Elena Bonner
From Philosopedia
Bonner, Elena (15 February 1923 - 18 June 2011)
The wife of Andrei Sakharov, Bonner was awarded the “Distinguished Human Rights Award” in Amsterdam at the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s Congress in 1992.
Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner was born in Merv (now Mary), Turkmenistan. Her father Gevork Alikhanov was an Armenian, her mother Ruth Bonner was Jewish and originally from Siberia.
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Parents
When she was fourteen, her father, a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, was arrested. Six months later, her mother was arrested as “a relative to a traitor of his country.” Her father was later executed without trial, and her mother spent eight years in a labor camp, during which time she saw her mother but once but somehow smuggled messages in and out of the camps. Being a child of parents who were “enemies of the people,” Bonner said she was kicked out of the Komsomol and treated as some kind of pariah.
A Nurse
During World War II, she rehabilitated herself by working as a nurse but was injured in a bombardment, the result of which led her to become almost blind. Despite exile in Gorki, hunger strikes with her second husband (whose fatal heart attack in 1989 she blames on Gorbachov and his associates), she continues to fight for causes threatening human rights. “If minorities cannot have a certain autonomy,” she declared, “there will be a terrible bloodbath.”
She studied pediatrics at the First Leningrad Medical Institute.
Honors
In 1991 she received the Thorolf Rafto Memorial Prize, awarded by the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights.
In 1993, Bonner was elected a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism by the Council for Secular Humanism.
Works
- P. S. (1991)
- Mothers and Daughters (1992)
- Her 1993 essay, “The Rebirth of Democracy in Russia,” is included in Challenges to the Enlightenment,
- Essays in Defense of Reason and Science (1994).
- Alone Together (1996, a memoir)
Death
Bonner, at the age of 88, died in Boston on 18 June 2011. She had been ill since February and died of heart failure.
Known as the dignified symbol of protest within the Soviet Union, she is survived by two children from her first marriage, Tatiana I. Yankelevich of Boston and Alexey I. Semyonov of Sprinfield, Virginia; five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
Obituaries:
