It needs to rediscover its concern for Russian dissidents, argues Natan Sharansky
ago I received a letter from my alma mater: the Soviet gulag, where I spent nine years after being convicted of anti-Soviet activity, high treason and espionage, and from which I graduated in 1986. The letter was sent by Alexei Navalny from a, or “shizo” for short, the most extreme type of punishment cell in the gulag. He told me he was reading my book, “Fear No Evil”, and was surprised by the similarity of our experiences.
To keep your spirit in shizo you have to remind yourself why you are there, and that if you show weakness the whole world will collapse. Navalny understood this better than anybody else. Russia controls people mainly by fear. People can be divided into three categories: “true believers”—those who sincerely are loyal to the ideology of the regime; “doublethinkers”—those who don’t believe this ideology and don’t trust the regime, but are afraid to speak up; and “dissidents”—those who are not afraid to speak truth to power.
Archival documents recently released by the White House show how the administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s repeatedly insisted on raising three groups of questions with the Soviets: the arms race and disarmament; co-operation on trade, other economic issues and science; and human rights in the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on the fate of democratic dissidents. The Soviet reaction to the last of these was always “It is an internal affair”.
After the murder of Navalny there is no doubt that the lives of other political prisoners are in grave danger, particularly those of Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, whose 25-year sentence for treason was revenge for his advocacy of the West’s Magnitsky sanctions .
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