February 22, 2024

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.

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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.

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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?”