Elena Bonner, died Saturday in Boston (USA) at age 88, served for 20 years a major figure in the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union along with her husband, the Nobel Peace Andrei Sakharov.
"Taking stock today, I can summarize my life in three words. My life has been typical, tragic and beautiful," she told in a speech in Oslo two years ago.
Elena was born in 1923 into a family of convinced Communists.His father, active in Transcaucasia during the Revolution, is a leader of the Comintern (Communist International), which allows the young Elena cross in the family apartment the future Marshal Tito and Georgi Dimitrov, the future communist leader of Bulgaria.
Elena Bonner is 14 years old when his father was arrested in 1937 at the height of the Stalinist purges. He was shot the following year. His mother, who was sentenced to eight years in camp, will total 18 years between the prison camp and exile. Both will be rehabilitated in 1954, after Stalin's death.
Committed volunteer as a nurse during World War II, Elena Bonner was injured twice.After the war, she became a pediatrician, married a doctor in Leningrad and has two children, Alex and Tatiana, with whom she lived in recent years in Boston.
After the timid de-Stalinization initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, Elena Bonner joined the Communist Party, "the biggest mistake of my life," she said years later.
The invasion by Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia in 1968 put an end to his hopes of liberalization of the communist regime, and she left the party in 1972, an act so sacrilegious in the Soviet Union.
At that time, Elena has been involved for several years in the movement of human rights.So she meets Andrei Sakharov in 1970 in Kaluga, a small town 100 km from Moscow, where both have come to attend the trial of two dissidents.
In 1972, Elena Bonner Sakharov wife, one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, which is already recognized in the USSR and the West as a symbol of the opposition, with the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
"We were absolutely free people in a country absolutely free", remember loved Elena Bonner citing years of common struggle with Sakharov.
In the Moscow Group for the implementation of the Helsinki Agreement, a leading dissident groups, Elena Bonner plays a central role: it informs foreign journalists arrests, convictions, searches and smuggled many documents in the West.
For years, the KGB (secret services and Soviet political police) made it his main target, avoiding a frontal attack on the Sakharov: the Jewish origins of Bonner are then highlighted to help the accused to serve of foreign powers and to have "astray" Academician Sakharov.
In 1975, her husband having been prevented by the Soviet authorities to travel to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace is that it represents.
In 1980, Sakharov was exiled to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), city closed to foreigners and 500 km east of Moscow, for criticizing the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
Elena becomes the only link with the outside of Sakharov, making back and forth between Moscow and Gorky punctuated with many stops and searches by the KGB.
In 1984, she in turn is sentenced to five years of exile in Gorky for "systematically disseminated information slandering the Soviet Union."
On his return to Moscow with Sakharov in 1987, after being pardoned by Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika in full, Elena continues her fight.
She became a member of the Commission for Human Rights by President Boris Yeltsin, but left office in 1994 to protest against the war in Chechnya.
In recent years, Elena Bonner did not spare his criticism of the current prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin considered it a threat to the freedoms and human rights in Russia.
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