biography
| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1923– )
|
| biography:
| Civil rights campaigner, born in Moscow, Russia. After the arrest of her parents in Stalin's ‘great purge’ of 1937, she was brought up in Leningrad by her grandmother. She joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1965, but became disillusioned after the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968) and drifted into dissident activities. She married Andrei Sakharov in 1971 and resigned from the party a year later. During the next 14 years she and her husband led the Soviet dissident movement. Following a KGB crackdown, Sakharov was banished to internal exile in Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod) in 1980, and Bonner suffered a similar fate in 1984. The couple were finally released in 1986 by the Gorbachev administration, and remained prominent campaigners for greater democratization. |
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