From the IK-6 penal colony located in Melekhovo, east of Moscow, Alexei Navalny maintained, in April 2023, an epistolary relationship with Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. “I understand that I am not the first, but I really want to become the last, or at least one of the last, of those who are forced to endure this,” Navalny wrote in this four-letter exchange. A short, but emotional correspondence, in which the two men draw striking parallels between the repression experienced during the USSR era and that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The duty was able to speak with Natan Sharansky.
In a video interview from Israel, where he now resides, the 76-year-old man says he experienced “a shock” when he received the first hand-written letter from the public enemy no 1 of Putin. “I didn’t know him personally, but I have of course followed his activities over the past few years,” says Natan Sharansky, who, after immigrating to Israel, served as a Knesset member and minister.
“We don’t very often realize how the reality of Putin’s Russia is almost identical to that of the Soviet Union,” he continues. This is what became the basis of our exchange, and also this kind of spirit of the person who is in prison, but who is free and who, thanks to his freedom, keeps this spark of freedom for others. »
Probably through his lawyers, Alexeï Navalny – who died last month while serving a 19-year prison sentence for “extremism” – had obtained the book You will not fear evil that Natan Sharansky (also spelled Nathan Chcharanski) wrote in 1988, after spending nine years in a penal colony of the former Soviet Union regime.
Record to beat
“I am writing to you as a reader,” Navalny mentions to Sharansky in the first missive he writes, while he is in an isolation cell, a missive that he was able to transmit to him through his lawyers. “I would like to thank you for this book. [Tu ne craindras point le mal] who helped me a lot and who continues to help me,” he writes, referring to Sharansky’s description of the 400 days he, too, spent in solitary confinement in the 1970s and 1980s , being eaten away by cold and hunger.
“Your book gives new hope since the similarity between the two systems – the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia –, their ideological resemblance, their hypocrisy which is at the very basis of their essence and the continuity from the first to the second, all of this guarantees an equally inevitable collapse. Like the one we witnessed,” Navalny continues.
With a touch of humor and a keen sense of derision, Sharansky responds to his famous correspondent that reading this letter sent from a solitary cell “is as exciting as if an old man received a letter from his alma materthe university where he spent many years of his youth.
In an interview, the ex-dissident explains that “it is very important, to survive in these conditions, to be able to laugh about it.” In the response to the second letter sent to him by Navalny, Sharansky continues in the same tone: “Judging by the time you spent at SHIZO [cellule d’isolement], you will soon break all my records. I hope you don’t succeed. »
“I had certain advantages over you,” he also wrote to her ironically — after all, I am 159 cm tall. [Navalny mesurait 190 cm], and I had the same food rations as you. In the solitary confinement cell, the sleeves of my jacket fell so low that I could keep warm, whereas for you, they probably only reached my elbows. »
The story repeats itself
In writing You will not fear evil, the Soviet dissident wanted to write a “manual on how to behave in a confrontation with the KGB” and how to continue to be free even in prison. Since the USSR collapsed shortly after its publication, the work became more of a historical book…until history repeated itself. Before Navalny, the Russian opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for “treason”, also wrote letters to Sharansky from prison to let him know that his book helps him keep the cap.
By leaving, in these letters, traces of his fight against Russian authoritarianism, Navalny also speaks of this freedom and criticizes the naivety of the Russian people in the face of Putin’s regime. “ […] You write that dissidents in prisons have retained the “freedom virus” and that it is important to prevent the KGB from inventing a vaccine against this virus, he told Sharansky. Alas, they invented it. But in the current situation, it is not them who should be blamed, but us, who naively thought that there would be no going back. And that, for the good of all, there is no harm in rigging the elections a little here, in influencing the courts a little there, in stifling the press a little here. »
“These little things, and the conviction that it is possible to modernize authoritarianism, are the ingredients of this vaccine,” he continues.
inevitable fall
But Navalny adds that the “freedom virus” has not yet died out in Russia. “There are no longer tens or hundreds like before, but tens and hundreds of thousands who are not afraid to speak out for freedom and against war [menée en Ukraine], despite the threats. Hundreds of them are in prison, but I am confident that they will not give up and will not give up. »
After fighting the Soviet regime from within, Natan Sharansky now says he is convinced that Putin’s regime will also fall. “A regime that devotes so much energy to controlling people’s minds will inevitably fall from within,” he said in an interview.
According to Sharansky, by remaining a free man in prison, Navalny influenced “the souls of millions of people around the world.” “ […] You are freer today than many (if not most) people in both parts of our world [le monde libre et le monde non libre] », he wrote to her, with admiration, in his last missive.