Defending Identity

This is my third book, though I never considered myself a writer. I write when I feel that sharing my combined experiences from the dramatically different phases of my life might advance the causes I believe in and help others in their struggle for freedom.

My prison memoir, Fear No Evil, was written immediately after my release from nine years in the Gulag. The point of pouring onto paper all the stories from my years as a dissident and a prisoner was to remind everyone—but most of all those who remained trapped behind the iron curtain—how deep are the inner resources that each of us has when we defend our right to be free. I wanted to strengthen the spirits and the hopes of the people left behind.

My second book, The Case for Democracy, was written after nearly twenty years in public and political life. In these years the great victory of the free world in the Cold War had been followed by a period when the same free world seemed to want to disarm itself of the most potent weapon in its arsenal: freedom itself. The book was an appeal to democratic political leaders of every party and perspective to appreciate the power of freedom. With the perspective gained from being both a democratic dissident and a politician, I desperately wanted to explain why and how the democratic world can mobilize freedom to overcome the forces of tyranny and terror.

Still, I recognize that the power of freedom alone is insufficient to the task today. For while the democratic world has at its disposal the system that is best able to use the talents and energies of its citizens and as a result has vastly superior material resources, the enemy possesses a strong will.

The enemy's will is strong because his identity is strong. And we must match his strength of purpose with strong identities of our own.

In thinking about the challenges facing the democratic world in building strong identities, I soon discovered that precious few people in the West see identity as a friend of freedom. On the contrary: Identity is regarded by an increasing number of intellectuals and public figures as an antagonist to freedom, as a source of conflict, and as a threat to peace.

Yet the idea of a pitched battle between the forces of freedom and the forces of identity is entirely alien to me. I can read books and articles suggesting it is true. I can hear eloquent rationalizations explaining why it is true. But I know it is false. Not only are strong identities vitally important to individuals who hope to lead a life of purpose, they are essential for the ability of a democratic nation to defend its cherished freedoms. Far from being enemies, freedom and identity are staunch allies in the struggle against evil. That is the main message of Defending Identity, the message that I believe is important for every individual, every group, and every nation in the free world.

Over time I have come to understand that the notion of identity and democracy as allies is so obvious to me because I had an experience long ago that left an indelible mark on my view of freedom, my view of identity, and my view of the connection between them.

In the books I have written, I have drawn deeply on the experiences of my years in prison. I have done so not because I am under any illusion that the unique circumstances of prison life are easily transferable to the outside world but rather because I believe that those years in the Gulag afforded me a once-in-a-lifetime laboratory to discover first principles that put a bright spotlight on challenges and confusions that face the world. The lessons of the Gulag are stark but also very clear.

My years in the Gulag convinced me of this powerful alliance between freedom and identity. This is not to say that I never feel any tension between them—only that I recognized long ago that freedom and identity stand on the same side of a great moral divide and nothing I have seen or experienced since has convinced me otherwise. In fact in all my adult life I have doubted this truth for only a single day, and that was many, many years ago—in February 1977. . .

The KGB understood the importance of controlling the lines of communication. That is why there was no direct dialing abroad. Telephone conversations were often jammed, and those telephones that were suspected of being frequently used for "illegal" calls were often simply disconnected. But with inventiveness and stubbornness we would restore our connections, informing our contacts in advance, often through tourists, about where and when and under what name we would be waiting for the next call. And each telephone call brought one more injection of encouragement, energy, and enthusiasm.

Especially precious to me were conversations with my wife, Avital, from whom I had been separated since the day after our marriage. She never abandoned the struggle for our reunion, not even for a single day. But our telephone conversation in the middle of February 1977 was exceptional. After it I felt like a balloon from which the air had been taken out.

It was a difficult time for all the dissidents of the Soviet Union. The Helsinki group created in April 1976 had been publishing dozens of documents about the Soviet Union's failure to fulfill its obligations on human rights under the Helsinki Accords. This had attracted the attention of the entire world. And, exactly as the founders of the group expected, at the beginning of February the repression started. Two leaders of the group, Yuri Orlov and Alexander Ginsburg, were arrested. A third central figure, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, was forced to leave the Soviet Union. I, as the unofficial spokesman of this group, was the next central activist in line to be arrested. At the same time, the Jewish immigration movement, which was more massive than any other dissident group and more specific in its single fundamental demand that Jews should be allowed to leave, was also under strong attack. For the previous two years we had established an unbelievable level of international recognition. Official delegations of senators and congressmen were meeting with us before they went on to summits with Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders. In Washington, D.C., our voice in support of the Jackson Amendment, which linked American trade with freedom of immigration from the USSR, proved to be stronger than the voice of the Nixon administration, which tried to circumvent it. Direct TV reports, taped in Moscow, of interviews with refuseniks—Jews who had been denied exit visas—and coverage of their activity began to appear on Western screens. (All these events would later become part of the accusations against me of high treason.) Such obvious and powerful dissident activity bewildered the KGB and in the beginning of the winter they began their counterattack. Articles and TV programs about Zionist betrayers of the motherland became more and more threatening. In the official film Merchants of the Soul, pictures were shown of activists and we were called traitors. Searches and confiscations unprecedented in scale were carried out in the provinces and later in Moscow. It was clear that all of this was in preparation for a serious attack against us.

