Ruf Grigorievna Bonner (russian: Руфь Григорьевна Боннер; 1900 — 25 December 1987), also known as Ruth Bonner, was a Soviet Communist activist and who spent eight years in a labor camp during

Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...

Great Purge The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secret ...

. She was the mother of the human rights activist

Yelena Bonner Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner (russian: link=no, Елена Георгиевна Боннэр; 15 February 1923 – 18 June 2011) ...

and the mother-in-law of physicist and dissident

Andrei Sakharov Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov ( rus, Андрей Дмитриевич Сахаров, p=ɐnˈdrʲej ˈdmʲitrʲɪjevʲɪtɕ ˈsaxərəf; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, nobel laureate and activist for n ...

. Bonner was born in 1900 into a Russian Jewish family in

Siberia Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive region, geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a ...

. Her mother, Tatiana Matveyevna Bonner early widowed, was widowed and left with three small children. Bonner's first husband was Armenian Levon Sarkisovich Kocharian, who died when Yelena was a year old. In the 1930s, Bonner was a health official in the

Communist Party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ...

committee of Moscow while her second husband, Gevork Alikhanyan, aka Georgy Alikhanov, was a director at the Comintern.Ruf Bonner and Gevork Alikhanov background info. at ''The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System'', p. 212
/ref> As part of Stalin's mass purges in 1937, her husband was arrested on charges of

espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangib ...

and sentenced to death. Bonner was arrested a few days after her husband and spent the next eight years in the

Gulag The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...

near

Karaganda Karaganda or Qaraghandy ( kk, Қарағанды/Qarağandy, ; russian: Караганда, ) is the capital of Karaganda Region in the Republic of Kazakhstan. It is the fourth most populous city in Kazakhstan, behind Almaty (Alma-Ata), Astan ...

Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...

. After her release she spent another nine years in internal exile. In 1954 she was one of the first of Stalin's victims to be rehabilitated under the new Soviet leader

Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...

. Her husband was rehabilitated posthumously.''Ruth Bonner, Stalin Purge Victim''
Obituary, ''The New York Times'', 1987-12-27 When her daughter Yelena and her son-in-law Andrei Sakharov were exiled to Gorky in 1980, she was allowed to move to the United States to be with her grandchildren. She returned to Moscow in June 1987 to live with her daughter, whose exile had been lifted by Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1986. She died in Moscow on 25 December 1987, aged 87.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bonner, Ruf 1900 births 1987 deaths Russian activists Russian women activists Russian Jews People from Moscow Place of birth missing Soviet rehabilitations People from Irkutsk Governorate