Corruption and a poor economy have created almost "death-camp"-like conditions in Russia's jails and equally poor conditions on its streets, human rights activist and author Elena Bonner told a crowd of 100 people in Rockefeller Center yesterday afternoon.
Bonner, the widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, spoke through an interpreter -- her daughter, Tatiana.
She said conditions in Russia's prisons and detention centers, where suspects can await trial for two to three years, "can be compared just with the Nazi death camps except that the Nazis used gas."
In Soviet Russia, Bonner faced repression and human rights abuses, but she said those "only seem a drop in the ocean of today's problems," including meager salaries and impoverished education, healthcare and criminal justice systems.
Bonner's parents were imprisoned as traitors of the state when she was only 14. Her father was executed in 1938 and her mother was confined until 1954.
Bonner was exiled in 1984 for being married to Sakharov, who spoke out against Soviet totalitarianism and the Cold War.
Many social problems have seen little or no improvement since Russia's democratization, she said. Some problems, such as an increased crime rate, massive poverty and conditions in jails, nursing homes and orphanages, have become worse.
Prisoners and those awaiting trial often sleep and sit in shifts, due to lack of space that limits each prisoner to an average one square meter of space. The number of homeless children are equal with numbers from the 1920s, when the country was fighting a civil war.
All of these problems have been only exacerbated by the "insanely-started" war in Chechnya, Bonner said.
New committees and legislation have been created, but Bonner said she had "serious doubts that the changes that will take place will actually be for the benefit of human rights."
"Our society in the Soviet time was penetrated by lies, and unfortunately it remains penetrated by lies," Bonner said.
Bonner likened last year's national elections to "a sale and purchase agreement."
"The president was acquired and purchased for the society," she said.
But Bonner said the country has made much progress from the "total oppression and horror" of Soviet Russia in legislation which has made freedom of movement and information a reality.
Citizens were formerly required to register their legal residence to the government. They now have the freedom, if not the financial ability, to move freely, she said.
There is also little limitation on the freedom of information in Russia today, she said. "The Russian mass media has not only achieved freedom of information equal to the free world, but [it has] gone even farther."
Bonner lauded groups such as Physicians Without Borders, Amnesty International and the International League for Human Rights for their continued efforts in alleviating some of Russia's problems.
"Today's human rights work is not the heroic, romantic work of the 1970s," Bonner said. "It is now an everyday, simple work [whose] purpose is to educate, to protect, to defend."
Bonner met Sakharov in 1970 when they were both attending a trial of human rights activists in Kaluga.
Sakharov is known as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, but was expelled from the Soviet weapons-building program for publishing dissident articles.
After her marriage to Sakharov, Bonner devoted herself to their struggle for human rights.
She traveled to Stockholm to accept Sakharov's Nobel Peace Prize when he was not permitted to leave the country in 1975. After Sakharov was exiled to Gorky in 1980, Bonner served as his link to Moscow and the West, until she was also exiled.
In 1986, they were allowed to return to Moscow. Sakharov served in many elected and appointed posts, including that of national ombudsman for fellow citizens who had suffered official abuse. He died in 1989 of heart failure after completing a draft of a new constitution for the Soviet Union.
Since her husband's death, Bonner has continued to campaign for democracy and human rights in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. She writes for the Russian and American press and is the author of two books, "Alone Together," which is about the years spent in exile with Sakharov, and "Mothers and Daughters," a memoir of her childhood in Stalinist Russia.
Bonner's speech, titled "Human Rights and Democracy in Russia Today," was sponsored by the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and the Russian department.
