Natan Sharansky

Natan Sharansky was born on January 20, 1948 in Donetsk, then called Stalino, in the industrial basin of Soviet Ukraine. His father, Boris Chtcharanski, was a background journalist with Zionist leanings, specializing in industrial press; he died in 1980, before his son was released. His mother, Ida Petrovna Milgrom — born in 1908 in Balta, a city in southern Ukraine then within the Russian Empire — had followed a remarkable trajectory for a woman of her generation and milieu: trained as a pianist, she studied for a time at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow before reorienting toward the Odessa Polytechnic Institute, where she trained as an engineer-economist, then worked as an economic adviser to ministers of the Ukrainian government [Ida Milgrom, Wikipedia]. This dual heritage — scientific rigor on the maternal side, cultural sensitivity and Zionist lineage on the paternal side — constitutes the family soil in which Anatoly Borissovitch grew up.

A gifted child, he excelled at chess — a practice that would later become his mental refuge during prison isolation — and pursued studies in applied mathematics at the Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow. Nothing in this trajectory of a young Soviet scientist predestined him to direct confrontation with power. The Chtcharanski family presented the characteristic profile of Soviet Jewish intelligentsia of the postwar period: deeply integrated into Soviet structures, deprived of any contact with Hebrew tradition or religious practice, yet bearing within it layers of identity that external pressure — waves of institutional antisemitism, the Six-Day War of 1967, the movement of Jewish cultural renaissance — would soon reactivate.

The city of Balta, from which Ida Milgrom came, belongs to that geography of southern Ukraine which was, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a dense center of Jewish life, crossed equally by pogroms and hopes for emancipation. That Sharansky's mother came from there reminds us that behind the brilliant young man from Moscow lies a lineage rooted in the Ukrainian Jewish provinces, even if this rootedness was largely covered over by decades of Sovietization.

The turning point occurs in the early 1970s, when Sharansky requests permission to emigrate to Israel and is denied. This refusal places him among the refuseniks, Soviet Jews whom the State prohibited from leaving while excluding them from normal life once their request was submitted. After being denied an exit visa, Sharansky becomes an activist in the human rights movement in the USSR and gains international prominence as spokesperson for the Moscow Helsinki Group [The Jewish Agency]. The learning and transmission of Hebrew, a de facto forbidden language, become for him an act of cultural resistance as much as the foundation of a rediscovered identity. It is in this moment that the assimilated man from Donetsk refounds himself as a Jew conscious of his lineage.

Sharansky also plays the role of interpreter and bridge between Russian dissidents and the Western press, a position that multiplies his usefulness — and the exposure that follows. Alongside Andrei Sakharov and other leaders of the movement for the implementation of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, he embodies the junction between the struggle for Jewish emigration and the universal defense of freedoms.

What is important to emphasize here is that the decision to emigrate and Soviet refusal affected not only the individual, but his entire family circle. Ida Milgrom, his mother, did not leave the USSR during the first waves of emigration: she remained in place, alongside her other son Leonid, thereby assuming a role of support and struggle that Natan's years of detention would make crucial. The figure of the refusenik is, in this sense, less individual than familial: each refusal touches an entire family, distributing roles among those who leave, those who stay, and those who fight.

The signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 officially placed the USSR under the moral obligation to respect human rights. Dissidents immediately seized upon it as a lever: they founded surveillance groups tasked with documenting violations. Sharansky became one of the most visible spokespeople for the Moscow Helsinki Group, cofounder and organizer of the refusenik movement. He was one of the founders and spokespeople of the Jewish and refusenik movements in Moscow, before being arrested and convicted of treason and espionage on behalf of the United States [The Jewish Agency].

The accusation of espionage in service to the CIA, entirely fabricated, aimed to discredit dissidence by presenting it as a foreign enterprise. Condemned to thirteen years of hard labor [The Jewish Agency], Sharansky refused to the end to acknowledge a guilt he did not have. His 1978 trial became an international cause: Western governments, Jewish organizations, and human rights defenders denounced a mockery of justice.

During the trial, Sharansky refused to be assisted by the lawyer appointed by the KGB and conducted his own defense, at risk of capital punishment. He was denied the right to call witnesses or cross-examine his accusers. Outside the Moscow courtroom, closed to the public, Ida Milgrom, his mother, kept solitary vigil, a stubborn presence that moved millions of people around the world when media relayed her image [Natan Sharansky, Encyclopedia.com]. The disproportionality of the sentence, in view of the inconsistency of the charges, transformed the defendant into a worldwide symbol of Soviet arbitrariness.

Of the sentence handed down, Sharansky served nine years in the Soviet penitentiary system, between the isolation of Lefortovo prison and the labor camp. After sixteen months of incarceration at Lefortovo prison, he was sent to Perm 35, a Siberian labor camp, where he served for nine years [New World Encyclopedia]. His detention was punctuated by long periods in disciplinary cells and hunger strikes, ordeals he opposed to the enterprise of moral annihilation waged against him.

