MOSCOW – 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 have said.
In recent times, Ms Bonner was outspoken against prime minister Vladimir Putin.
She died on Saturday in the United States, where she had lived in recent years in the Boston area.
Born in Soviet Turkmenistan in 1923, to parents who were persecuted under Josef Stalin, Ms Bonner served as a nurse in the second World War. She 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 Ms Bonner married Sakharov, a nuclear physicist who helped develop the Soviet atom bomb but later used his prominence to speak out for peace and human rights.
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. She herself was ordered confined to Gorky in 1984.
Sakharov and Ms 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.
Mr Bonner was a member of a state human rights commission under Boris Yeltsin but quit in protest over the war that began when Yeltsin sent troops into Chechnya.
Her memorial service will take place tomorrow in Massachusetts. – (Reuters)