Ruth Bonner Born: Soviet Activist Survives Stalin's Purge

Ruth Bonner was a committed Soviet Communist who worked as a party organizer in the 1920s and 1930s, only to be arrested during Stalin's Great Purge and sentenced to 8 years in a labor camp. Her daughter Elena Bonner went on to marry physicist Andrei Sakharov and became a prominent Soviet dissident. Born in 1900 in Siberia, Ruth Bonner came of age during the Russian Revolution and committed herself entirely to the Bolshevik cause. She worked as a Communist Party organizer in Central Asia and later in Leningrad, where she married Gevork Alikhanov, an Armenian Bolshevik official. Their daughter Elena was born in 1923. In 1937, during the peak of Stalin's Great Purge, Ruth's husband was arrested, accused of being an enemy of the people, and executed. Ruth was arrested shortly afterward and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag system. She served her sentence in camps in Kazakhstan, separated from her children, who were raised by relatives. Her experience of the camps, where she worked in brutal conditions alongside millions of other political prisoners, shattered her faith in the Soviet system she had helped build. After her release, she lived under restrictions that prevented her from returning to Leningrad for years. Her daughter Elena, deeply affected by her parents' fate, became a doctor and then a human rights activist. Elena's marriage to Andrei Sakharov in 1972 created the Soviet Union's most prominent dissident couple, and Ruth lived to see her daughter carry on a different kind of revolutionary commitment, this time against the system Ruth had once believed in. Ruth died in 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall fell.