From this experience, Sharansky drew a narrative that became a classic of dissident prison literature. He recounts how inner life — the memory of chess games played in his mind, fidelity to a recovered Jewish identity, humor and stubborn refusal to yield to blackmail — allowed him to preserve his inner freedom where the regime sought to dissolve it. This part of his fate belongs both to judicial archives and transmitted testimony: the prisoner's account, activist memory and documentation from human rights organizations respond to and corroborate each other widely, even if the inner self, by nature, escapes all external verification.

What the usual narrative tends to reduce to a single figure — the campaign led by Avital — must actually be doubled. During those nine years, resistance organized on two complementary and geographically opposed fronts: from Israel and the Western world, where Avital multiplied meetings with heads of state, religious leaders and Jewish organizations; and from the USSR itself, where Ida Milgrom waged what the American press called her "nine-year battle," visiting her son in detention, demonstrating before the Moscow court, documenting the conditions of his captivity and sending letters to Soviet authorities [Ida Milgrom, Wikipedia]. These two women — the mother-in-law who remained in place and the wife who left for Israel the day after their wedding — together formed a pressure device whose complementarity was probably decisive. Where Avital embodied international mobilization, Ida Milgrom embodied inner resistance, one that could neither be ignored nor expelled.

Sharansky's liberation owed everything to a relentless international campaign, of which his wife Avital, who emigrated to Israel immediately after their marriage, was the tireless driving force around the world. Under the mounting pressure of an international campaign led by his wife, Avital Sharansky, he was released in 1986 to East Germany [New World Encyclopedia]. The 1985 meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev paved the way for the agreement.

The scene played out on February 11, 1986 on the Glienicke Bridge, which connected Potsdam to West Berlin and served, during the Cold War, as the theater for agent exchanges. Sharansky was the first political prisoner released by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev [ETV Bharat]. A meeting between American president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 had led to the agreement to exchange Sharansky for the couple of Czechoslovak agents Karel and Hana Koecher [RFE/RL]. The image of the small man in oversized trousers crossing the bridge went around the world.

On the very day of his liberation, Sharansky was transported to Israel, the destination of a journey begun fifteen years earlier with a simple visa request. He received the Congressional Gold Medal of the United States in 1986 [The Jewish Agency]. In the weeks that followed, Ida Milgrom and his other son Leonid obtained their exit visas in turn and joined Natan and Avital in Jerusalem [Ida Milgrom, Wikipedia]. The family scattered by the Soviet regime was finally reunited, on the land to which Natan had first asked to go sixteen years earlier.

Upon arriving in Israel, Sharansky quickly became a public figure, first as an activist for the cause of immigrants from the former USSR, whose major wave of arrivals transformed Israeli society in the 1990s. He founded and led the Yisrael BaAliyah party, intended to represent this Russian-speaking immigration and facilitate its integration. Founded in 1996, the party brought as many as seven members to the Knesset during its best elections, before merging with Likud in 2003. The movement opened the doors of government to him, where he successively held several ministerial portfolios: Minister of Industry and Commerce from 1996 to 1999, Minister of the Interior from 1999 to 2000, then Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Housing and Construction from 2001 to 2003, and finally Minister of Affairs of Jerusalem and the Diaspora from 2003 to 2005 [Natan Sharansky, Wikipedia].

His political trajectory was that of a man faithful to a conviction more than to a political apparatus: he resigned on principle when government orientations clashed with his vision. His presence within the Israeli executive gave an institutional voice to a million new citizens and made him the living bridge between tried Soviet Judaism and the State of Israel. The question of Jewish "normality," that of a people that had once again become master of its political destiny — a theme worked on by essayists such as Abraham B. Yehoshua — found in Sharansky a singular incarnation: that of a man who had moved from the status of stateless prisoner to that of sovereign legislator.

Ida Milgrom, for her part, lived in Jerusalem the last sixteen years of her life, surrounded by her sons and grandchildren, before dying in May 2002 at the age of 94 [Ida Milgrom, Wikipedia]. This woman who had traversed the Russian Empire, the USSR, the Moscow Conservatory and the Odessa Polytechnic Institute, had waged a nine-year battle for her son's freedom, and had finally seen this son sit in the government of the Jewish State.

Beyond government action, Sharansky built a body of political thought nourished by his experience. His most famous work defends the idea that freedom is a universal aspiration and the best safeguard against tyranny. He is the author of Fear No Evil and of The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror [Carnegie Council]. He developed notably the notion of "society of fear," opposed to "free society," and the "public square test" as a criterion of the free character of a regime. His latest work, Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People, co-authored with historian Gil Troy and published in 2020 [Genesis Prize, Never Alone Wikipedia], extends the reflection on the link between individual destiny and collective belonging.

