Ruth Bonner

Ruth Grigorjewna Bonner (* 1900; † December 25 1987 in Moscow) was a Jewish Communist activist and a victim of Stalin's purges. She was the mother of the human rights activist Yelena Bonner and the mother in law of physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov.

In the 30s Ruth Bonner was an official in the communist party of Moscow while her husband Georg Alikhanov was a director at the Comintern. As part of Stalin's mass purges in 1937 her husband got arrested on charges of espionage and was sentenced to death. She got arrested a few days after her husband and spent the next 8 years in a forced labor camp near Karaganda, Kazakhstan. After her release she spent another 9 years in internal exile. In 1954 she was one of the first of Stalin's victim that got rehabilitated under the new soviet leader Khrushchev and her husband was rehabilitated posthumously as well. When her daughter Yelena Bonner and her son in law Andrei Sakharow were exiled to Gorki in 1980, she was allowed to move to her grandchildren in the US. Ruth Bonner returned to Moscow in June 1987 to live with her daughter, whose exile had been lifted by Mikhail Gorbachev in December the year before.

References

* Marcelline J. Hutton: Russian and West European Women, 1860-1939: Dreams, Struggles, and Nightmares. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001.
* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE2D8123FF934A15751C1A961948260 Obituary in the New York Times]