By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Natan Sharansky has been a computer scientist, a chess
player, a refusenik, a dissident, a political prisoner, a party leader, a
government minister, a nonprofit executive, and a bestselling author. He never
expected to be a school counselor.
But the coronavirus dashes expectations. In early March,
when the virus began to appear in Jewish communities outside New York City,
Sharansky found himself online, in an unaccustomed position. He began to share
with students and parents whose schools were closed how he had coped during
years in confinement.
“At first, it seemed absurd, even obscene,” Sharansky
writes in his latest book, Never Alone, coauthored with the historian
Gil Troy. “How could my experience of playing chess in my head in my punishment
cell compare to being cooped up in gadget-filled homes wired to the internet —
with computer chess — especially because this isolation is imposed to protect
people, not break them?”
What Sharansky realized is that the costs of lockdowns do
not depend on the reasons behind them. The sudden and seemingly arbitrary
interruption of individual plans, movements, and relationships causes
psychological harm. Sharansky recorded a brief YouTube video for the Jewish
Agency — you can watch it here
— offering his five tips for quarantine. Recognize the importance of your
choices and behavior, Sharansky advised. Understand that some things are beyond
your control. Keep laughing. Enjoy your hobbies. Consider yourself part of a
larger cause.
“Surprisingly,” Sharansky writes, “this short clip went
viral, reaching so many people all over the world within a few days that it
made me wonder why even bother writing this book.” His reaction was another
example of his droll and often self-deprecating wit. The video, however helpful
it may be, does not match the power and wisdom of Never Alone. Part
autobiography, part meditation on Jewish community, the book ties together the
themes of Sharansky’s earlier work, from his prison memoir, Fear No Evil
(1988), to his defense of cultural particularity, Defending Identity
(2008). It is a moving story of emancipation and connection, of freedom and
meaning.
Sharansky was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian city of
Stalino. His given name was Anatoly. His parents were educated professionals
who downplayed their Jewish identity. They did not want to risk political and
social reprisal. “The only real Jewish experience I had was facing
anti-Semitism,” he writes. The precocious youth spent his early years playing
chess. He learned to navigate a Soviet system that maintained its rule through
fear. He became captive to doublethink. He repeated official lies and myths not
because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the safe thing to do.
Sharansky enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Physics and
Technology. “I dived into the republic of science,” he writes. “This world
seemed insulated from the doublethink I had mastered at home.” Israel’s victory
in the Six-Day War prompted him to discover his heritage. “Realizing how little
I knew about this country that so many people were now asking about made me
hungry to learn more.”
Sharansky studied representations of Biblical scenes
hanging from the walls of Moscow’s galleries. He came across a samizdat
copy of Leon Uris’s Exodus, a potboiler historical fiction that
describes Israel’s founding. “It drew me into Jewish history, and Israel’s
history, through my Russian roots. It helped me see myself as part of the
story.”
The following year the Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei
Sakharov wrote his “Reflections
on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” Sakharov
argued for freedom of inquiry. He demanded the protection of human rights.
“Sakharov was warning that life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either
you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no
matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha,” Sharansky writes.
“Ultimately, I couldn’t escape myself or my conscience.”
Inspired by Sakharov, Sharansky applied for a visa to
immigrate to Israel in 1973. He was rejected. He was unable to leave the Soviet
Union. That made him a refusenik. “My life as a doublethinker, which I had
consciously begun at age five the day Stalin died, was over. The professional
world I had built for myself, my castle of science, collapsed instantly. Now, I
could say what I thought, do what I said, and say what I did.”
The twin concerns of Sharansky’s life — identity and
freedom — became fused. “Democracy — a free life in a free society — is
essential because it satisfies a human yearning to choose one’s path, to pursue
one’s goals,” he wrote in Defending Identity. “It broadens possibilities
and provides opportunity for self-advancement. Identity, a life of commitment,
is essential because it satisfies a human longing to become part of something
bigger than oneself. It adds layers of meaning to our lives and deepens the
human experience.” Freedom offers choice. Identity provides direction.
It would be a while before Sharansky could enjoy his own
freedom. By 1975, he was working with Sakharov. The next year he formed the
Moscow Helsinki Group to pressure the Soviets to live up to the commitments
they had made in basket three of the Helsinki Accords. The KGB arrested him in
1977. “I spent the next nine years in prison and labor camp,” he wrote in Fear
No Evil, “mainly on a special disciplinary regime, including more than 400
days in punishment cells, and more than 200 days on hunger strikes.”
In prison he played chess games in his head. “I always
won.” He would tease the guards with anti-Soviet jokes. He was not afraid. What
could they do — put him in jail? He communicated with his fellow inmates
through Morse code. They would drain the toilets and speak to one another
through pipes. He read Soviet propaganda esoterically, between the lines. He
figured out what was actually going on by determining what the authorities had
omitted.
Sharansky was in prison when he heard that President
Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” The year was 1983.
Reagan had uttered the famous — and controversial — words in a speech to the
National Association of Evangelicals. “It was one of the most important,
freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it,” Sharansky said
in a 2004 interview. “For us, that was the moment that really marked the end
for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never,
ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin’s ‘Great October Bolshevik
Revolution’ and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution —
Reagan’s Revolution.”
Sharansky and his wife Avital had been apart since her
immigration to Israel the day after they married in 1974. Throughout his
imprisonment she worked tirelessly on his behalf, and on behalf of other
refuseniks and dissidents. She found an ally in Israel’s U.N. ambassador,
Benjamin Netanyahu. She met with Reagan, who began asking Soviet leaders to
release Sharansky. Gorbachev freed him on February 11, 1986. He was reunited
with Avital in Frankfurt Airport. They flew to Israel. “‘It was just one long
day,’ Avital sighed later that night, in our new home in Jerusalem. ‘I arrived
in Israel in the morning. You arrived in the evening. It was just one very,
very long day in between.’”
He became Natan. He entered Israeli politics. He helped
resettle one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. He opposed the
Oslo peace accords. He resigned from Ariel Sharon’s government over the policy
of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. His work as an activist was
devoted to building what Reagan had described as “the infrastructure of
democracy.” Sharansky distinguished between free societies and fear societies.
“The structural elements that enable democratic societies to respect human
rights — independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, a freely elected
government, meaningful opposition parties, not to mention human rights
organizations — were all glaringly absent in fear societies,” he wrote in The
Case for Democracy (2004).
Sharansky’s career resists summary. It offers lessons in
courage, freedom, justice, belonging, and hope. What makes his example
especially relevant is his insistence that freedom and identity, liberty and
tribe, are not just compatible but codependent. “To have a full, interesting,
meaningful life,” he writes in Never Alone, “you have to figure out how
to be connected enough to defend your freedom and free enough to protect your
identity.” The same puzzle confronts nations. “Benefiting from the best of
liberalism and the best of nationalism, together we can champion the joint
mission to belong and to be free as both central to human happiness.”
Governments establish the conditions of liberty. But
identity must come from below. The most positive and enduring sources of
identity are not found in politics. They are located in civil society. The
institutions of family, faith, and community tell us who we are, what we want,
where we should turn.
People are antecedent to government. And they must remain
so, if democracy is to survive. This is the unforgettable teaching of Natan
Sharansky, hero and champion of freedom.
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