Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner (Russian: Елена Георгиевна Боннэр; 15 February 1923 – 18 June 2011)[1][2] was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the physicist Andrei Sakharov.

Her father died a year after her birth, and her mother remarried to Gevork Alikhanyan, founding First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia and a Comintern executive.

Her resolve towards dissidence was strengthened in August 1968 after Soviet bloc tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in order to crush the Prague Spring movement.

[15] At the Kaluga trial in 1970, Bonner and Sakharov met Natan Sharansky and began working together to defend Jews sentenced to death for attempting an escape from the USSR in a hijacked plane.

[2] Under pressure from Sakharov, the Soviet regime permitted Yelena Bonner to travel to the West in 1975, 1977 and 1979 for treatment of her wartime eye injury.

When Sakharov, awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, was barred from travel by the Soviet authorities, Bonner, in Italy for treatment, represented him at the ceremony in Oslo.

[1] Sakharov's several long and painful hunger strikes forced the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev to let her travel to the U.S. in 1985 for sextuple bypass heart surgery.

She joined the defenders of the Russian parliament during the August Coup and supported Boris Yeltsin during the constitutional crisis in early 1993.

[16] In 1994, outraged by what she called "genocide of the Chechen people", Bonner resigned from Yeltsin's Human Rights Commission and was an outspoken opponent to Russian armed involvement in Chechnya and critical of the Kremlin for allegedly returning to KGB-style authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin.

She was a recipient of many international human rights awards, including the Rafto Prize in 1991,[21] the European Parliament's Robert Schuman Medal in 2001,[22] the awards of International Humanist and Ethical Union,[11] the World Women's Alliance, the Adelaida Ristori Foundation, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy,[23] the Lithuanian Commemorative Medal of 13 January,[11] the Czech Republic Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and others.