The late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who perished under mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison last week, corresponded with former Jewish Soviet Refusenik Natan Sharansky while in prison, Bari Weiss reported in the Free Press.
In their exchanges of letters, Navalny stated that he read Sharansky's book “Fear No Evil," and was inspired by the older man's story. He even joked that not much had changed in the Russian prison system in the decades since Sharanky's years in Soviet prisons in the 1970s and 1980s.
In his first letter, dated March 2023, Navalny wrote, “I want to thank you for this book as it has helped me a lot and continues to help. Yes, I am at SHIZO now, but when reading about your 400 days spent in the ‘punishment cell’ on decreased food rations, one understands that there are people who pay much higher prices for their convictions.”
"Your book gives hope because the similarity between the two systems—the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia—their ideological resemblance, the hypocrisy that serves as the very basis of their essence, and the continuity from the former to the latter—all this guarantees an equally inevitable collapse. Like the one we witnessed," he wrote.
Sharansky wrote in response that receiving a letter from someone imprisoned in a Russian jail for political reasons was like receiving a letter from his “alma mater.”
The two joked a lot in their letters. Sharanky's second letter ended, “Judging by all of your time in SHIZO, you will soon beat all of my records. I hope you don’t succeed in this.”
Sharasnky was arrested and imprisoned for nine years for seeking to immigrate to Israel. Upon his release in 1986, following an international campaign led by his wife Avital, he moved to Israel and published his memoir of his experience as a political prisoner. He has served as a minister in the Israeli cabinet and as chairman of the Jewish Agency.