Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the physicist Andrei Sakharov.
24 Facts About Yelena Bonner
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Yelena Bonner was born Lusik Georgiyevna Alikhanova in Merv, Turkmen SSR, Soviet Union.
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Yelena Bonner had a younger brother, Igor, who became a career naval officer.
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Yelena Bonner's family had a summer dacha in Sestroretsk and Bonner had fond memories there.
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In 1937, Yelena Bonner's father was arrested by the NKVD and executed as part of Stalin's Great Purge; her mother was arrested a few days later as the wife of an enemy of the people, and served ten years in the Gulag near Karaganda, Kazakhstan, followed by nine years of internal exile.
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In 1947 Yelena Bonner was accepted as student in the medical institute in Leningrad.
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Yelena Bonner's children immigrated to the United States in 1977 and 1978, respectively.
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In October 1970, while attending the trial of human rights activists Revol't Pimenov and Boris Vail in Kaluga, Yelena Bonner met Andrei Sakharov, a nuclear physicist and human rights activist; they married in 1972.
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Yelena Bonner's resolve towards dissidence was strengthened in August 1968 after Soviet bloc tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in order to crush the Prague Spring movement.
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Yelena Bonner became a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976.
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When in January 1980 Sakharov was exiled to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners, the harassed and publicly denounced Yelena Bonner became his lifeline, traveling between Gorky and Moscow to bring out his writings.
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Yelena Bonner remained outspoken on democracy and human rights in Russia and worldwide.
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Yelena Bonner joined the defenders of the Russian parliament during the August Coup and supported Boris Yeltsin during the constitutional crisis in early 1993.
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Yelena Bonner was critical of the international "quartet" two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and has expressed fears about the rise of antisemitism in Europe.
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In 1999, Yelena Bonner received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom.
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Yelena Bonner was among the 34 first signatories of the online anti-Putin manifesto "Putin must go", published 10 March 2010.
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From 2006, Yelena Bonner divided her time between Moscow and the United States, home to her two children, five grandchildren, one great-granddaughter, and one great-grandson.
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Yelena Bonner died on 18 June 2011 of heart failure in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 88, according to her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich.
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Yelena Bonner was the author of Alone Together, and Mothers and Daughters, and wrote frequently on Russia and human rights.
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Yelena Bonner was a recipient of many international human rights awards, including the Rafto Prize in 1991, the European Parliament's Robert Schuman Medal in 2001, the awards of International Humanist and Ethical Union, the World Women's Alliance, the Adelaida Ristori Foundation, the US National Endowment for Democracy, the Lithuanian Commemorative Medal of 13 January, the Czech Republic Order of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, and others.
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Yelena Bonner was awarded the Giuseppe Motta Medal in 2004 for protection of human rights.
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In 2005 Yelena Bonner participated in "They Chose Freedom", a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement.
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Yelena Bonner was on the Board of Advancing Human Rights.
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Yelena Bonner was portrayed by Glenda Jackson in the 1984 film Sakharov.