MOSCOW, June 19 (Reuters) - Yelena Bonner, a prominent human rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov, has died at the age of 88, Russian media reported on Sunday.
A Soviet-era dissident, Bonner continued to advocate rights and democracy in post-communist Russia and became a critic of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Bonner died on Saturday in Boston, Massachusetts, where she had lived in recent years, RIA news agency cited her daughter Tatyana Yankelevich as saying in a statement.
It did not give the cause of death.
Born in Soviet Turkmenistan on Feb. 15, 1923, to parents who were persecuted under Soviet leader Josef Stalin, Bonner served as a nurse in World War Two and was later ejected from medical school during a Stalin-era campaign against Jews.
In 1972 she married Sakharov, a nuclear physicist who helped to develop the Soviet atom bomb but later used his prominence to speak out for peace and human rights. She represented him at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in 1975.
A member of the Soviet dissident movement that developed in the 1960s, Bonner went with Sakharov when he was sent into internal exile in Gorki, now Nizhny Novgorod, in 1980 after speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
She was convicted by a court there of defaming Soviet society and the state.
Sakharov and Bonner returned to Moscow in 1986, as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was ushering in his policies of openness and reforms. Sakharov died in December 1989, two years before the Soviet Union fell apart.
Bonner was a member of a state human rights commission under Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, but quit in protest over the war that began when Yeltsin sent troops into Chechnya to fight separatist rebels.
Late last year, Bonner signed a petition calling for the resignation of Putin, who critics say has rolled back democratic gains of the Yeltsin era since he became president in 2000 and subsequently prime minister.
The statement from Bonner's daughter said her funeral would be held on Tuesday in Massachusetts and that, in accordance with her wishes, she would be cremated and her ashes interred at a Moscow cemetery beside her husband, mother and brother. (Reporting by Steve Gutterman; editing by David Stamp)
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