BROOKLINE - Elena Bonner sits in an armchair in her living room, wrapped in a lace shawl and chain-smoking European cigarettes.
The widow of Andrei Sakharov - father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, internationally renowned human rights activist, winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize - turned 85 yesterday. Tonight, over herring and salmon caviar and raised glasses of vodka, she'll celebrate with a birthday party at a Russian restaurant in Newton. Among those sending good wishes is German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A few days before her birthday, with the lights on the balcony behind her flickering in the dusk and a sketch of her and Sakharov hanging on the wall in front of her, Bonner reflects on her lifetime of resistance. Physically frail and mentally alert, more rough-edged than her reserved late husband, she first deflects congratulatory greetings.
"Thank you," she says in Russian, with her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich, translating, "but I think when it's 85, it doesn't feel like a particularly joyous occasion."
After years of spending the winter in Brookline near her children and the warmer seasons in Moscow, Bonner has lived here full-time for five years. Widowed since 1989 and a longtime activist in her own right, she is a devoted keeper of Sakharov's legacy and determined critic of Russian leader Vladimir Putin's authoritarian tendencies.
Bonner was over 80 when she completed editing and annotating three thick volumes of Sakharov's diaries. She was 78 when she decried Putin's "state of lies" in The New York Review of Books in 2001 and 81 when she complained that "Mr. Putin carries on with the traditions of his KGB predecessors" in The Wall Street Journal Europe in 2004. These days she stays busy reading and keeping up with news and correspondence via the Internet.
Bonner's short hair is turning white, and her glasses are thick, but she still resembles the "beautiful woman" with the "serious, energetic, and businesslike manner" that Sakharov, in his memoirs, describes noticing in an apartment in 1970 during a political trial both followed. "That was Elena Bonner," he recounts his host telling him. "She's been helping prisoners nearly all her life."
The daughter of a high-ranking Communist Party official under Stalin, Bonner spent her early years in relative affluence. In 1937, when Bonner was 14, her father was arrested and executed. Her mother spent a decade in a labor camp for being the wife of a traitor to the motherland. "I was predestined to be the girl who sent food parcels to those women who found themselves in so-called correctional camps," Bonner says. "Life itself put me on this road."
She retrieves a volume filled with the names of prisoners in the camp where her mother was held. On the title page she has penciled the names of 20 friends of her mother or mothers of her friends culled from its listings. "I have not finished reading the book," she says. She remembers these years in a memoir of her childhood, "Mothers and Daughters," published in 1992.
Bonner served as a nurse in World War II and suffered a serious eye injury. After the war, she entered medical school, married a classmate, and had two children. She and her husband separated in 1965, and in 1972 she married Sakharov.
Asked what attracted her to Sakharov, she says: "It wasn't love at first sight." Asked what propelled friendship to become romance, she hesitates.
"It's very hard to speak about that. In the attitude toward him in my circle of friends there was tremendous reverence and very deep respect that intuitively everyone felt. At the same time, I was struck by what you could call an extreme loneliness on a human level," she says.
"One of the most memorable and deeply personal moments was a moment when Sakharov started showing me the photographs where he was photographed with a famous physicist who was head of the entire atomic project in the Soviet Union. I said, 'I really dislike you in these photographs.' He seemed like one of those schoolboys who would be extremely full of himself. Even though I did not explain to him what I didn't like, he understood very well what I meant and he said something very important. 'All these valences' " - using the scientific term - " 'are no longer free with me.' These desires that he may have had at the time were no longer there. Somehow I believed him, and after that sentence I trusted him."
A Prize and exile
In 1975, the Nobel Committee, praising Sakharov as "one of the great champions of human rights in our age," recognized him for his "struggle for human rights, for disarmament, and for cooperation between all nations." Soviet officials prevented him from traveling to Oslo, so Bonner, who was in Europe getting treatment for her eye, accepted the Peace Prize for him. Her children, daughter Yankelevich and son Alexey Semyonov, emigrated to Massachusetts in the late 1970s because of fears for their safety. Yankelevich, 57, resides in the North End and directs the Sakharov Program on Human Rights at Harvard. Semyonov, 51, a software analyst, now lives in Virginia.
Soviet authorities exiled Sakharov to the Russian city of Gorky in 1980. For four years, until she herself was also exiled to Gorky for "anti-Soviet agitation," Bonner traveled between Gorky and Moscow and became her husband's link to the outside world. In Gorky, under the constant watch of the KGB, they were isolated and harassed, often communicating by pen and paper because their quarters were bugged.
Bonner's health deteriorated, but Soviet officials refused her request to have her ailing heart treated in the West. Finally, after Sakharov staged three lengthy hunger strikes, she came to Boston in 1985 for sextuple bypass surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. While here she wrote "Alone Together," a chronicle of the couple's years in Gorky. Sakharov and Bonner were freed in 1986 with a personal phone call from reform-minded president Mikhail Gorbachev.
Bonner approaches her birthday fearful for the future of the Sakharov Program, which brings fellows from Russia to Harvard and whose federal grant, Yankelevich says, runs out this year. "The end of the program would signal to her that there is no place in this world for Sakharov's legacy," Yankelevich says. Among those from whom Bonner has tried, without success, to secure financial backing is Google founder and Soviet emigre Sergey Brin. Through a Google spokesman, Brin declined to comment.
"Sakharov has done so much for people to freely leave the Soviet Union," Bonner says, "and they still don't help the Sakharov program. So I really have nothing to be happy about."
Despite all the hardship she endured there, Bonner still yearns for Russia. "I do not feel this is home," she says. Looking back on her long life, she quotes Alexander Pushkin's classic "Eugene Onegin," a novel in verse that she memorized during World War II.
"In this poem there are such verses. 'Blessed is he who was young at the young age, and blessed is he who matured at the right time. And blessed be he who was able to endure the coldness of life,' " Bonner says. " 'Blessed be he of whom they always said he was a good person.' Sometimes people say I am a good person as well. I want to add that this doesn't concern me. I never think whether people think I'm good or bad."
Reaching for another literary source to describe her outlook at 85, Bonner turns to Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," which she read in translation in Soviet Russia.
"Give me strength to change what I can change," she paraphrases Vonnegut's use of the "Serenity Prayer" made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous. "And give me strength to bear what I think is horrible but which I cannot change."'
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