It was at this moment that my conversation with Avital took place. She was calling from Israel. Our words were chosen carefully. There were many things half said, many hints, but the message she was asked to deliver was still very clear. I had to stop my involvement in the Helsinki Watch group and the dissident movements. It was taking me too far. It was dangerous for me and for other Jewish activists. At this critical moment for the entire Jewish movement, it was necessary to be careful. The State of Israel would not be able to defend me if I continued to be at one and the same time both a Zionist and a dissident. It was time for me to separate the two and make my choice between them.

The message was not a new one. I had received it a number of times, in different forms, from Israeli officials. But what made it difficult to simply ignore, as I had done many times before, was that this time the message was sent by them through Avital. What you are saying, I told her, would be a betrayal of the people who have been arrested.

When I met Natalia Steiglitz, later Avital Sharansky, near the Moscow synagogue in October of 1973, it was love at first sight. On July 4, 1974, we had our chuppah and the next morning I took her to the airport, where she left with her hard-won exit visa to Israel. We hoped and believed we would soon be reunited there. Throughout the years of separation since then, she had not stopped fighting for our reunion. Even across the vast distance stretching between Russia and the free world, we had always understood each other, even without words. So for her to ask me to do something that I could not do and was not going to do made it seem as if the connection between us, which had been the foundation of my optimism and my strength, was suddenly shaken.

But all this lasted for only twenty-four hours. How Avital succeeded in such a short time to organize another telephone call and to send me a message in Moscow as to where and when I should wait for her call I did not know. But the next evening I heard her voice again. I am sorry, she said; forget everything I told you yesterday. That was a moment of weakness. I fully trust you and I am with you in whatever you do.

Our bond was reestablished and remained unbroken for the next month before my arrest and for the following nine years of my imprisonment. And when we met at the moment of my release in Germany in February 1986, we knew and we felt that we had never been separated.

During all the years of separation, I never knew the details of what had been behind that telephone call. But it was easy to understand the context. My position of simultaneous allegiance to two movements—the struggle of dissidents for freedom and the Zionist struggle for identity—created many suspicions on both sides. Some activists of the Zionist movement and especially Israel officials who were dealing with the question of immigration from the Soviet Union were afraid of my work with Sakharov and other democratic dissidents. My role in the founding of the Helsinki Watch group was viewed as crossing a red line. This was mostly explained by the naïve belief that the KGB was ready to tolerate the struggle for immigration but not ready to tolerate the struggle to fundamentally change the regime. My activities were viewed by some in Israel as creating unnecessary risks to myself and my colleagues in our struggle. What they failed to understand was that to the KGB, any freedom was a fundamental change.

In addition, the Israeli government's attitude was also the expression of a genuine historical concern, based on long and unfortunate experience. Jews had often been ready to fight for many "isms," for freedom across the world, in which they would leave their people, their ghetto, their shtetl behind. Communism was only the latest example. But to what good either for the Jews or for the world? Our aim, therefore, should be to go back to our country, to our roots. Leave the abstract struggle for freedom to others: that was their message. The fact that I continued my involvement in both movements looked suspicious to many in the Israeli establishment, even after I had spent nine years in prison for Zionist activity. When I came to Israel I continued to hear insinuations like this: Isn't Sharansky the Soviet version of Timmerman—an Argentine leftist who had been arrested by the junta, was released under pressure from world Jewry, but soon abandoned Israel to join the European world cause?

Many of my colleagues in the human rights movement made the same separation and viewed me with the same distrust. One of the most noble and pure representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, the courageous Lydia Chukovsky, expressed her indignation in a conversation with me during the same difficult period at the beginning of 1977. Why do you have to leave for Israel? Didn't we struggle together for the same ideals? Didn't we share the same beliefs? But now you want to say that you have your own history and your own country, that you have a truth of your own. Another courageous woman, a member of the Helsinki Watch group, Malva Landa, said to me: I am ready to support nationalists only before the victory of their cause. After this victory, they forget about human rights.

Such suspicions continue to follow me. To this day I encounter self-confident democrats who attack me in article after article: When will the real Sharansky stand up—is it the one who is speaking about human rights or the one defending the Zionist state? To my critics, then and now, I had to make a choice: I could fight for universal values or for particularistic values. I could fight for human rights, democracy, and peace or I could fight for the rights of Jews, strengthen Jewish identity, and defend Israel. In this struggle, I would have to choose between the forces of freedom and the forces of identity, between being a man of the world and being a man of my people.

But except for those twenty-four hours between two phone calls with Avital I never felt any problem with my dedication to both; in fact, quite the contrary.

A year later, after my arrest, after accusations against me for high treason, after 110 interrogations, I entered the last stage before my trial, reading the documents prepared by the KGB against me. I spent much time going over the fifteen thousand pages of my "criminal activity," my involvement in both the Jewish movement and the movement for human rights. Suddenly I discovered a film produced in the West after my arrest. Parts of this film had been used as "proof" of my subversive activities.

In the film there was a debate between Ludmilla Alexeyeva, a democratic dissident, and Michael Sherbourn, one of the Zionist activists. They were arguing over why I had been arrested: One said I was arrested as a Zionist, the other, that it had been because of human rights. I could not hold back a smile. The year that had just passed had convinced me more than ever that to the KGB, there was no difference. Both movements were considered enemies. Both posed a threat to KGB control. Both were bulwarks against tyranny.

What I did not know then and could not foresee was that even after the Soviet Union collapsed, this tension would remain. I could not imagine that these two forces, identity and freedom, which were allies in the struggle to resist the world of fear that the Soviets had built, would become the bitterest of enemies in the free world.