to speak with activist Yelena Bonner. Boxer says the widow of Andrei Sakharov identified the forced deportation of an estimated 200,000 Armenian residents from their disputed enclave in Azerbaijan as "the No.

1 human rights abuse in the Soviet Union," warning it could turn into what... NEWS "If the message he was carrying was to read them the riot... December 27, 1989 "If the message he was carrying was to read them the riot act, that was the appropriate message. But he didn`t need to travel to Beijing to deliver it." -Democratic Rep. Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, commenting on the visit to China last summer by President Bush's National Security advisor Brent Scowcroft. "Unity is only a question of time." -Former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, discussing the need for step-by-step moves toward a federation of the... NEWS "If the message he was carrying was to read them the riot... December 27, 1989 "If the message he was carrying was to read them the riot act, that was the appropriate message. But he didn`t need to travel to Beijing to deliver it." -Democratic Rep. Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, commenting on the visit to China last summer by President Bush's National Security advisor Brent Scowcroft.

"Unity is only a question of time." -Former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, discussing the need for step-by-step moves toward a federation of the... NEWS On Dec. 10, 1520, Martin Luther publicly burned the papal... December 10, 1993 On Dec. 10, 1520, Martin Luther publicly burned the papal bull excommunicating him from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1830 poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Mass. In 1896 Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, died, leaving his estate for the Nobel prizes to those "who . . . shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." (The first prizes were awarded on this date five years later.) In 1917 Rev. Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town... NEWS Sakharov Reportedly Ill By United Press International | June 28, 1985 Nobel Peace Prize-winner and dissident Andrei Sakharov is alive but suffering from heart ailments and Parkinson's disease, said West Germany's Bild newspaper Thursday.

In a report released in advance of its Friday editions, the newspaper said it has obtained two videotapes made at a hospital in Gorky where Sakharov is being treated. The paper said one showed Sakharov, 64, accompanied by his wife, Yelena Bonner, with the doctor, who it said was treating him for an irregular heart rhythm, narrowing... NEWS Sakharovs Not Heard From By New York Times News Service | June 7, 1985 Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist and dissident, and his wife have "been removed involuntarily from their apartment" in Gorky, the Soviet city where they are in internal exile, according to the Sakharovs` relatives in the United States. No one has seen Sakharov or his wife, Yelena Bonner, since a group of Soviet scientists visited them in Gorky in late February, the relatives said in an appeal to a U.S. human-rights group that is meeting this week in Argentina. The relatives said recent...

Bonner's Heart Problems Given Top Priority - latimes YOU ARE HERE: LAT Home → Collections Bonner's Heart Problems Given Top Priority December 06, 1985 |DON A. SCHANCHE | Times Staff Writer ROME — Soviet dissident Yelena Bonner met privately with Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi on Thursday and then prepared to fly to Boston for medical consultations over her severe heart problems. Bonner, 62, wife of dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, drove to Rome on Thursday afternoon from the medieval hill town of Siena, where a leading Italian eye specialist urged her to seek treatment for her heart before undergoing cataract surgery in his clinic. "It is not the moment for her to consider an (eye) operation," said Dr. Renato Frezzotti, who treated her for glaucoma in 1975 and 1977. He examined her again in 1979 on her last visit to the West before she was sentenced to internal exile with her husband in the closed Soviet city of Gorky.

Sakharov, 64, winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, recently ended a six-month hunger strike that was staged to force Soviet authorities to allow Bonner to seek medical treatment in the West. Visa Extension Advised Frezzotti said he urged the dissident physician to take care of her heart problems first, then seek an extension of her 90-day exit visa from the Soviet Union so that she can return to Siena for the cataract operation on her left eye and treatment of glaucoma in both eyes. The eye specialist implicitly criticized the neglect of Bonner's medical problems in the Soviet Union. He said she needs to be examined "every three or four months, not every six years" to prevent a worsening of the glaucoma that could lead to blindness. The eye condition dates from war wounds and a concussion that Bonner suffered as a Soviet army nurse in 1941. Bonner's son, Alexei Semyonov, and son-in-law, Yefrem Yankelevich, said here that she suffered two major heart attacks, one in 1983 and another last May, and may require coronary bypass surgery.

They said she will see an unnamed Boston cardiologist soon after she reaches the United States, probably this weekend. The prominent Soviet human rights activist reached Rome from Moscow on Monday and was reunited with Semyonov and Yankelevich, husband of her daughter, Tatiana, all of whom live in Newton, Mass., a suburb of Boston. The two men refused to confirm reports that they and Bonner will fly to the United States today. According to Semyonov, Bonner cabled her husband, still living in internal exile in Gorky, when she arrived in Rome but has not yet received a reply. He said she will try to telephone him when she reaches Boston. Officials at Craxi's Chigi Palace office said Bonner had asked to see the prime minister privately to thank him for helping her to gain the exit visa. Tatiana Yankelevich met with Craxi last spring, and the Italian leader subsequently saw Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Moscow and urged that Bonner be allowed to come to Italy.

The two met in Craxi's office with only an interpreter present while Semyonov and Yankelevich waited with reporters in the open courtyard of the ornate 17th-Century palace in central Rome. Recalling that she had met Craxi on an earlier trip to Italy in 1975, when he was a rising Socialist Party leader, Bonner quipped, "The only thing that has changed since then is that he has become premier and I have become a criminal." Five-Year Sentence Sakharov has been in internal exile since 1980, when he angered authorities by condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had numerous conflicts with the Kremlin earlier as a result of his and Bonner's outspoken protests against Soviet human rights abuses. Bonner was sentenced to five years in internal exile 19 months ago for her human rights activities. MORE:

Question: Yelena Bonner who died last month was the wife of which Soviet dissident and physicist, winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize?
Answer: ANDREI SAKHAROV