Shcharansky: Lessons From a Soviet Prison

After nine years in a Soviet prison, human-rights activist Anatoly Shcharansky was freed in February. He enjoyed a tumultuous greeting in Israel, accompanied by world press fanfare, then went into seclusion with his wife, Avital.

This week he re-emerges as a public figure, to visit the United States and to meet with President Ronald Reagan. Reagan played an instrumental part in Shcharansky’s release, bringing up Shcharansky’s case at the Geneva summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Just before his travels, Shcharansky broke a self-imposed silence to talk at his small apartment in Jerusalem. There were papers and books piled everywhere. On a coffee table were African violets and a copy of Joan Peters’ controversial book on Arab-Jewish conflict, “From Time Immemorial.”

Shcharansky, 37, said he was feeling fine although somewhat weak, and was having trouble sleeping. When he sleeps, he dreams that he is back in what he refers to as his “punishing cell”--the solitary confinement imposed during the worst moments of his nine-year confinement. He said, joking, that he didn’t want to sleep so much anymore--free, he now enjoys being awake. Shcharansky, from firsthand experience, considers himself an expert on the KGB--the Soviet secret police--and on Soviet prison camps. He understood that the Soviets wanted to crack his will and to make an example of him for others who dared to resist. “The KGB do their work well,” he said. “One thing they understand is the weakness of people. They were telling me all the time, ‘Believe us. You are not the first. Sooner or later, you will give in. So the earlier you change your position, the better, because one day you will be destroyed.’ There were many whom they managed to destroy,” although Shcharansky said “no” to them to the end.

Recalling imprisonment, Shcharansky said, “I had problems with my heart . . . because of the long days in solitary confinement.” He once fell unconscious to the floor of his cell and suffered a concussion. He almost died during a hunger strike in 1982. And there was the mental anguish of being cut off from the outside world. In what he calls “good times,” he was allowed to receive two letters a year from his wife, who was writing two letters a week. In bad years, he received none at all.

Two months before his release, the Soviets began to feed him and give him injections of vitamins.

He rejects the argument that his release is proof of the power of so-called “quiet diplomacy.” Yes, Reagan helped gain his release, but without the long public struggle led by Avital Shcharansky, he is convinced that diplomatic efforts alone would not have worked.

In Washington, experts debate the best ways to bring about the release of Soviet Jews. Some argue for a hard-line, public confrontation with current Soviet policy while others advocate a softer, backstage approach.

Shcharansky joins the tougher group. He believes the controversial Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, offering trade concessions in return for release of Soviet Jews, worked. “I think the amendment helped thousands of Jews to emigrate. Without this process of pressing the Soviet Union, there would not have been the explosion of emigration that happened at the beginning of the ‘70s,” he said.

But that emigration of approximately 200,000 Jews, he added, could not have taken place without a struggle inside the Soviet Union by Jews who dared to declare their desire to leave. More help should have come from the Helsinki Accords of 1975, guaranteeing Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe in return for recognizing the human rights of their own citizens, including the right to leave. Approximately 400,00 Jews have sought permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union. But the Helsinki agreement turned out to be a meaningless piece of paper. Shcharansky, once a member of a group that monitored Soviet compliance, recalled, “The moment they signed it, they started to take steps to discourage people from using it.” In the Soviet prison camps, he said, “Helsinki was a big disappointment. The conditions became worse and worse.” Reaching agreement wasn’t a mistake, he said. The mistake was a failure to be tough in demanding Soviet compliance.

His participation as a monitor was part of the cause for his imprisonment, he believes, although he was tried and convicted on the trumped-up charge of being a U.S. spy. By 1980 the Soviets could boast--correctly--that most Helsinki monitoring groups had been disbanded and that the monitors themselves were in prison or exile.

There is a lesson from Helsinki, Shcharansky said, for those interested in arms agreements with the Soviets. He suggests that one way to measure whether the Soviets can be trusted is to examine their performance in past agreements: “The issue of Jewish emigration arises because once you let thousands of Jews go, you can’t change the situation back. In other areas, they can say, ‘OK, we’ll do that,’ and then overnight, they can stop.”

