Russian civil rights activist Yelena Bonner, widow of the late human rights crusader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, died Saturday in Boston at the age of 88. Bonner, who had been hospitalized since February, died of heart problems, according to her daughter Tatiana Yankelevich. Together with her husband, Bonner opposed the Soviet regime, and the apartment they shared in Moscow became the unofficial headquarters of the dissident movement. The couple was persecuted by the KGB and eventually exiled to the city of Gorky. In 1938, a year after being arrested in Moscow, Yelena's father, a Communist politician of Armenian origin, was shot to death. Her mother, who was Jewish, was also a victim of Soviet persecution. She was arrested, and spent 17 years in labor camps. Despite her anger over the murder of her father and her mother's exile, Bonner volunteered for the war effort during the Second World War, serving as a nurse and earning a medal for bravery. She was injured during a bombing and suffered serious eye injuries. When the human rights movement against the Soviet regime began to gather steam, Bonner became politically active. As a result, she was attacked by state media, which portrayed her as a "Zionist and CIA agent working to undermine the Soviet regime." After her marriage to Sakharov in 1972 the media attacks on her continued. One of the claims against her was that she incited Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, to act against the establishment. Sakharov received letters calling on him to "repent" and divorce "the Jew."
