Historians rarely write in collaboration with those who make history. A few years ago, I was fortunate to do just that.
Natan Sharansky at 76 starts his workdays at 5:30 a.m. He has been married to Avital for 50 years, although she adds “minus 12” because she refuses to count the ones during which the Soviet authorities forcibly kept them apart as they dared to defy the Communist system and seek emigration to Israel. Those years of separation include the nine from 1977 to 1986 when he was trapped inside the Soviet prison system, including stays in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo jail and Perm 35 in the Gulag archipelago.
In 2018, as he completed another nine years—his near-decade leading the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Jewish world’s largest nongovernmental organization—Sharansky felt compelled to recount some key episodes and lessons of his life in his effort to balance the twin goods of freedom and identity, thoughtful patriotism and civil dialogue. He asked me to co-author that book.
We made an odd couple. I was raised with my name, “Gil Troy,” to fit in as an American while being a proud Jew, living in one of the most Jew-friendly countries; he was forced to stand out despite his perfectly Russian original name, “Anatoly,” because he was a Jew living in one of the most Judeophobic countries. I spent most of the 1980s at Harvard, learning to be an American historian. He spent most of the 1980s in the Gulag, fighting to stay alive as a political prisoner. When I first noted our Harvard-Gulag ’80s gap, without skipping a beat, Natan quipped, “That means I have moral clarity, and you don’t.”
Miraculously, Avital’s unlikely but determined campaign of persuasion—during which she crisscrossed the globe and lobbied Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, and many others for years seeking their assistance in securing the freedom of her husband—finally paid off. In 1986, many of us watched Sharansky zigzag across the Glienicke Bridge connecting East and West Berlin after a KGB agent had told him to “walk straight” to freedom, a final act of defiance.
But that’s not actually what we saw. In fact, after landing in East Berlin, it was on the airport tarmac that the then-named Anatoly Shcharansky (note the Russian letter “shch” he bore as the opening sound of his surname rather than the softer Hebrew “shin”) zigzagged away from his Communist captors into a waiting car. In a 1988 speech, Ronald Reagan said of that moment, “It was one of those moments when laughter and tears commingle, and one does not know when the first leaves off and the second begins. It was a vision of the purest freedom known to man, the freedom of a man whose cause is just and whose faith is his guiding light.”
By the time he had reached the bridge, he was already free and no longer had Communist masters to disobey. Nevertheless, people keep telling him, and me, how they are still inspired by that moment, which I’m sure they are, only it wasn’t on the bridge!
Although we wrote the book collaboratively, the most pressing question I was trained to ask as a biographer stayed with me: What made this man tick? There were 250 million Soviet citizens, including 2 million Jews. Why did he become not just a refusenik—a Jew who sought and was then refused permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel—but one of the few Jewish activists who also worked as a dissident with Andrei Sakharov and the Soviet human-rights movement? That synthesis made him the regime’s most famous political prisoner. And how did he endure nine years of solitary confinement, punishment cells, hunger strikes and forced feeding, yet then emerge with a ready smile and quick wit?
Sharansky explains, matter-of-factly, that in 1967, when he was 19, the anti-Semitic jibes he had grown up enduring suddenly changed form. After Israel won the Six-Day War, even close friends started joking about his being a bully and not a coward. Fascinated that something that happened in a country he had never visited could change people’s impressions of him, he started learning more about the Jewish state and his Jewish identity.
“Once I discovered my identity, I then discovered my freedom,” he explains. Still, discovering your freedom is not the same as fighting for it.
I most appreciated his courage when I discovered a New York Times Magazine article from 1984 titled “How I Was Broken by the KGB.” Using language similar to Sharansky’s, the economist Victor Krasin described how he first overcame his fears and became a dissident. Speaking out became “our victory over the slavery in which we had lived for almost half a century.” Krasin endured the same KGB tactics used against Sharansky. But, ultimately, Krasin “was afraid”—of being executed for treason. And so, during a press conference that the Russians triumphantly orchestrated, he was forced to denounce his fellow dissidents. Broken, Krasin felt “nothing.” “My soul was empty,” he wrote.
Arrested in 1977, four years after Krasin cracked, Sharansky realized they could control your body, but that only you can control your soul. So, he recalled, “I find myself, standing there naked, trying not to show my nervousness, I tell myself: ‘They cannot humiliate me. Only I can humiliate myself.’”
Sharansky characterizes his emergence from doublethink as a universal process anyone can undergo. Yet struck by how few people actually took that bold leap (the refuseniks never gathered even as many as 150 signatures on any petition), I tended to think of Sharansky’s attitude as peculiar to him and a very select few like him.
Then I read an essay by a 32-year-old Egyptian dissident named Adel Abdel Ghafar writing about the Arab Spring of 2010–2011. He offered the revelatory explanation that “revolutions are made by everyday people who are no longer afraid.” Indeed, in East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and now in Hong Kong, Iran, and, sadly, Russia again, rebelling against the rulers first requires ordinary people to overcome the fear imposed on them by those rulers.
