Yelena Bonner, one of the most renowned and respected Soviet-era dissidents, passed away on Saturday. She was 88 and died of heart failure in Boston, where her children live, and her ashes will be buried in Moscow alongside her husband, Nobel Prize winner and fellow dissident Andrei Sakharov.

Bonner lived a rich and difficult life, devoting her energy to fighting the Soviet regime after losing her father to Stalin’s repressions and growing up while her mother served time in the Gulag. She accompanied Sakharov, the father of Russia’s nuclear bomb, after he was sent into internal exile in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) after his increasing criticism of the regime. She was arrested in 1984 and sent to exile in Gorky. Their apartment there has been turned into a museum, one of the most haunting and informative in all of Russia.

Sakharov died in 1989 and Bonner kept up her work, writing memoirs and providing support to the opposition that appeared in Russia after the rise of Vladimir Putin at the turn of the century. Putin has yet to comment on her death, but President Dmitry Medvedev, in a meeting with his human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, expressed his condolences.

US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said Bonner was "an extraordinary voice among human rights defenders in the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation."

Read the Guardian’s obituary here, as well as a report from her adopted town’s paper, The Boston Globe. New Yorker editor David Remnick, a former Washington Post bureau chief in Moscow, has written a touching remembrance. Russian magazine Snob has re-issued their last interview with Bonner, along with some powerful photographs.