Speaking Truth to Tyrants

When Ronald Reagan died last year, Natan Sharansky authored an electrifying tribute. Sharansky spent nearly a decade in Soviet (i.e., actual) gulags, and was there on March 8, 1983, when President Reagan first called the Soviet Union an "evil empire":

In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

At the time, I never imagined that three years later, I would be in the White House telling this story to the president. When he summoned some of his staff to hear what I had said, I understood that there had been much criticism of Reagan's decision to cast the struggle between the superpowers as a battle between good and evil. Well, Reagan was right and his critics were wrong.

I reflect on Sharansky's advice often, and deploy it in debate, as first-hand foreign policy evidence. Supporting freedom and opposing tyranny topples walls. Accommodation becomes appeasement--"the Cold War [was] won by strength, not by Nixonian détente. Sixty years of 'all-carrot-all-the-time' freed fewer than two years of Bush's carrot and stick."

But those truths shouldn't obscure Sharansky's incredible story, as Jay Nordlinger writes in the current National Review on dead tree (no link yet):

Sharansky spent nine years in the Gulag, a harrowing time in which he demonstrated what resistance is. More than 400 of those days were spent in punishment cells; more than 200 were spent on hunger strikes. His refusal to concede anything to the Soviet state was almost superhuman. This was true to the very last. When they relinquished him to the East Germans, they told him to walk straight to a waiting car — "Don’t make any turns." Sharansky zig-zagged his way to that car.

Nordlinger recounts a story new to me--about Sharansky's pocket book of Psalms, a gift from his wife, Avital, days before he was arrested:

He went through hell to hang on to this book. The authorities often deprived him of it. Once, he went on a “work strike,” entailing several months of the punishment cell — until he got that book back. In another period, “I took my Psalm book and for days on end . . . recited all one hundred and fifty of King David’s psalms, syllable by syllable.” . . . One other thing about the Psalm book: It “was the only material evidence [through the nine years] of my mystical tie with Avital.”

Toward the very end of his ordeal, at the airport in Moscow — Sharansky had no idea what was happening to him — he refused to board the plane before they gave him back his Psalm book. In front of photographers, he dropped to the snow, yelling for it. They gave it back to him. Once aboard — when they told him he was being released — he recited the Psalm he had always designated for his liberation day, Psalm 30: “I will extol thee, O Lord; for thou hast lifted me up, and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me.”

Anyone not moved can't be inspired. Anyone doubting the effect of fortitude -- and sometime force -- isn't listening.