Galina Y Averbukh

Galina Averbukh passed away peacefully in the early hours of Saturday, February 12 at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is survived by her son Sergey, her daughter-in-law Luba, her grandsons Mark and Matthew, her cousin Leo, her nephews Alex and Raisa, and her great-grandchildren Maya and Boris. She is predeceased by her husband, Mark.

Galina was born on April 27, 1939 in Moscow, USSR. She was an only child and lived with her parents Yulij Averbukh and Isabella Zvonitskaya, as well as her grandfather Naum Zvonitsky, a renowned professor of medicine. When she was two years old she was evacuated from Moscow during World War II. While in evacuation her mother passed away, and afterwards she lived with her Aunt Lyusya and her cousin Leo.

After the war Galina moved to Leningrad with her family, to live with her father, her step-mother Bertha and her step-sister Tanya. She attended school in Leningrad where she met her best friend Dora with whom they were friends until Galina’s last days.

In 1956 she enrolled at LITMO Institute. There she met her future husband Mark, and they were married in 1964. She had one son with him, Sergey. 15 years into their marriage, in 1979, untimely, Mark died at the age of 42. Galina never tired of talking of him, what a remarkable man he was and an amazing husband and father.

After graduating from LITMO she went on to work at the Mendeleyev Institute for Metrology and finished an All-But-Dissertation PhD in engineering. Later she was inspired by a new world of programming, and became a software and CAD engineer, working at several research institutes.

All her colleagues admired her as a very bright, kind and open person. Some of them became her close lifelong friends. She retired in 2004.

While still in college, Mark brought Galina to a friends’ home on Pushkinskaya Street, a place where many Soviet dissidents gathered. Galina became involved in the dissident movement, helping hide dissident and blacklisted literature from the KGB searches, and donating money to help political prisoners and their families. It was at Pushkinskaya that she met Elena Bonner, a prominent Soviet human right activist and the future wife of Andrei Sakharov. The two became close friends. Galina helped organize the Sakharov Archive in Moscow in 1994, and she undertook a substantial archival research to help Elena put together a book on Sakharov’s genealogy and family history. In 2002 Galina traveled to the US to help Elena organize and edit Sakharov-Bonner Diaries.

On the last day of Elena’s life in June 2011, Galina was by her side. Galina left a poignant memoir about their friendship, included in the 2015 volume of Elena Bonner’s friends’ reminiscences.

In 2007 Galina moved to the Boston area to be closer to her children and grandchildren, settling at the Morville house on Norway Street. She quickly made many friends among her neighbors and helped many teaching computer literacy and generally assisting her friends. Any chance she had, she attended concerts at her beloved nearby Boston Symphony Hall. Galina also loved exploring the Fine Arts and Gardner Museums and attending a movie club with her friends.

Once she moved to the United States, Galina had a chance to travel all over the country and to many countries in Europe, including visiting her grandson Mark in Amsterdam as well as her relatives in Germany and friends in Italy, spending endless hours walking the boulevards of Paris and Barcelona. Her last trip in 2019 was to Germany with her son, and then on a solo trip to Austria.

2019 also marked the arrival of her great-granddaughter Maya to Boston and later the birth of a great-grandson Borya. Very quickly they became the most important part of her life and she spent as much time with them as she could. Until her very last days she was able to entertain and single handedly take care of these two very energetic toddlers who eagerly awaited her arrival with daily questions of "When is Grandma Galya coming?"

Galina will be forever remembered for her infinite generosity, her warmth, her sense of humor and her amazing inquisitiveness and intellectual curiosity. Her life has impacted many people of multiple generations and spanned two continents. She will be deeply missed by everyone whose life she touched with her amazing soul.