Andrei Sakharov, the great nuclear physicist and human-rights campaigner, had been dead for two years by the time I came to his Moscow apartment in the early summer of 1991. Elena Bonner, his widow, was there, still defiantly at war with the faceless foe that had slaughtered her family, exiled her and her husband, slandered her Jewish name, and lied about it all. Now that she has died at eighty-eight, a dissident to the end, I find the memory of my brief encounter with her almost unbearably poignant.
Bonner had come from more humble beginnings. She was the daughter of a Jewish mother and an Armenian father; both were arrested at the height of Stalin's purges in 1937. Her father was executed; her mother endured 18 years in the gulag. A pediatrician by training, Bonner served as a military nurse in World War II. She met Sakharov in 1970, when she had quit the Communist Party and became involved in the battle against Soviet totalitarianism. By the time I met her, she was nearly blind and suffering from heart disease. She greeted me matter-of-factly, in her heavy smoker's voice: "You have 25 minutes!" But she softened when I presented her a bottle of perfume. "I will put it under the Christmas tree on Human Rights Day."
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