A riveting interview with Natan Sharansky on the murder of Alexei Navalny

On her Substack, which she shares with Marc Thiessen, Danielle Pletka has posted a riveting interview with former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, who knew exactly what top Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was going through before his suspicious death a few days ago in an Arctic Gulag prison.

It turns out the two knew each other, and understood each other as only people with such experience can, and they met many times and corresponded a lot.

She begins with:

There are people who believe that Putin timed the murder of Aleksei Navalny to happen during the Munich Security Conference, when global leaders were gathered around to talk about international security. They’ll see, one can imagine him thinking, who’s the boss. Maybe. But in another way, it seems clear that Navalny has gone from being a man to being a symbol, a movement… something greater. And while Putin can arrest those who leave flowers, hide his body, fiddle the news, he can’t beat this ephemeral thing — Navalny’s spirit of freedom. Putin will, sooner or late, lose.

In considering whom to talk to about Navalny, Marc and I couldn’t think of a better person than Natan Sharansky. As a Soviet refusenik, he was a hero to both of us, and to the world. He had been in the Soviet gulag, and lived to tell. In 1978, Sharansky was convicted of treason and spying on behalf of the United States, and was sentenced to thirteen years imprisonment in a Siberian forced labor camp. After his liberation, he moved to Israel, and was elected to the Knesset. In June 2009, he was elected and sworn in as Chairman of The Jewish Agency for Israel, a post he still holds.

Incredibly, when confined to solitary, Navalny was allowed to bring a copy of Sharansky’s memoir, Fear No Evil, with him. Thus began a short correspondence which Natan tells us about in the podcast.

Sharansky speaks of the fierce determination it takes to be a Russian or Soviet dissident, and how one’s own safety isn’t the important thing anymore, only that freedom will come. He explains how Putin can kill a person and often does, bujt that burning desire for freedom amounts to a place that Putin can’t reach.

Here is one excerpt:

You knew Alexei Navalny before his death. Talk a little about your letters with him?

NS: First I have to correct you. It was wrong to say death. It was murder. Murder of Navalny by President Putin. Look, of course I followed Navalny’s career and his spectacular, I would say, unmasking of KGB’s attempt to poison him with a lot of excitement and even admiration, even envy because he really succeeded to stage such a great theater. But the stage of this theater was all the world, and the prize would be his life. But it was really very exciting to see a person with such courage and model of clarity and such great leadership. Then he went to prison, and he went to Moscow. I received some very strange, bewildering, I would say, question of some British journalist. She said, “Explain to me, he doesn’t understand what we all understand? He doesn’t understand that he will be arrested at the airport?”

I really became irritated and said that, “I think you don’t understand what he’s doing. That if his struggle was for his own survival, he would never start doing the things that he’s doing. His struggle is for the future of his people, and he will not only show the nature of this regime to his people, he also says to his people, ‘You should not be afraid, scared. I’m not scared. I’m not afraid to deal with this,” and so we also should not be afraid.” That’s why he felt that his place is there. That’s like natural continuation of his struggle. Of course he was arrested, and then I really was excited to receive a letter from him through his lawyer. His lawyer found some rabbi in Israel that knew me, and I was really surprised by the power of the internet that in one day, the day that he gave it to his lawyer in prison, it already reached me in Jerusalem.

Then I answered, and then he wrote another letter which he was writing at the very last moment before he went again to punishment cell. I of course immediately answered, and that’s it. After this, communication became more difficult. His lawyer found himself in prison, and that was it. But the main thing is that I immediately felt like this kindred feeling or the free person who enjoys being free the most hard conditions. He wrote being very intrigued or in spite, I would say, by the fact that he’s reading my book in prison to find that the reality is absolutely the same. He says like, “what was that is and how we’ll make sure that it’ll not be.” He already is at that moment, like 127 days the punishment cell. It was his first year, and I felt myself as the one who owns the world record.

…and another:

Navalny is gone. Is his message, also?

NS: Well, look, very important in this struggle and that what happened with Navalny, with Kara-Murza, with me. Very important to understand at a very early stage that the aim of your life, of your struggle, cannot be survival. When I am arrested, KGB threatening me with capital punishment. At the same time, explains all the time that your life is in your hands and so on. If you will really feel that your aim is your survival, then you’ll be broken by KGB because it doesn’t depend on you. Or in the case of Kara-Murza and Navalny, they shouldn’t even start the struggle if their aim is physical survival.

But let’s say very early in my being in prison, I understood that I really have to replace the aim, how to survive. Because it doesn’t really depend on me, it depends on KGB. Had to replace it with the aim how to remain a free person in prison. That depends all on you that to the last of your day to be a free person. Navalny and Kara-Murza, everybody in their way had to decide, had to feel that this struggle against the regime for freedom, that is what’s really important, and that that what makes them participate in the struggle, make them feel free people and they’re enjoying this being free. And the victory is not [to] deprive your opponent of the opportunity to kill you physically. The victory is that there is territory of freedom which they cannot conquer. That you are keeping this territory, and that’s what you are saving for the continuation of the struggle.

And I think that in terms of physical survival, Navalny failed, but it wasn’t his aim, or Putin won. But I think even for Putin it was the aim, as I was told many times about KGB, we are not bloodthirsty, we don’t want your life, we want you to cooperate. For Putin it could be thousand times more important if Navalny would accept and say that he’s really sorry, but that even if we don’t agree everything, but Putin has his case, and it is important for Russia to listen to what Putin… Something like this. If he would say it, that could be a huge victory for Putin.

And he killed him because of he is revengeful person, but also because he lost hope to reconquer the territory of freedom which Navalny was keeping and continues to keep. So, I think in terms of historical struggle, Navalny is the winner.

It explains a lot about why these dissidents do what they do and why they should not be dismissed. There were sad stories about the ‘death of dissent’ and the death of freedom throughout the press, but Sharansky, who knows this drill, knows better.

Putin is a goner, same as the Soviet Union that came crashing down, he explains. Putin doesn’t know this but Sharansky knows this because he has lived this and understands every inch of the repressive regime that is little different from the Soviet one.

It may be night now, but Navalny went to a place Putin can’t go to, and he had a kindred soul in Israel who understood exacgtly what was going on and stood by him and gave him hope.

Read the whole thing here.

Image: American Jewish Historical Society, via Picryl // public domain