I realized that when I had read Sharansky’s prison memoir Fear No Evil in 1988, I didn’t grasp his main message. I remembered the physical privations he detailed: the cold so intense that whenever you’re served hot water you try defrosting by moving the crude cup around your body; the hunger so gnawing; the disgusting torture when you are force-fed through various bodily orifices during hunger strikes.
What I missed—and what I hope our book Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People shows—is the psychological grandeur required to sustain hope and belief. And just how deep Sharansky had to burrow into his own mind—and how vividly he imagined the Jewish people’s support by his side—to make sure he continued to believe he was never alone.
We children of freedom don’t get it. I told a friend as Natan and I were working together how, in 1983, Sharansky had rejected a “humanitarian” offer to be released because of his ill health. He did so, he said, “because the Soviet Union wasn’t humanitarian.” As a result, he served another two-plus years.
My friend asked the logical, American question: “Does he regret those two lost years?” I wondered—how do you ask someone that kind of question?
One day, as we brainstormed about a course Sharansky was teaching to young Israelis, I explained that those of us born into freedom don’t understand those who fought their way into freedom—and got up the nerve to ask my friend’s question.
Sharansky and I were sitting, as usual, at his dining-room table. It felt like time stopped, and that he had traveled 3,000 miles back into the Gulag. He looked at me quizzically, as if the thought had never crossed his mind. He would never, ever surrender.
“Otherwise, we would have lost,” he said slowly, mystically. “And I would have let everyone down.” Returning to his more analytic mode, he explained that in the mid-1980s no one knew when the Soviet Union would fall. Note “when.” Like most Americans, I was barely in “if” mode then. Had giving in to his interrogators made even one dissident more vulnerable to KGB pressure, he would have felt that all his efforts up to that point had been wasted.
That’s what Sharansky means when he talks about “the interconnectedness of souls.” It took a full week of us sitting across the dining-room table with him speaking slowly and deliberately for me to grasp this mystical journey out of his living physical hell and finding the power to transcend his actual physical self. That ability to disconnect from his isolated surroundings but connect with everyone who ever was or might be a political prisoner…or with Avital or his mother thousands of miles away…or with a one-time tourist from Philadelphia or a visiting rabbi from New York…all of that meant he was never alone. That became our book title. The leap might seem imaginary, but the feeling kept him alive.
This freedom from fear is the key to understanding Natan Sharansky’s life: “I was nine years in the Gulag, nine years in Israeli politics, and nine years in the Jewish Agency—and I don’t know where I suffered most.”
In each period, he fought for freedom. His first nine years were an internal struggle, learning to free himself from fear. His next nine years, he stood out as a dissident in Israeli politics, an outsider at heart, now serving on the inside. He was mocked by the Oslo-worshipping left and the territory-hungry right, and for condemning Yasir Arafat and his terrorists who imposed fear not freedom on their own people while talking about “peace.” Finally, while heading the Jewish Agency, in some ways the world headquarters of the Jewish people, Sharansky spent nine years explaining that a healthy identity—pride in your own heritage—offers the best escape from fear, anxiety, anomie, and toward true freedom.
That commitment to freedom from fear is why Sharansky finds this moment so sobering, and why the message of the book we published in 2020 is still so timely. To our far right, an aggressiveness, a bullying, a hijacking of nationalism steers what should be proud, constructive, expansive identities away from their loftiest, most democratic, inclusive ideals into a defensive, often aggressive crouch. To our far left, an aggressiveness, a bullying, a negation of nationalism and of pride in one’s own people comes wrapped in a totalitarian demand for unanimity of opinion chillingly familiar to a refugee from Marxism. Having experienced the intellectual vacuum that comes from no freedom, Sharansky is dismayed watching a similar intellectual vacuum grow when there’s no tolerance.
Moreover, as someone who grew up seeing a dictatorship wield Jew-hatred to crush Jews and unite others, Sharansky has always associated anti-Semitism with authoritarianism. To see it thriving on the left, in campuses, in what should be healthy democracies, is worse than jarring.
The book’s message to Jews—that you are never alone when you’re a part of this community, so choose unity—is a broader message to all liberal democrats. You can avoid alienation and isolation by connecting to something greater than yourself and remaining free enough to express that identity publicly and proudly.
Natan Sharansky cringes when people call him “a hero.” People often asked John F. Kennedy how he came to be a hero that night in August 1943 when a Japanese destroyer rammed PT-109. Shrugging, JFK would say: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” Ultimately, Natan Sharansky has taught me that heroism, or more important for him, moral clarity, does not need to emerge from an “Aha” moment or turning point. Working with him reaffirmed my own Zionist and American life lessons—that we all yearn to belong and to be free.