While browsing the shelves of the library of the sinister IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo, where he was serving part of his sentence, Alexeï Navalny unearthed You will not fear evil, the autobiography of the famous refusenik Natan Sharansky. In March 1977, this young Soviet Jew was sentenced to thirteen years in the gulag for having campaigned for the right to emigrate to Israel. In his book, written after his release in February 1986, Sharansky recounts the cruelty of the Soviet regime, its justice under orders, its inhumane prison system. With clinical descriptions of the totalitarian machine, like Varlam Chalamov, Sharansky mixes high-level philosophical reflections on freedom, totalitarianism, faith. A moving and ultimately optimistic story because the little Jewish mathematician ended up triumphing over the Soviet dictatorship.
“The virus of freedom is far from being eradicated”
“I would like to thank you for this book which helped me a lot and continues to help me,” Navalny wrote to Sharansky on April 3, 2023. The two men maintained a brief (two letters each) but very moving correspondence. . “In your preface to the 1991 edition you wrote that dissidents in prison had contracted the ‘freedom virus’ and that it was important to prevent the KGB from inventing a vaccine against it […] Know that the virus of freedom is far from being eradicated,” writes the bête noire of Vladimir Putin, who died in detention on February 16.
A living legend in Israel, where his fight for the emigration of Russian Jews made history, Sharansky immediately responded to Navalny’s letter and encouraged him to hold on. “By remaining a free person in prison, you, Alexei, influence millions of souls around the world,” he wrote to him. And to report a conversation with a Western journalist who criticized Navalny for having returned to Russia to throw himself into the den of the Putinian wolf. “I told him: If you think the goal is to survive, then you are right. But Navalny’s real concern is the fate of his people. He tells his fellow citizens: ‘I am not afraid and you are not You don’t have to be afraid either.”
The KBG yesterday, the FSB today. The acronyms change, the brutality of the regime remains. Sharansky, who experienced hunger, extreme cold and isolation, can compare Brezhnev’s USSR and Putin’s Russia. “Some things have improved, confides Natan Sharansky to L’Express. For example, I could never have been represented by a lawyer of my choice like Navalny. And the thing that surprised me the most was that my book was available in prison libraries.” Before qualifying: “But fundamentally, from Stalin to Putin nothing has changed, Sharansky tells us. It’s the same cynicism, the same moral corruption.”
“I had certain advantages over you”
In one of his letters, Alexeï Navalny evokes his numerous stays in solitary confinement, the Shizo, the Russian bastard. A sanction repeatedly inflicted on Sharansky during his nine years in the gulag. “Traditions are honored. Friday evening they took me out of Shizo and today, Monday, I received an additional fifteen days,” Navalny quips in a letter. And Sharansky responded with the same dark humor: “I had certain advantages over you. After all, I am 1m59 tall and I had the same rations as you.”
To conclude his last missive, Natan Sharansky cites a famous passage from the ritual of the Jewish festival of Passover, celebrating the exit from Egypt. “Today we are slaves, tomorrow we will be free men. Today we are here, tomorrow we will be in Jerusalem. I wish you, Alexei, and all of Russia, an exodus as soon as possible. ” Less than a year later, Navalny would die in prison.
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