MOSCOW, (Reuters) – 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 on Saturday 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 Feb. 15, 1923, to parents who were persecuted under Soviet leader Josef Stalin, Bonner served as a nurse in World War Two 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.
Bonner 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.