In June 2009 opened the last great chapter of his public life: he acceded to the presidency of the executive of the Jewish Agency [Carnegie Council]. At this post, which he held for nearly a decade, he worked on the relationship between Israel and the diasporas, notably on the question of religious pluralism and access to the Western Wall. The highest honors marked this path: he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006 [The Jewish Agency], and was awarded the Israel Prize, national consecration of his contribution to the State and to Jewish thought. His reflection combines the liberal defense of freedom and an inquiry into identity as a condition—and not an obstacle—of democracy.

Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky (born January 20, 1948) — נתן שרנסקי. Born in Donetsk (then Stalino) in Soviet Ukraine, a mathematician by training from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, he became spokesman for the Moscow Helsinki Group and the refusenik movement. Sentenced in 1978 to thirteen years of hard labor on charges of alleged espionage, he served nine before his release on the Glienicke Bridge on February 11, 1986. Israeli statesman, founder of Yisrael BaAliyah, minister on several occasions, essayist of freedom and president of the Jewish Agency from 2009 to 2018, he remains the central symbol of Soviet Jewish dissidence and the refusenik cause.

Ida Petrovna Milgrom (1908–2002) — ידה מילגרום. Born in Balta, in southern Ukraine, then in the Russian Empire, this engineer-economist had studied at the Moscow Conservatory and the Odessa Polytechnic Institute, before becoming an economic adviser to the Ukrainian government. Mother of Natan Sharansky, she waged an uninterrupted campaign from within the USSR itself during the nine years of her son's detention: she visited him in prison, demonstrated alone outside the Moscow courthouse during his 1978 trial, and sent letters to Soviet authorities. Obtaining a visa in 1986, she settled in Jerusalem with her other son Leonid and died there in May 2002, at age 94 [Ida Milgrom, Wikipedia].

Avital Sharansky (born 1950) — אביטל שרנסקי. Wife of Natan, born Natalia Stieglitz, separated from him the day after their marriage when she emigrated to Israel in 1974. During the nine years of her husband's detention, she conducted a tireless international campaign across the world for his release, meeting heads of state and religious leaders. Her action was decisive in the mobilization that resulted in the 1986 exchange. Holder of a master's degree in social work, she subsequently devoted her life to welcoming Russian-speaking immigrants and transmitting the memory of Soviet dissidence to young people.

Boris Shtcharansky (dates unknown–1980) — father of Natan Sharansky, Jewish journalist with a Zionist background, specialized in Soviet industrial press. He died in 1980, before his son was released, without being able to see him complete his struggle. His Zionist lineage, though buried under decades of Soviet life, constituted one of the identity layers that Natan reactivated upon his awakening to Jewish consciousness in the 1970s.

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) — Андрей Сахаров. Soviet nuclear physicist who became the moral conscience of dissidence, 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Tutelary figure of the human rights movement in the USSR, he was the ally and protector of Sharansky within Moscow's opposition. Placed under house arrest in Gorki for his positions, he embodied, alongside the refuseniks, intellectual resistance to totalitarianism and the demand for implementation of the Helsinki Accords.

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–2022) — Михаил Горбачёв. Last leader of the Soviet Union, architect of perestroika and glasnost. It was under his authority that Sharansky was released on February 11, 1986, the first political prisoner freed in the new era. The opening he initiated subsequently enabled the great Jewish emigration to Israel, whose political reception Sharansky organized. His figure marks the turning point between the USSR of repression and its collapse.

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004). President of the United States whose meeting with Gorbachev in 1985 paved the way for the exchange agreement that freed Sharansky. His administration supported the cause of Soviet Jews and received Sharansky after his release. Sharansky saw in American firmness against the Soviet bloc a confirmation of his thesis on the power of freedom, developed later in The Case for Democracy.

Natan Sharansky's path traces a line of remarkable consistency, from the Perm cell to the podiums of the Jewish Agency. What unites the refusenik of Moscow, the Siberian prisoner, the Israeli minister and the essayist of freedom is a single intuition: that no regime can durably deprive man of his conscience, and that this conscience, once free, becomes political force. Having moved from Soviet assimilation to a reclaimed Jewish identity, then to Israeli sovereignty, he made his own biography a demonstration of the thesis he would later defend in writing.

The integration of Ida Milgrom's figure into the narrative slightly shifts the center of gravity of the story: behind the individual hero emerges an entire family, each of whose members took their share of the struggle according to the possibilities available to them. Ida, from Moscow, did what Avital did from Tel Aviv and New York — she resisted, she documented, she did not yield. This double resistance, internal and external, suggests that the cause of the refuseniks was carried not by isolated individuals but by family and community networks that knew how to transform their legal powerlessness into lasting moral force.

His legacy is twofold. On the historical level, he embodies the victory of the refusenik cause and the great exodus of Jews from the former USSR to Israel. On the intellectual level, he provided contemporary debate with a grammar of freedom founded on lived experience rather than theory alone. At the intersection of militant Memory and verified archive, the figure of Sharansky reminds us that the dignity of the person remains the most subversive of claims against powers that claim to deny it.