The Whisperers

*She left the Party as soon as Tania and her brother Aleksei emigrated to the USA – at the height of the Kremlin’s campaign against Elena Bonner and her second husband Andrei Sakharov – in 1978. Elena Bonner had joined the Party in 1956. She stopped paying her Party dues after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but out of fear for the welfare of her grandchildren, Ruth Bonner secretly went on paying them for her until 1972 (interview with Elena Bonner, Boston, November 2006).