Elena Bonner was a 
remarkable woman and human rights defender, widely eulogized in the week since she died at 88 following heart surgery in Massachusetts.
Bonner was, since 1972 the wife and after 1989, the widow of famed Soviet Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Andrei D. Sakharov – the moral giant who stood for human rights, peace and telling the truth.
Elena was herself a major public figure, as well as a demanding mother and doting grandmother – and a wonderful interlocutor, and a great role model. Her loss is huge.
She had many years of activism as well as repeated bouts of illness and infirmity. But it was her ability to rise again and again from infirmity to activism, to speak up and demand change, to exhibit courage when others were wilting from the repression that was directed against the tiny dissident/human rights community, for which we will always remember her.
And of course, for the many institutions she created and preserved, so the message and moral views of Andrei Sakharov will live on in Russia and beyond.
I first met Elena Bonner when she came to New York for heart surgery in 1986 – we even took this photo together, standing on Sakharov-Bonner Corner, just down the block from the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. Before and in the years in between, I helped carry out the rapid-fire demands and requests that Mrs. Bonner conveyed when she was able to get through on a rare, closely controlled international phone line out of Russia. Her requests, frankly, were endless. Or so it seemed. When I learned that her eye trouble stemmed from being wounded at the front in World War Two, I thought – how ironic – she could have been a great General! She understood the need to combine strategy with action – to fight on several fronts, and never to give up.
In a New Yorker tribute, David Remnick recalls how Bonner was slandered by Soviet spokesmen as a “sexual brigand” and “predatory Jew” who somehow led Sakharov astray, but he reflects on how she served as Sakharov’s protector, his ‘lion at the gate’ – and that she was “unafraid” and resilient.
Former New York Times reporter Serge Schmemann simply describes her as “formidable,” “imposing”, “peremptory” and a “sergeant –major.”
Let’s be clear: Elena Bonner was not a minor player, not a “sergeant-major”-- she was courageous, demanding, and effective. And that is why she was one of the great human rights defenders of our time.
She was well aware of who she was and, of course, of the worldwide renown which her husband Sakharov had gained since his famous 1968 essay on human rights, “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom."
I recall vividly visiting her in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1990 – about 6 months after Sakharov's untimely death, but well before the collapse of the Soviet Union had even been contemplated. It was the day of the Wellesley College graduation, just one town away, and the Soviet 1st Lady Raisa Gorbachev was the commencement speaker alongside U.S. 1st Lady Barbara Bush. There was a media frenzy around this – the first time that Mrs. Gorbachev, who was accompanying her husband, President Mikhail Gorbachev, on a state visit, was given such a platform in the United States.
When I arrived, Elena’s first question was, “What do you think of Raisa’s planned speech?”
I said I thought it was disgraceful, since the only reason Raisa Gorbachev was asked to be the commencement speaker at Wellesley was because she was the wife of a famous man.
Well, Elena responded immediately, “You could say the same thing about me..."
When I recovered my balance, I protested to the contrary – all the things she had done herself, the causes she championed, the organizations like the Moscow Helsinki Group and a fund for the children of political prisoners that she founded, among others. She was no mere reflection of a powerful man.