One of the signs that The Free Press has become a real newsroom is that important figures—intellectuals, politicians, comedians, and writers—swing by our office for conversations.
Of late: Rob Henderson, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Konstantin Kisin, and Paul Kingsnorth. And earlier this week: Natan Sharansky, one of the men who changed the course of the twentieth century.
I suspect readers of The Free Press need no introduction to Sharansky, who is no stranger to our pages. I’ve had the honor of interviewing Natan in Israel in the wake of October 7, and, most recently, we published his remarkable letters he exchanged with Alexei Navalny in the gulag.
But just in case you need a refresher:
Natan Sharansky was born in Donetsk, Ukraine—then called Stalino—in 1948, the same year as the birth of the modern State of Israel. A chess prodigy and a mathematician, he became a figure of international importance in 1977, when he was imprisoned by the Soviet Union—on manufactured charges of treason—for the real crime of wanting to emigrate to Israel.
At his court hearing in 1978, he famously said, “To the court, I have nothing to say. To my wife, and my people, I say, next year in Jerusalem.”
Getting to Jerusalem took him longer than a year.
Sharansky spent nine years in the gulag—often in solitary confinement. In 1983, he was in a tiny cell in a prison near the Siberian border when he learned that President Ronald Reagan had labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”
That empire fell eight years later, in no small part because of Sharansky, who emigrated to Israel upon his release from prison in 1986 and reunited with his wife, Avital, an activist who stared down presidents and prime ministers in order to free her husband and all refuseniks.
Sharansky then had a long political career, serving as a cabinet minister in every Israeli government from 1996 to 2005, including a stint as Ariel Sharon’s deputy prime minister from 2001 to 2003. He is the author of several books, including the memoir Fear No Evil and, most recently, Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People.
In the course of his remarkable life, Sharansky has been a key actor in the forever war of liberty versus tyranny. And while many American Jews have had the luxury over the past half-century of feeling as if history had ended—or that they had been on a permanent holiday from it—Sharansky has always lived inside of it. He is, as my friends at Tablet magazine recently put it, “a living monument to twentieth-century Jewish heroism.”
As the events of the twenty-first century speed up in ways that make the coming months and years profoundly uncertain, I can think of few people better to illuminate the way than Natan Sharansky.
So we were thrilled that he took an hour to answer our questions. Below is an edited and condensed version of our staff’s conversation.
Bari Weiss: Give us a report from Jerusalem. What’s it like over there?
Natan Sharansky: Israel is so deep in this struggle, and it’s been over a year. We’ve never had fighting like this for more than a month. My son-in-law has been fighting for 280 days—away from his five small boys. And that’s the case for most of their neighbors.
My daughter’s closest childhood friend just passed away. Our friend who played music in our sukkah this past month fell in the same battle.
It’s been like one long funeral.
Thousands have been killed. Ten thousand or more have been injured. Tens of thousands of people have PTSD.
On the other hand, we have a united society with a devoted, young generation. They feel their mission is to continue their thousand-year history.
We’re not confused. We know we can defeat Hamas and Hezbollah rather than appease them.
BW: Twenty years ago, most people would have seen the war in Israel and the war in Ukraine as being connected. Today, we have a strange phenomenon where, to put it crudely, Israel has become the cause of the American right, while Ukraine has become the cause of the left. What do you think about this political development?
NS: The free world cannot choose between fighting Putin and fighting terrorism. It just won’t work. If you want to live in the free world, you have to find ways to resist. It’s awful when wars become issues exclusive to the right or left. We are talking about how to save the free world and guarantee its existence.
On one hand, we have Putin who wants to restore the Russian Empire. He is determined to make Russia the mother of all nations. On the other hand, we have Iran-backed terrorists who say that, through terror, they can establish their power. And I would say they are more and more successful, and more and more forces are willing to appease them.
Unfortunately, Israel has been one of the forces willing to appease. Now Israel has no choice. It has to fight. It is fighting so terrorists cannot blackmail the free world.
BW: This year, we’ve seen many Russian prisoners released, but we also saw the death of Alexei Navalny in an arctic prison. How do you characterize the current state of civic society in Russia? Do you see any precursors to regime change?
NS: When I was released as a political prisoner, it was the first step towards decreasing pressure in society, and that ultimately brought about the fall of the Soviet Union.
But that’s not the case anymore. In the last year, every human-rights activist I know has fled Russia.
I had hopes when the war with Ukraine started, because if Putin were to look weak in Ukraine, there is no way he would survive as dictator of Russia. So he would be overthrown. But because, in part, the West was afraid to support a strong Ukraine in that first year, Putin remained strong and survived.
