Natan Sharansky has been a hero to many throughout the world since the 1970s. Then, he was Anatoly Shcharansky. He spent nine years in the Soviet gulag. He wrote one of the greatest prison memoirs ever penned: Fear No Evil. He has gone on to do much more.
Sharansky is the guest on my latest Q&A podcast: here. We talk about Russian political prisoners, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza — his successors, in a way. Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, is now having to do what Sharansky’s wife, Avital, did so well: campaign for her husband, speak for her husband, keep the name of her husband alive (and keep him alive, in the bargain).
Over the years, Sharansky has said, “The biggest mistake the KGB made was letting Avital out of the country.”
In our podcast, we also talk, at length, about the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. Sharansky has many interesting and insightful things to say, from long observation and experience.
I’ve been poking into the past, as well as examining the present. In October 1982, President Reagan wrote a letter to the Soviet chief, Brezhnev, about Shcharansky. See it here.
In May 1986, Sharansky was finally able to meet with Reagan, in the Oval Office. Afterward, Sharansky told the press, “He is the president who can make the Soviet Union open the gates.” During that same visit to Washington, Congress presented both Sharanskys — Natan and Avital — with gold medals.
Twenty years later, in 2006, President George W. Bush awarded Natan Sharansky the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The award, said Bush, was for a “life of courage and conviction.”
In 2008, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation gave Sharansky its Freedom Award. The recipient spoke of the moment when he and his fellow zeks — prisoners — learned that Reagan had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” This thrilled the prisoners, because here was a leader, in the Free World, who was telling the blunt truth.
Reagan, said Sharansky in 2008, understood something very important: the connection between a dictatorship’s treatment of people under its control and the security of the rest of the world. “Those who don’t respect the rights of their own people,” said Sharansky, “will never respect their neighbors.”
That was true of the Kremlin in Soviet times; it is true of the Kremlin now.
To listen to Natan Sharansky on Russia today — and on the Ukraine war — is a bracing and clarifying experience. Again, our podcast is here.