Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova was an influential noblewoman, a major figure of the Russian Enlightenment and a close friend of Empress Catherine the Great. She was part of the coup d'état that placed Catherine on the throne, the first woman in the world to head a national academy of sciences, the first woman in Europe to hold a government office and the president of the Russian Academy, which she helped found. She also published prolifically, with original and translated works on many subjects, and was invited by Benjamin Franklin to become the first female member of the American Philosophical Society.
Eleazar Moiseevich Meletinskii was a Russian scholar famous for his seminal studies of folklore, literature, philology and the history and theory of narrative; he was one of the major figures of Russian academia in those fields.
Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the physicist Andrei Sakharov. During her decades as a dissident, Bonner was noted for her characteristic blunt honesty and courage.
Yelena Andreyevna Hahn von Rottenstern (née Fadeyeva) was a Russian writer known for her contributions to the literary journals Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya and Otechestvennye Zapiski. In addition to her literary works, she is known as the mother of Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy.
Yelena Abdulaevna Khanga, also transliterated as Elena Hanga, is a Russian journalist who was raised in Moscow, USSR, and came to the United States in 1990 to write Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family: 1865–1992. Khanga divides her time between New York City and Moscow.
Yelena Maglevannaya is a Russian free-lance journalist for the newspaper Svobodnoye Slovo, Free Speech, in Volgograd. She requested a political asylum in Finland in May 2009. Maglevannaya has focused on cases of persecution against Chechens.
Yelena Dmitrievna Polenova was a Russian painter and graphic artist in the Art Nouveau style. She was one of the first illustrators of children's books in Russia. Her brother was the landscape painter Vasily Polenov.
