Elena Bonner

Elena Bonner was born on February 15, 1923, in Merv, Turkmenistan. She grew up in the restless, cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Hotel Luxe on Gorky Street, which lodged important foreign communists working in Moscow. Her father, Gevork Alikhanov, was a prominent Armenian communist and a secretary of the Comintern, the "general staff of the world revolution." Her mother, Ruth Bonner, was born in Siberia in 1900, joined the Communist Party in 1924, and was dedicated to bringing culture to the masses and saving children made homeless by the upheavals of 1917 and the Civil War.

Elena's life as a Moscow schoolgirl ended abruptly when her father was arrested in May 1937. Ruth moved with her two children to her mother's apartment in Leningrad but did not escape her fate. She was arrested later that year and sentenced to hard labor as the wife of a traitor.

Elena became a proficient survivor. She finished high school in Leningrad, volunteered as a nurse when war broke out, was wounded twice, and honorably discharged in 1945 as a lieutenant and a disabled veteran. After two years of intensive treatment, the loss of vision caused by her wartime injury was brought under control, and she enrolled in the First Leningrad Medical Institute. Upon graduation, she worked as a pediatrician, a district doctor, and a free lance author and editor. She married Ivan Semyonov, a classmate from the medical school, and, ignoring warnings that childbearing could endanger her life, gave birth to a daughter, Tatiana, in 1950, and a son, Alexei, in 1956. (Elena and Ivan separated in 1965.)

She succeeded in reestablishing contact with her mother as the war was drawing to a close. It was only in 1954, however, that Ruth was exonerated, granted a special pension, and informed that her husband died in confinement sometime in 1939. (It took another 52 years for the truth to be revealed – four years after Ruth passed away, Elena gained access to the KGB files and learned that her father was executed in 1938.) Ruth was also assigned an apartment in Moscow, on Zemlyanoi Val, comfortable by Soviet standards. This apartment became Elena's home and in 1971 it was here that Andrei Sakharov moved in.

She mingled with the generation of writers and artists who had been inspired by the post Stalin thaw, but she also helped prisoners and their families. Elena met Andrei Sakharov in October 1970 when both were attending the trial of human rights activists in Kaluga. They got to know each other better in December while defending Jews sentenced to death for attempting an escape from the USSR in a hijacked plane. By August 1971 friendship turned into love, and in January 1972 they formally registered their marriage. Theirs was an unlikely match between a reserved Russian physicist and a scrappy, streetwise Armenian Jewish physician. But it endured.

Her marriage to Sakharov changed Elena's life. She took early retirement as a disabled war veteran and devoted herself to Sakharov, serving as his chief of staff and secretary as well as cook and bottle washer. She also became Sakharov's ambassador to the world at large. She represented him at the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo; reported on her visits to Italy, France, and America; and after his January 1980 exile, served as his sole link with Moscow and the West until May 1984, when she too was barred from leaving Gorky. In August 1984, she was tried by a Gorky court, found guilty of "anti Soviet agitation," and sentenced to exile. By then, she already had a serious heart condition and was in urgent need of surgery.

In 1981 Elena and Andrei went on a successful hunger strike to secure the right for their daughter in law to join her husband, Elena’s son Alexei, in the United States. But it took three hunger strikes by Sakharov, totaling almost 200 days, for Elena to gain permission to travel to the US in December, 1985 for open-heart surgery. In June 1986, after sextuple bypass operation, she returned to Gorky to Andrei and to what they thought would be an exile for life. On December 15, 1986, a telephone was installed in their Gorky apartment and the next day Mikhail Gorbachev personally asked the Sakharovs to return to Moscow. They arrived at Zemlyanoi Val apartment on December 23, 1986. The curtain was raised for the next act.

After Andrei Sakharov's death in December 1989, Elena Bonner continued the campaign for democracy and human rights in Russia. She joined the defenders of the Russian parliament during the attempted coup of August 1991, and lent her support to Boris Yeltsin at the time of constitutional crisis of 1993. She has campaigned tirelessly in defense of self determination for the disputed region of Nagorno Karabakh and for all the peoples of the former Soviet Union. In 1995 she resigned from the Presidential Human Rights Commission in protest against the war in Chechnya, and withdrew her support for President Yeltsin in the following years, insisting that he compromised himself as a democratically elected president having started and condoned the war.

She was the driving force behind the creation of the International Andrei Sakharov Foundation, created in 1990, and is now its honorary chair. Her impassioned commentary on current Russian politics and human rights issues appears frequently in Russian and international press.

Recently, Elena’s age and health condition made it increasingly difficult for her to be far away from her children who live in the US; since 2004 she resides in Boston, Massachusetts, while maintaining her citizenship of Russian Federation.

Elena’s book about the years spent in Gorky exile with Andrei Sakharov, Alone Together, was published in the United States by Alfred Knopf in 1987, and in February 1992, Knopf published Mothers and Daughters, a memoir of her childhood in Stalin’s Russia. These two publications have seen the light of day in many other languages in Europe, Asia, and South America. In Russian language, her publications also include The Bell Tolls, a collection of her newspaper articles by Peak, Moscow, 1991, and Notes on the Sakharov Family Genealogy, by Human Rights Publishing House, Moscow, 1996.

In 2006, the eight-volume collection of Sakharov’s writing was put out by Vremia, a Moscow publishing house. The collection includes Sakharov’s political and human rights essays, transcripts of his interviews (both radio and press), open letters, statements that have never before appeared in Russian; his Memoirs (first published in 1990), and three volumes of his diaries published for the first time. Elena Bonner has prepared and edited the entire collection, complementing The Diaries by her extensive commentary. She has also become a co-author of The Diaries, filling in the inevitable gaps when Sakharov was unable to continue keeping it, mostly during the forced hospitalizations when he was kept incommunicado. Her capacious and precise memory, combined with a talent for writing, makes her an indispensable and unique eye-witness. This “docu-novel” (roman-dokument, in Russian) sheds profound light on the spiritual and intellectual life of one of the most noble and courageous figures of the XX century. This labor of love also serves as yet one more testimony of Bonner’s unswerving dedication to Sakharov and his causes, indeed, her sharing in these causes, her intimate understanding of his reasons and actions, and of the boundless and well-deserved trust Sakharov put in her.