Elena Georgievna Bonner

Tough critic

Until her death, Bonner remained an unbending critic of the Russian and Western establishments. This chain smoking, grey haired, bespectacled woman was known for her fiery temper, which she described as “Armenian.” She was sincere and passionate and saw things in black and white. In her last interview to a Russian opposition newspaper, she said, “I believe the Western establishment has betrayed the ideology of protecting human rights . . . Perhaps it’s just human nature: the higher a person gets, the worse he becomes. . . .

“The woman who currently presides over Amnesty International . . . could possibly even become UN secretary general, therefore, she will do everything that Putin says. Amnesty International has become shit . . . all the well-known human rights organisations are just formalities: the UN International League of Human Rights, Freedom House, Amnesty, and the others have all become the same officials with high salaries” (http://en.novayagazeta.ru/society/46865.html).

In 1974 Bonner created a foundation to help the children of political prisoners in the Soviet Union and was one of the founders of Moscow Helsinki group, to improve relations between the Communist bloc and the West. Unlike Sakharov she was allowed to travel abroad, and in 1975 she went to Oslo to deliver her husband’s Nobel prize speech.

Sakharov’s public criticism of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan resulted in his exile to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in 1980. Bonner voluntarily followed and served as a link between Sakharov and the outside world until 1984, when she was sentenced to exile in Gorky for five years. Sakharov repeatedly went on hunger strike, as Bonner describes in her book Alone Together. In 1986 they were allowed to return to Moscow after a phone call from Mikhail Gorbachev initiating perestroika. They resumed political activity.

Elena Bonner was born Lusik Alikhanova in Merv (now Mary), Turkmenistan, into an Armenian-Jewish family. Her stepfather, Gevork Alikhanov, led the Communist Party of Armenia, and her mother, Ruth Bonner, a Siberian Jew, was also a Communist functionary. The family moved to Leningrad and then to Moscow. Under Stalin, Alikhanov was shot dead in 1938, and his wife was sent to a concentration camp. Lusik and her younger brother, Igor, were taken to Leningrad by a grandmother to avoid being sent to an orphanage. Aged 16, Lusik took her mother’s family name and changed her first name to Elena because of her admiration for Elena Insarova, a heroine of the 19th century novel Nakanune (On the Eve) by Ivan Turgenev. Nevertheless, she was always addressed by her friends and relatives, including Sakharov, as Lusya.

In 1940 Bonner graduated from high school and entered the philological faculty at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad. When the war with Germany began in 1941 she was mobilised into the Red Army and was severely injured during an air raid. After her discharge she worked as a nurse. Bonner was demobilised in 1945, at the rank of medical lieutenant.

In 1947 Bonner joined the paediatric faculty of the First Leningrad I P Pavlov Medical Institute (now the St Petersburg State I P Pavlov Medical University). In 1953 many high ranking (mostly Jewish) doctors were accused of killing their patients on the orders of US and UK intelligence agencies. As an active member of the Young Communists’ League, Bonner was asked to demand capital punishment for one of the institute’s professors at a rally. “You want to execute our professor? Have you gone mad?” she asked instead. She was excluded from the institute but returned as a student after Stalin’s death. After she graduated she worked in Leningrad as a district physician and as a neonatologist at a maternity hospital. She was decorated as an “outstanding healthcare worker” by the health ministry.

Party member, but not for long

In 1959 Bonner was sent to Iraq to conduct smallpox vaccination. She published papers in Meditsynsky Rabotnik, formerly the official newspaper of the Soviet health ministry. Her essay that claimed a mother’s right to stay in hospital with her child provoked huge response, but it took almost half a century for this to be included in a new federal law. In 1965 Bonner divorced her first husband, Dr Ivan Semenov, whom she’d married while they were medical students, and moved with her two children to Moscow. The same year she joined the Communist Party. Sakharov later wrote in his memoirs, “Lusya is an active person. She wants to correct life, ‘to correct Soviet power.’ Certainly, it is easier to do so from within, from its heart, being a Party member.” Disillusioned by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 she officially severed herself from the party in 1972. Later Bonner called her membership “the biggest mistake of my life.”

Bonner was a member of a Commission for Human Rights under the president of the Russian Federation, but quit in December 1994 in protest at the war in Chechnya. From the 1990s she lived in Boston, Massachusetts, close to her daughter. In 2003 she visited Moscow for the last time. Predeceased by her husbands, Bonner leaves two children from her first marriage.