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The Spectacle Blog
Yelena Bonner, best remembered along with her husband, Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov, as the first couple of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s, died yesterday in Boston after a lengthy illness. She was 88.
Bonner joined the Communist Party during the Kruschev years but broke with them after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. She married Sakharov in 1971 and spent a good part of the next two decades being harrassed, imprisoned and exiled in Gorky along with her husband. Yet she always stood her ground and never relented in her criticism of Soviet communism and was Sakharov's lifeline to the West especially when she accepted Sakharov's Nobel Prize in Physics when the Soviets refused to let him to travel to Norway. In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev finally ended the harrassment against Bonner and Sakharov, ended their exile and publicly welcomed them back.
In more recent years, despite her frail health, Bonner became a critic of both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin and also became increasingly outspoken against anti-Semitism.
How many of us, if put into the same position Elena Bonner was put, would have responded so gallantly? This was one brave woman.
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More Blog Posts by Aaron Goldstein
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/06/19/yelena-bonner-rip
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Ore Gone| 6.19.11 @ 3:58PM
We have become so complacent that people in our country won't speak out against the politicians that are steering us towards a socialist nation. I hope more Americans find their voices and their souls. I have only respect for principled people that realize the value of being free to choose to do the right thing. The socialists want to legislate all of our choices because they know better.
Occam's Tool| 6.19.11 @ 8:56PM
She makes Obama and his ilk into the small, worthless humans they are.
JmsA| 6.19.11 @ 9:05PM
Brave Lady. May She Rest in Peace.
WL| 6.19.11 @ 10:49PM
Yes. We honor ANY anti-communist figure...count me in.
But, it seems that Amer. Spect. has sort of become an obituary section here lately...
So...must me running short of the usual "I will criticize this or that when it's appropriate" negative columns" on Palin or something?
Oh nevermind...I see a column about the marlins so that answered the question.
weddingdresses| 6.20.11 @ 2:29AM
She makes Obama and his ilk into the small, worthless humans they are.
weddingdresses| 6.20.11 @ 2:31AM
We have become so complacent that people in our country won't speak out against the politicians that are steering us towards a socialist nation. I hope more Americans find their voices and their souls. I have only respect for principled people that realize the value of being free to choose to do the right thing. The socialists want to legislate all of our choices because they know better.