This interview was conducted by Pamela Paresky in Israel in February 2024.

Transcript

Pamela Paresky: Given the current events, I wanted to start by asking you about Navalny. What do you think happened?

Natan Sharansky: Putin killed Navalny. Whether he did it by poisoning him, or he did it by beating him to death, or simply through permanently keeping him in a punishing cell, and it was slow.

It does not matter. What’s important is that Navalny did more than anybody in the world to unmask the real nature of this regime, the dictatorial and corrupt nature of the regime and Putin personally, and he showed unbelievable courage and moral clarity doing all this.

Putin is a very revengeful dictator. He saw real danger in the influence which Navalny had on the minds of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. Putin decided to kill him long ago and Putin didn’t succeed by poisoning him. To the contrary, this poisoning turned into the biggest humiliation for Putin. So Putin did it a different way. But that was the way it was. It was revenge.

PP: When you say punishing cell, what is that?

NS: A punishing cell, or car cell, is a small room, two or three metres, it’s very cold, and they take away all your warm clothes and they give you three pieces of bread and three cups of hot water a day, and there’s nobody you can talk to. You are in full isolation.

Navalny wrote to me from prison, and I answered him, then he wrote again. In our exchange of letters, there was such a black humour. I told him that I spent 405 days in a punishing cell and that was a record, but I was afraid that he was going to beat it, and we were laughing about it.

He didn’t beat my record because Putin killed him too early for this, but he spent more than 300 days in a punishment cell and that’s very, very difficult. I never heard about such a thing. And just a day before, he was brought to trial for another 15 days and he was joking. He was very strong and he never lost his ironic sense of humour, making fun of all these guards.

I don’t know what happened the day after this. Maybe Putin simply saw his smile and said, “How long can this guy smile?”

Once, when I had spent 100 days in a punishing cell, I fell unconscious and they took me to the hospital and then brought me back. In my case, Soviet leaders didn’t want me to die. They were very sensitive to the pressure from the West. Today Putin is not sensitive because he’s already burned all his bridges.

PP: Do you think that Navalny embodied a commitment to something greater than his own survival and his own self-interest? People will say it’s about sacrificing your life, but I think it’s more like something to give your life for.

NS: Yes. By going back to Russia, knowing that almost for sure he’d be killed, but definitely that he would spend many, many years in prison, Navalny showed clearly that physical survival is not the highest value, and he gave a message to all Russians: “I am not afraid, you also should not be afraid.”

It is very important when you’re in prison, when they threaten you with death, to see that if your aim is physical survival, then you can confess to anything they want. That’s why the aim cannot be your physical survival. The aim is that even though you don’t know how long you will be alive, you know that until you die you will be a free person. That depends on you.

PP: You’ve talked about freedom and belonging and that these are fundamental needs. You also spent time where people would have said you weren’t free but, for you, you were free. What is true freedom?

NS: Freedom is that you say what you believe in and do things which you want to do and all your life is in accordance with your beliefs. That’s freedom. You can be restricted physically. You can be put in a punishing cell. They can try to humiliate you in different ways. But you know that they cannot do it. They cannot humiliate you. Only you can humiliate yourself if you betray this idea of freedom that you are living with.

PP: And what does belonging mean?

NS: Belonging means seeing that life has meaning above your own existence. Because if there is no meaning except from your own existence, then we’re like animals. There must be some ideas which are as important for you as your own life and maybe even more, like that you belong to some group of people or to some religious philosophy or you’re professionally involved with a big group that is very interesting for you. It’s very natural. People want to belong to something bigger than their own individual life. That’s identity. These are two very fundamental feelings. Desire to be free means that nobody will tell me what to think and that we belong when there is a group of people who think like you and with whom you have a common mission in this life.

PP: What did you start to notice on college campuses 20 years ago and what do you think is happening now?

NS: In 2003, being a minister in the Israeli government, I had a tour over the universities because I was looking for the roots of antisemitism.

