Yelena Bonner, a relentless critic of human rights abuses by Soviet-era authorities and the widow of Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov, has died at the age of 88, her children said.
Bonner continued to advocate rights and democracy in post-communist Russia and was outspoken against prime minister Vladimir Putin.
Bonner died yesterday in the United States, where she had lived in recent years in the Boston area, her daughter Tatiana Yankelevich and son Alexey Semyonov said in a statement posted on the website of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation.
It did not give the cause of death.
Born in Soviet Turkmenistan on February 15th, 1923, to parents who were persecuted under Soviet leader Josef Stalin, Bonner served as a nurse in the second World War and was later ejected from medical school during a Stalin-era campaign against Jews.
A member of the Soviet dissident movement that developed in the 1960s, she was a co-founder in the 1970s of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a rights organisation that challenged state oppression.
In 1972, Bonner married Sakharov, a nuclear physicist who helped to develop the Soviet atom bomb but later used his prominence to speak out for peace and human rights. They had met at trial of activists in 1970.
She represented Sakharov at the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo and helped maintain communication with Moscow and the West when he was banished to Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, in 1980 after speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Bonner was Sakharov's sole link with the outside world during his internal exile until she herself was ordered confined to Gorky in 1984. She was convicted by a court there of defaming Soviet society and the state.
After a series of hunger strikes by Sakharov, Ms Bonner was allowed to travel to the United States for heart surgery in 1985.
Sakharov and Bonner returned from exile to Moscow in 1986 at the invitation of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was ushering in reforms.
Sakharov died in December 1989, two years before the Soviet Union fell apart.
Bonner was a member of a state human rights commission under Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, but quit in protest over the war that began when Yeltsin sent troops into Chechnya to fight separatist rebels.
Late last year, Bonner signed a petition calling for the resignation of Putin, who critics say has rolled back democratic gains of the Yeltsin era since he became president in 2000 and subsequently prime minister.
"It is very bitter when someone of your generation dies, but she lived a good, full and productive life - one can only envy such person," Lyudmila Alexeyeva, another co-founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group and now its head, told Reuters.
"She will be remembered not just by loved ones but by many who never knew her," said Alexeyeva (83).
Bonner's children said her memorial service would be held on Tuesday in Brookline, Massachusetts and that, in accordance with her wishes, she would be cremated and her ashes interred at a Moscow cemetery beside her husband, mother and brother.
Reuters