“And at the same time, in the back of my mind,” she told Robards, according to his 1989 account in The Post, “I am packing my bags to return to the Soviet Union in less than a month. I wonder why I am not crazy.”
In 1986, Ms. Bonner and her husband were allowed to return to Moscow during a period of reform under Mikhail Gorbachev. They revived their human rights monitoring committee and pressed on with their calls for greater freedom.
(DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) - Dissident Yelena Bonner, the widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, speaks during the awards ceremony of the 2008 Sakharov Prize at the European Parliament in the northeastern French city of Strasbourg.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Ms. Bonner was exhilarated and astonished — not only by the political revolution in Germany but also by the fact that Soviet citizens were allowed to know about it.
“Our television showed all of this,” she said. “It was just like the rest of the world; we saw the same things you saw, those people on top of the wall.”
Yelena Georgievna Bonner was born born Feb. 15, 1923, in Turkmenistan.
She was a teenager when Stalin’s secret police arrested and shot her stepfather, an Armenian Bolshevik revolutionary. Her mother, the daughter of a Jewish family born into Siberian exile, spent 17 years in a slave labor camp as “the wife of an enemy of the people.”
Ms. Bonner lived with relatives and became a nurse during World War II. She was badly wounded during the siege of Leningrad and almost lost her eyesight when a German plane strafed a medical train on which she was tending wounded soldiers.
Her eyes gave her trouble for the rest of her life. When authorities did not allow Sakharov to leave the Soviet Union to accept the Nobel Prize in 1975, Ms. Bonner — who was in Italy for eye surgery — traveled to Oslo in his stead.
Ms. Bonner’s first marriage, to Ivan Seymonov, ended in divorce. Survivors include two children from that marriage, Tatiana Yankelevich of Boston and Alexey Semyonov of Springfield; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Sakharov died in 1989. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Even as Ms. Bonner’s health declined over the years, she continued to champion her husband’s memory, editing an eight-volume collection of his writings that was released by a Moscow publishing house in 2006.
She never stopped speaking out about her country’s politics. In the 1990s, she sat on President Boris Yeltsin’s human rights commission until resigning to protest his military assault on Chechnya.
More recently, she challenged President Vladimir Putin’s human rights record. When a petition circulated in 2010 calling for Putin to step down, she was among the first to sign it.
Klose is dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