It was the time of the Second Intifada. In Israel, we felt that we were fighting against terror and defending all the world. There were terrorists attacks and suicide bombings practically every day in the streets.

On the other hand, I saw a lot of students who believed in all these lies. There was a film, Jenin Jenin, which was inventing the lie that Israel was committing genocide in those days. I heard from one student. She was a postgraduate student in Harvard business school and she explained to me that she wanted very much to sign a letter in support of Israel but she knew for sure that there would be three professors who were very important for her career who would not like it. That’s why she decided to be silent for a few years until her career was guaranteed.

I remember I thought, “My God, it’s not just in Moscow University in my days when people were double thinkers, it's here in the free world.” I saw and I heard it more and more on different campuses, how people are afraid to identify themselves with Israel. They can deceive themselves that it’s only for the time being at the beginning of their careers, but in fact from now they will be double thinkers, like Soviet citizens who were double thinkers. I came and I said to Ariel Sharon that I really believe that the most important battlefield for the future of the Jewish people is American universities.

All these postmodern, neo-Marxist critical theories emerged in addition to anti-colonialism and as a result, Israel became not only the last remnant of colonialism, but so did Jews, this white, successful part of population. It was part of the theories which divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, where the oppressors are always wrong and the oppressed are always right. That’s what politically correct means: that you should not permit the oppressors to speak and to make the oppressed feel uncomfortable. All this cancel culture, it’s all different sides of the neo-Marxist world in which I grew up.

It was clear that always in these theories, Israel and Jews will be on the wrong side of history, and Palestinians will be always on the right side of history. That was the base of this new antisemitism, which puts together classical demonisation, hatred of Jews, with this newly-born progressive demonisation of Israel. I saw it beginning 20 years ago.

I started a number of projects later, but there’s no doubt that today this classical antisemitism on the wings of progressive theories went and turned into the powerful, aggressive, anti-liberal movement in the world today.

PP: I’d like you to say a little more about doublethink because doublethink is obviously something that’s necessary in a communist environment and now we’re seeing it in the neo-Marxist environment. Can you say more for people who don’t know what doublethink is?

NS: In every dictatorial regime, there are three categories of people.

There’s true believers, those who believe in the ideology, whether it’s Marxist ideology or some other ideology, but they believe that’s the only way the authorities should deal with these people. They are loyal citizens.

Then, there are dissidents, those who speak openly against the regime and are ready to pay with their freedom, or sometimes their life.

Then there is the third class of people who don’t believe in this ideology and who think that this is a bad regime, but they’re afraid to speak, and pretend they’re loyal citizens. They behave like loyal citizens and they’re all marching on demonstrations in solidarity with their leaders. They’re the doublethinkers but you cannot really say, if you cannot look into the minds of these people, who is a loyal citizen and who is a doublethinker.

What you can say, or what I said in my book, The Case for Democracy, almost 20 years ago, is that the longer a dictatorship lasts the bigger is the number of doublethinkers because more and more people feel the restrictions of the dictatorship and are unhappy with these restrictions, and they’re becoming doublethinkers. Revolution is when big masses of doublethinkers cross the line and become dissidents.

I propose a test for if you live in a free society. It’s the town square test: if you go to the centre of the town and can say whatever you think and you will not be put into prison or punished then it is a free society. You can have many problems in that society but you can speak freely.

I felt uncomfortable seeing 20 years ago that this phenomenon of doublethink had come to the free society and today many polls and studies show that more and more Americans, especially young Americans, prefer not to express publicly their views on one or another question. That means that America is becoming a society of doublethinkers. That’s very dangerous. The moment citizens are ready to sacrifice their freedom, nothing will stop the regime from becoming illiberal or even anti-liberal. We cannot afford to lose America as a liberal country because that’s the only hope for the world to stay free.

PP: You resigned over the withdrawal from Gaza. Say more about what that was about for you. You were prescient in that you said that just having a separation between Israel and the Palestinians is not going to allow for peace and that we have to care about a Palestinian free society too.