To achieve an arms agreement, the West would allow limits imposed upon its major advantage over the Soviets--technology. For an agreement to have meaning, it must impose some control on the Soviets, he said, “and you know how the Soviet Union resists control. The Soviets are absolutely independent of public opinion. There is no correlation between what is said openly and what is done.”

Is Mikhail S. Gorbachev any improvement? Shcharansky read Gorbachev’s speeches while he was in prison camp; he believes that Gorbachev “understands the drastic condition of the Soviet economy and the need for Western technology.”

But Gorbachev’s answers to his country’s problems are, in Shcharansky’s opinion, nothing new: “He belongs to the system, and he understands that you can’t touch fundamental parts of the system. For example, he wants to improve his economy, but he is not ready to give real freedom of initiative to his people. He says we must have more good public control.” For instance, Gorbachev is right about the Soviets drinking too much, said Shcharansky, but the ineffective remedy is to control people even more.

Shcharansky believes that Reagan’s Soviet policy has been more successful than those of Presidents Richard M. Nixon or Jimmy Carter. The Soviets “detect weakness and know how to use it. I saw it on the conquered faces of many people.” The same holds true, he believes, in regard to foreign governments: “When there is something they can use, when there is weakness, they will capitalize on it,” he said. With Carter, they saw a gap between words and actions. With Nixon, they used the deception of detente, which Shcharansky calls a one-way street.

The Soviets hoped Reagan would be weak, he said, “but these hopes disappeared. I’m absolutely sure they will try to find weak points in the future with Reagan, too. If they can get him to soften his line on the Strategic Defense Initiative or human rights, they will by saying, ‘We let (Yelena) Bonner leave. We let Shcharansky leave.’ They might say, ‘You can’t demand too much from us.’ ”

It probably wasn’t an easy decision for the Soviets to let him go, Shcharansky said. But, he explained, “I’m sure they have already compensated for it by arresting dozens of others--activists and Jews. There is very bad news about the persecutions of Jews arrested only for teaching Hebrew.”

In the coming years, Shcharansky will write a book and will work to help gain freedom for Jews who remain, involuntarily, in the Soviet Union. “We Jewish activists don’t expect justice from the Soviet Union,” he said. “What we want is fundamental change in the policy toward Jewish emigration.”

Almost from the day Shcharansky arrived, the Israeli press has tried to discover where he stands on internal Israeli disputes, including policies concerning the Palestinians and the occupied territories. Will he become a hard-liner, as his wife has?

But Shcharansky has been cautious and unwilling to commit himself. He says he must learn more about Israel before expressing any opinions. Taking such a stance, he has managed to do the impossible--remain above Israeli party politics.

Other questions are more personal: How is Shcharansky getting along with his wife? He married her 12 years ago in the Soviet Union; the next day she emigrated to Israel and later proceeded to lead the worldwide campaign for her husband’s release. During her long vigil, Avital Shcharansky changed. She became a personality in her own right, familiar with heads of state and other influential world figures. She turned to religion, becoming an orthodox Jew.

“I always felt our communication, spiritually,” Shcharansky told me. “But I was surprised how we started understanding one another from the very first moment. I was also surprised my wife had learned about politics, about different political figures. When I sent her to Israel, she wasn’t at all interested in politics,” he recalled. He spoke admiringly of the mammoth campaign for his release that she organized and led.

Will he become as religious as his wife? “I think I am religious,” said Shcharansky. “Religion meant a lot to me during all those years in the Soviet Union, but I never had a religious education.” Pointing to his wife’s religious books lining the shelves in their living room, he said he now has a chance to study. He was amused to read in the Israeli newspapers, “how serious the problems are which face our family because my wife is religious and I am not. The interesting thing is the moment I stop reading these papers, the problems disappear. They exist only in the imagination of the reporters.”

In solitary confinement, did Shcharansky believe he would ever be free again? “I was optimistic and ready to be out at any time,” he said. “On the other hand, I tried never to make concrete plans or to dream because I knew many people who relied too much on their hopes and lost their sense of reality. So, I simply prevented myself from thinking about being free. But I felt deep contact with Avital and my people and my country. I was sure that my people and my friends hadn’t forgotten me.”