Soviet Union

BOSTON AND the entire world lost a true hero with the death this weekend of Elena Bonner, an ardent champion of freedom and human rights in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia, who was married to the great Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Bonner, 88, who was partly Jewish and partly Armenian, had lived through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, when both of her parents were arrested by the Soviet secret police. Her father was shot, and her mother was sent to the gulag for eight years.

WASHINGTON - George Cowan, a pioneer in nuclear chemistry, a patron of the arts, and a persuasive, visionary, and enterprising figure who helped solve problems in areas from finance to foreign affairs, died April 20 at his home in Los Alamos, N.M. He was 92. Friends said his death followed a fall, the Associated Press reported. After playing an important role in the development of the atomic bomb, Dr. Cowan spent years as one of the key figures at the nuclear research center at Los Alamos, where the bomb had been built.

The first time Elena Bonner arrived in Boston, she was greeted by three police cars, the mayor of Newton, and a swarm of TV crews, all clamoring to meet the famous human rights advocate. “A girl on the street said, ‘When my grandmother comes to visit, she certainly doesn’t get that kind of attention,’ ’’ said Alexander Gessen of Falmouth, who knew Dr. Bonner for more than 30 years. “That goes to show how special she was.’’ Dr. Bonner, a beacon of freedom in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, an advocate for democracy in Russia in the past decade, and...

MOSCOW — Gennady Yanayev, a leader of the abortive 1991 Soviet coup who briefly declared himself president replacing Mikhail Gorbachev, has died at age 73, Russia’s Communist Party announced. In one of the indelible images of the putsch that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Yanayev’s hands shook visibly as he announced that he was taking over as president. He was later quoted by a newspaper as saying he was drunk when he signed the decree elevating himself from the vice presidency.

MOSCOW - Vyacheslav Ivankov, a Russian crime boss who spent nearly 10 years in a US prison, died yesterday in a Moscow hospital, two months after being shot several times coming out of a restaurant. He was 69. His death was announced by the main federal investigative agency, which said the cause had not been established. Mr. Ivankov underwent several operations since the shooting but was never well enough to leave the hospital, state news agency RIA Novosti said. After spending 10 years in a Soviet prison for running a ring of...

Franklin Roosevelt's dozen years as president saw him battle the Great Depression, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany. In Frank Costigliola's view, Roosevelt was necessary for one more imposing task: preventing the Cold War. The tragedy was that FDR did not live long enough to complete it. Costigliola, a historian at the University of Connecticut, maintains in his new book that Roosevelt's death in April 1945 eliminated the one man who could have...

MOSCOW - Gevork Vartanian, a former Soviet intelligence agent who helped derail a Nazi plot to assassinate allied leaders at a 1943 conference in Tehran, has died. He was 87. Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, a top KGB successor agency, said Mr. Vartanian died of an unspecified illness Tuesday. President Dmitry Medvedev sent condolences to Mr. Vartanian's widow, Goar, who worked with him on intelligence missions abroad and helped cement their fame as a legendary Russian spy couple.

NEW YORK - Vasily Alekseyev, the Soviet weight lifter who won two Olympic gold medals and set 80 world records, reigning as the so-called world's strongest man in the 1970s, died Friday at a heart clinic in Badenhausen, Germany. He was 69. His death was announced by the Russian Weightlifting Federation, which said that Mr. Alekseyev, who lived in the western Russian city of Shakhty, had been treated at the clinic since early this month. At a time when the Soviet Union and Eastern European nations dominated international weight lifting, Mr. Alekseyev was the sport's...

MOSCOW -- Tikhon Khrennikov, who headed the Soviet Union of Composers for four decades and denounced Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev as decadent, died Tuesday in his home in Moscow. He was 94. Mr. Khrennikov was a favorite of several Soviet regimes, earning top Communist Party awards for numerous symphonies, operas, and songs that glorified the Soviet Union. In 1948, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin appointed him to head the Union of Composers, a position he held until the Soviet collapse in 1991.

NEW YORK - Born in a Japanese fishing village just after his refugee family landed there in a desperate 1919 escape from Russia's Bolshevik revolution, Roy Essoyan arrived in the Soviet Union nearly four decades later as an American journalist. But after three years of hobnobbing with Premier Nikita Khrushchev and other communist leaders, the Associated Press reporter's Cold War adventure ended abruptly. In 1958, he was expelled for reporting that a serious breach had developed between the USSR and Mao Zedong's China.

