Ruth Bonner; Imprisoned by Stalin, Mother-in-Law of Dissident Sakharov

Ruth Bonner, a former labor camp inmate who became the mother-in-law of human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov, has died at age 87, her daughter said Monday.

Yelena Bonner said her ailing mother, whose husband was shot in the purges of the Stalin era, suffered a stroke Friday night in their Moscow apartment.

Mrs. Bonner had spent 17 years in Soviet prisons and internal exile under the dictatorship of Josef V. Stalin. She left for the United States in 1980 to be with her grandchildren, and returned to Moscow on June 6.

A member of the Communist Party, she married an official of the Armenian party who was arrested in 1937, at the height of the purges carried out under Stalin in which millions perished. She was arrested as the wife of an “enemy of the people” and spent eight years in prison camps, making bricks, digging canals in Kazakhstan with shovels as the only tools, and building factories.

In 1971, her daughter Yelena married Sakharov, one of the founders of the Soviet hydrogen bomb who became a driving force behind the dissident movement of the 1970s.