At the same time, the number of doublethinkers and dissidents have increased. But people today are more afraid than they were a year ago.
So in the short term, I’m not very optimistic. At this moment, he is strong, and his power is absolutely totalitarian.
Only when Russian civilians and members of the military feel they can’t rely on their dictator anymore, only when they decide that he is weak, can his regime fall apart.
But the fact that there are more doublethinkers is the best guarantee of that eventual outcome.
BW: Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu has made a point of telling the Iranian people to take their country back—making constant distinctions between the regime and its people. Do you detect a strategy to provide Israeli solidarity to the Iranian democratic struggle?
NS: Is there, at this moment, any Western government which believes it has to talk to the people over the heads of dictators? I don’t think so. From that point of view, Bibi’s comments are revolutionary. But I don’t think it’s part of a larger strategy yet.
BW: How are Israelis responding to the election of Donald Trump? In the short term, will it hurt Jews to be associated with him? What about in the long-term?
NS: I can’t say what Trump will do in the short-term, let alone long-term. But the people around him believe that it’s important for America that Israel be strong. But who knows?
In Israel, there was a sigh of relief when he won. Not because we love his character, but because there’s a much bigger chance that a Trump administration would be our ally against Iran, rather than trying to make another deal with them.
We see what is happening on college campuses—this unbelievable explosion of antisemitism and the legitimization of antisemites. Even when we are under attack from the most awful enemies of the world, students celebrated it as the beginning of liberation!
It’s clear that if anyone was going to fight against the most frightening antisemitism in academia, it would be the Trump administration, not the Harris administration.
These are the questions that made it clear to the Israeli right and to the Israeli left that Trump is better for the safety and security of the State of Israel.
But still a main challenge is to understand that mobs—of any political stripe—are not our friends.
BW: Why are so many highly educated people drawn to wokeness, or as you call it, neo-communism?
NS: People instinctively want to make the world a better place. And that’s how communist ideology—which killed tens of millions of its own citizens—became so popular, especially among intellectuals.
It’s nice to think of a society where everyone is equal. So neo-communists say: We’re destroying this world, where so much inequality exists, and we’re building a new one. And this ideology becomes so enticing that people are willing to give up their freedom for it.
This is the reason why the most important conflict in the West is not between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between liberals and progressives. Progressives are hiding behind liberal ideas. And in order to live out the promises of liberalism—equality, freedom—progressives are willing to destroy our world for the sake of building a new one with absolute justice. That’s communism. It’s destruction.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a liberal, not a progressive. He wanted African Americans to be integrated into society. Instead of dismantling the world he was born into, he fought to reform it.
So many people don’t understand the principal difference between those who want to destroy and rebuild this world and those who want to improve the world we have now.
Somehow, liberals became allies of the most primitive, totalitarian demagogues, who very closely resemble communists. And the woke movement looks a lot like the communist movement.
At the beginning of communism, so many social democrats decided that, although the communists were rough and violent, they wanted the same type of growth. And that’s the danger.
So we need to separate liberalism from progressivism.
BW: Do you consider yourself a liberal?
NS: Yes, I’m a proud liberal.
To be a liberal is to believe that everybody has the right to freedom and that all people are created equal, regardless of their identity. Liberals are partners, not dictators. From this perspective, the neo-conservative movement doesn’t understand that they’re liberals.
They’re ashamed to be called liberals, and as a result, they leave the territory open to the neo-communists. We’ve let them have the title. We’ll call ourselves conservatives.
Don’t give up the “liberal” title. Neo-cons shouldn’t be ashamed of the title! They’re liberals. The communists are not.
BW: Why does the left tend to have such poor leadership?
NS: They are more willing to appease terrorists or totalitarian regimes.
But in the case of America, the big challenge is how to divide between people with totalitarian ideals and real liberals. That’s why I’m reclaiming the label of “liberal.”
Being for or against abortion doesn’t mean you’re for or against American values. Are you ready to defend the values on which America was built? That’s the question.
BW: You played chess in your head during your nine years in the gulag. How have games impacted you?
NS: When you’re tired of this world, you can go in your head and play chess.
When I was a loyal Soviet citizen, my life was deprived of all meaning, and deprived of anything Jewish. What is more Jewish than saying “on one hand, on the other hand”? You don’t need to study Talmud. Just chess.
Then in prison my chess hobby became very useful. It was such a blessing for me to play chess in my head. I recommend it to everyone. Put yourself in the punishing cell deliberately, play only in your head, and you will find that you can enjoy life in every space.
Bari Weiss is the editor in chief of The Free Press. Follow her on X @BariWeiss, and read her piece, “A Year of Revelations.”
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