► Today is Friday, Feb. 17, the 48th day of 2012. There are 318 days left in the year. ► Today's birthdays: Actor Hal Holbrook is 87. Mystery writer Ruth Rendell is 82. Singer Bobby Lewis is 79. Actor-comedian Barry Humphries (a.k.a. "Dame Edna") is 78. Country singer-songwriter Johnny Bush is 77. Actress Christina Pickles is 77. Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown is 76. Actress Mary Ann Mobley is 73. Actress Brenda Fricker is 67. Actress Rene Russo is 58. Actor Richard Karn is 56. Actor Lou Diamond Phillips is 50. Basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan is 49. Actor-comedian Larry, the Cable...

As an entrepreneur and management consultant with clients in the United States and abroad, Benjamin S. Cole had already paid visits to Russia when he traveled there in 1993, about two years after the Soviet Union formally dissolved. "It was the time when the old system in Russia collapsed and the new one just started," Arkady Volozh - chief executive and cofounder of Yandex, the dominant Internet search engine in Russia - wrote in an e-mail. Volozh said he and his associates "were a group of young people, all under 30 with good education and a lot of ambitions, but no expertise in...

WASHINGTON - Richard E. Snyder, a Foreign Service officer who as a senior consul in Moscow handled the attempted defection of future presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to the Soviet Union, died Jan. 9 at a health care facility in Georgetown, Ky. He was 92. He had Alzheimer's disease, said his daughter Dianne. Mr. Snyder served as a Japanese and Russian specialist in the State Department from 1950 to 1970. He spent much of his career serving in posts across Japan, and he helped prepare for the 1972 transfer of the Ryukyu Islands from the United States...

WASHINGTON - Hans Heymann Jr., an economist who advised three US presidents on the Soviet Union and the Vietnam War - subjects he knew intimately as a key contributor to the top-secret history of the war known as the Pentagon Papers - died Jan. 10 at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington at 91. He had complications from heart disease, said his daughter Kendra Sagoff. Mr. Heymann began his career in 1950 as an analyst at the Rand Corp., a government contractor and think tank, and later served as a senior economics officer at the CIA and as a...

MOSCOW - Gevork Vartanian, a former Soviet intelligence agent who helped derail a Nazi plot to assassinate allied leaders at a 1943 conference in Tehran, has died. He was 87. Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, a top KGB successor agency, said Mr. Vartanian died of an unspecified illness Tuesday. President Dmitry Medvedev sent condolences to Mr. Vartanian's widow, Goar, who worked with him on intelligence missions abroad and helped cement their fame as a legendary Russian spy couple.

MOSCOW — Mikhail Gorbachev was told he would be awarded Russia’s highest medal yesterday, a belated tribute from the homeland where many blame him for the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. President Dmitry Medvedev told Gorbachev that he would be awarded the Order of St. Andrew for his service as the last Soviet leader. Medvedev said leading the Soviet Union during a “very complex, dramatic period’’ was a tough job. “It can be assessed differently, but it was a heavy load,’’ Medvedev said, adding that he will invite Gorbachev to the Kremlin to give him the award.

SKRUNDA, Latvia - Latvia sold a deserted town built around a Soviet-era radar station to a Russian investor who bid $3.1 million at an unusual auction yesterday, officials said. The town formerly known as Skrunda-1 housed about 5,000 people during the Cold War. It was abandoned over a decade ago after the Russian military withdrew from Latvia following the Soviet collapse. A representative of a Russian investor won the bidding contest in Latvia’s capital, Riga, with an offer of $3.1 million, said Anete Fridensteina-Bridina, a...

DECADES BEFORE Google Earth, a group of engineers in Connecticut built the first high-resolution spy satellite, a top-secret wonder that produced detailed photos of Soviet missiles, submarines, and air bases. Recently declassified, the program ranked among the most astonishing technological feats of the Cold War. It's fitting that the Pentagon is finally disclosing the program while many of the engineers who built the devices at Perkin-Elmer Corp. are still alive to enjoy public recognition at last.

Franklin Roosevelt's dozen years as president saw him battle the Great Depression, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany. In Frank Costigliola's view, Roosevelt was necessary for one more imposing task: preventing the Cold War. The tragedy was that FDR did not live long enough to complete it. Costigliola, a historian at the University of Connecticut, maintains in his new book that Roosevelt's death in April 1945 eliminated the one man who could have...