Today’s dissident corresponded to yesterday’s dissident. Alexei Navalny wrote from his penal colony to Natan Sharansky to thank him for his book “Fear No Evil” in which he recounted his imprisonment in the Soviet gulags. The exchange of letters, after Navalny’s death in prison, was revealed by the website “The Free Press”. «I want to thank you very much for this book which has helped me so much and continues to help me. Yes, I’m in Shizo (the punishment cell, ed.), but when I read about your 400 days in a punishment cell with decreasing food rations, one understands that there are those who have paid an even higher price for their beliefs », Navalny wrote to Sharansky in a first letter dated March 2023, after he was released from prison thanks to his lawyers, who had provided him with the book. «Your book gave me hope because the similarity between the two systems – the USSR and Putin’s Russia – their ideological similarities, the hypocrisy at the basis of their essence, the continuity from one to the other, all of this guarantees an equally inevitable collapse”, Navalny wrote again.
The response from Sharansky, who says he is an “admirer” of Navalny, was emotional. And that he resorts to the black humor of the gulag prisoners, saying he felt like “an old man receiving a letter from his alma mater, the university where he spent many years of his youth.” Sharansky, who spent nine years in the Soviet gulags until 1986, explains that he wrote his book as a survival manual for those held captive by the KGB. “I wish you, no matter how hard it is physically, to maintain your inner freedom,” Sharansky continues, adding that he hopes that Navalny does not surpass his record of staying at Shizo. Sharansky and Navalny will write two more letters to each other. The former Soviet dissident, who later emigrated to Israel where he was also a minister, revealed in his letters that his book was also read by another Russian dissident currently in prison, Vladimir Kara Murza.