Voting Station

Yelena Bonner

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Advocate

The Resume

    (February 15, 1923-June 18, 2011)
    Born in Mary, Turkmenistan
    Birth name was Lusik Georgievna Alikhanova
    Pediatrician and human rights activist
    Married to physicist/dissident Andrei Sakharov (1972-89)
    Wrote 'Alone Together' (1987) and 'Mothers and Daughters' (1992)

Why she might be annoying:

    She rejoined the Communist party during the Khruschev era.
    She was divorced from her first husband.
    Sakharov's children were reportedly upset by his close friendship with Bonner shortly after his first wife's death from cancer.
    Sakharov went on several hunger strikes until she was allowed to leave the Soviet Union for surgery.
    She made many of her criticisms of Vladimir Putin's regime from the safety of her daughter's home in Boston.

Why she might not be annoying:

    During the Stalinist purges, her father was executed and her mother was sent to a labor camp (1937).
    She was expelled from the Young Communist League for refusing to denounce her parents.
    While serving as a nurse during World War II, she was wounded by shrapnel and as a result suffered vision problems throughout her life.
    She gave up on Communism after the Soviet bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968): 'It cured me forever of revolutionary romanticism.'
    When the Soviets would not let Sakharov leave the country, she accepted his Nobel Peace Prize and delivered his acceptance speech (1975).
    When Sakharov was sent to internal exile in the city of Gorky (1980), she served as his lifeline to the outside world.
    The Soviet propaganda campaign against her featured a nasty streak of anti-semitism.
    She said of the pettier harassment that she and Sakharov received, 'Whenever the authorities did not like something, it was our car that suffered. Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue. This was how we knew that we had done something bad by their standards.'
    She joined the crowds defending Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament during an attempted coup by Communist hardliners (August, 1991).
    She resigned from Yeltsin's Human Rights Commission to protest the war in Chechnya (1994).

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 9 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 9 Votes: 55.56% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 24 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 171 Votes: 51.46% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 17 Votes: 58.82% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 13 Votes: 53.85% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 16 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 11 Votes: 45.45% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 11 Votes: 54.55% Annoying
    In 2011, Out of 57 Votes: 52.63% Annoying