LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Andrei Sakharov: Yelena Bonner
built 235 days ago
In contrast, Andrei Sakharov was, like all saintly individuals, a man of extraordinary compassion, good will and gentleness. His moral outrage at the needless casualties caused by a 1962 atmospheric test moved him to tears, and on to the path of political dissent. At the moment his wife, Elena Bonner, was reading his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm (Sakharov was denied an exit visa), Sakharov attended, at great risk, the trial of the dissident, Sergei Kovalev, who later said of Sakharov, "he was tormented by every arrest and every trial [of the dissidents]. That's really true. This was perhaps his most blessed and most marvelous gift -- to be able to feel someone else's pain."
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In December 1979, Sakharov spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The following month the Soviet government stripped him of his honours and exiled him to the closed city of Gorky. His wife, Yelena Bonner, a human-rights activist, was ... sent into exile.
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The Soviet government reacted with extreme irritation and prevented Sakharov from leaving the country to attend the Nobel ceremony in Oslo. Sakharov's Nobel lecture, “Peace, Progress, and Human Rights,” was delivered by Yelena G. Bonner, a human rights activist whom he had married in 1972. Sakharov and Bonner continued to speak out against Soviet political repression at home and hostile relations abroad, for which Sakharov was isolated and became the target of official censure and harassment. In January 1980 the Soviet government stripped him of his honours and exiled him to the closed city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) to silence him following his open denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and his call for a worldwide boycott of the coming Olympic Games in Moscow. In 1984 Bonner was convicted of anti-Soviet activities and was likewise confined to Gorky.
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Yelena Bonner