Obituary: Yelena Bonner, human rights activist

Yelena Bonner, human rights activist.

Born: 15 February, 1923, in Merv, Turkmenistan.

Died: 18 June, 2001, in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 88.

YELENA Bonner was best known worldwide as the husband of Soviet dissident and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, with whom she spent many years in exiled. But she was an outspoken human rights activist in her own right.

Sakharov, in his memoirs, said she, a victim of Stalin's atrocities since she was born, was the impetus behind his human rights campaign. Previously, he had been a nuclear physicist considered "one of the fathers" of the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

Most recently, despite ill health, she was a vocal opponent of Vladimir Putin, a former officer of an organisation which had caused her and her husband so much grief - the KGB. She also spoke out against Russia's bungled intervention in Chechnya until failing health forced her to slow down. She spent most of the last eight years living with her daughter in Boston, although she kept in close contact with Russian dissidents.

Lusia Georgievna Bonner (she would opt for Yelena as a teenager) was born in 1923 in Merv (now called Mary), on the historical Silk Road through Central Asia and a Soviet satellite at the time of her birth.

Her father, Gevork Alikhanov, was an Armenian who had become a senior local communist; her mother, Ruth Bonner, a Jew who fled the maternity ward with newborn Yelena after being warned of an attack by local anti-communist Muslims.

She was only 14 when her father was executed in a purge of the party by Stalin and her mother was sent to a labour camp where she would remain during the Second World War. After failing to denounce her parents as "enemies of the people", Yelena was expelled from the Young Communist League.

When the Soviets got fully involved in the Second World War in 1941 after the Nazi invasion, she enlisted as a nurse and won a reputation as something of a Florence Nightingale figure. She was tending soldiers on the front near Leningrad when she suffered serious head wounds in a Nazi artillery attack and was later wounded in a Stuka dive-bomber raid on a hospital train, damaging her eyesight for life. But she returned to the front and nursed until the Allied victory.

After the war, she married fellow medical student Ivan Semyonov. Despite being thrown out of medical school for a time during Stalin's campaign against Jews, she eventually qualified as a GP in Leningrad and had two children before her growing political activism led to divorce in 1965.Earning a meagre living as a paediatrician, she moved in intellectual circles and wrote for medical journals and literary publications, often with subtle political content.As the human rights movement grew in the late 1960s, during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, she helped produce The Chronicle of Current Events, which listed human rights violations. Like many of her generation, she was stunned by the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. In 1970 she met the like-minded Sakharov, whose wife had just died, and they married in January 1972. Their cramped flat on Moscow, shared with her mother Ruth, became a hotbed of dissident activity and a magnet for foreign correspondents.

The couple were deeply involved in the so-called Helsinki Group, set up to monitor Soviet violations of the Helsinki agreement on human rights, as well as for the rights of Christians, Jews and others.

As a physicist working on the Soviet nuclear programme, Sakharov had become increasingly concerned over moral issues, particularly the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the US. He called on Brezhnev to "take the Americans at their word" and agree to a bilateral rejection of new anti-ballistic missiles in order to diminish the threat of nuclear war. He was kicked off the state nuclear programme but only increased his activism. When his efforts won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 the Soviet authorities would not let him to leave the country to receive it. Bonner, who had been allowed out for medical treatment in Italy, read his acceptance speech and lecture to great applause in Oslo.

In 1980, Sakharov was banished into internal exile in Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow and closed off to foreigners at the time, for criticising the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and calling for an international boycott of the Soviet Olympics. Yelena joined him and spent the next seven years under virtual house arrest. They went on hunger strike for 17 days in 1981 until the Soviet authorities backed down on preventing Bonner's daughter-in-law from leaving the country.

Mikhail Gorbachev finally ended Sakharov's exile with a personal telephone call to Gorky in 1986 and the couple continued their activism until his death in 1989, five weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bonner published two major books: Alone Together (1986, about her time in Gorky with Sakharov) and Mothers and Daughters (1992, a memoir of her childhood).

"My mother took very closely and very personally everything happening in Russia," said her daughter Tatiana Yankelevich. "And she was bitterly disappointed with where Russia is heading." She added: "From the first day of Putin's reign, she was warning that Putin's regime was purposely eradicating the budding democracy in Russia."

Yelena Bonner died of heart failure in hospital in Boston. She is survived by her son Alexey and daughter Tatiana, five grandchildren and three great grandchildren.