Bonner, Yelena 1923-
Soviet civil rights campaigner

She was born in Moscow. After the arrest of her parents in Stalin's 'great purge' of 1937, she was brought up in Leningrad (St Petersburg) by her grandmother. During World War II she served in the army, but suffered serious eye injuries. In 1965 she joined the Communist Party (CPSU), but became disillusioned after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). She married Andrei Sakharov in 1971 and resigned from the CPSU a year later. During the next 14 years she and her husband led the Soviet dissident movement. Following a KGB crackdown, Sakharov was banished to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in 1980 and Bonner followed in 1984. After hunger strikes, she was permitted to travel to Italy for specialist eye treatment in 1981 and 1984. The couple were finally released from Gorky in 1986, as part of a new 'liberalization' policy by the Gorbachev administration, and remained prominent campaigners for greater democratization. Following Sakharov's death in 1989 she remained a critic of the post-Soviet governments of Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin.