Ruth Bonner

Ruf Grigorievna Bonner (; 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's Great Purge. She was the mother of the human rights activist Yelena Bonner and the mother-in-law of physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. Biography Bonner was born in 1900 into a Russian Jewish family in Siberia. 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 committee of Moscow while her second husband, Gevork Alikhanyan, aka Georgy Alikhanov, was a director at the Comintern. As part of Stalin's mass purges in 1937, her husband was arrested on charges of espionage and sentenced to death.