Natan Sharansky

Natan Sharansky (נתן שרנסקי; Натан Щаранский; Натан Щаранський; born 20 January 1948) is an Israeli politician, human rights activist, and author.

Sharansky was born into a Jewish family on January 20, 1948 in the city of Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union.

A former Soviet dissident, he spent nine years imprisoned as a refusenik during the 1970s and 1980s.

Sharansky was denied an exit visa to Israel in 1973.

The reason given for denial of the visa was that he had been given access, at some point in his career, to information vital to Soviet national security and could not now be allowed to leave.

After becoming a refusenik, Sharansky became a human rights activist, working as a translator for dissident and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, and spokesman for the Moscow Helsinki Group and a leader for the rights of refuseniks.

On 15 March 1977 Sharansky was arrested by the KGB, then headed by Yuri Andropov, on multiple charges, including high treason and spying for several Americans.

The accusation stated that he passed to the West lists of over 1,300 refuseniks, many of whom were denied exit visas because of their knowledge of state secrets, which resulted in a publication by Robert C. Toth, "Russ Indirectly Reveal 'State Secrets': Clues in Denials of Jewish Visas".

High treason carried the death penalty.

The following year, in 1978, he was sentenced to 13 years of forced labor.

Sharansky spent time in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison, followed by Vladimir and Chistopol prisons, where for part of the time he was placed in solitary confinement.

His health deteriorated, to the point of endangering his life.

Later he was detained in Perm 35, a post-Stalin-Gulag-type so-called "strict regimen colony" in Perm Oblast.

During his imprisonment, he embarked on hunger strikes to protest confiscation of his mail, and he was force-fed at least 35 times, which he describes as "a sort of torture".

Sharansky later opposed force-feeding of Palestinian detainees.

His father, Boris Shcharansky, a journalist from a Zionist background who worked for an industrial journal, died in 1980, before Natan was freed.

His mother, Ida Milgrom, visited him in prison and stubbornly waged a nine-year battle for her son's release from Soviet prison and labor camps.

She was permitted to follow her son to Israel six months after he left the Soviet Union.

He attended physics and mathematics high school No.17 in Donetsk.

As a child, he was a chess prodigy.

He performed in simultaneous and blindfold exhibitions, usually against adults.

At the age of 15, he won the championship in his native Donetsk.

Sharansky graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

When incarcerated in solitary confinement, he claims to have maintained his sanity by playing chess against himself in his mind.

He took his current Hebrew name in 1986 when he was freed from Soviet incarceration as part of a prisoner exchange and received an Israeli passport with his new name.

Natan Sharansky is married to Avital Sharansky and has two daughters, Rachel and Hannah.

In the Soviet Union, his application to marry Avital was denied by the authorities.

They were married in a friend's apartment, in a ceremony not recognized by the government, as the USSR only recognized civil marriage and not religious marriage.

As a result of an international campaign led by his wife, Avital Sharansky (including assistance from East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, New York Congressman Benjamin Gilman, and Rabbi Ronald Greenwald), Sharansky was released on 11 February 1986 as part of a larger exchange of detainees.

He was the first political prisoner released by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Sharansky and three low-level Western spies (Czech citizen Jaroslav Javorský and West German citizens Wolf-Georg Frohn, and Dietrich Nistroy) were exchanged for Czech spies Karl Koecher and Hana Koecher held in the United States, Soviet spy Yevgeni Zemlyakov, Polish spy Marian Zacharski, and East German spy Detlef Scharfenorth (the latter three held in West Germany).

The men were released in two stages, with Sharansky freed first then whisked away, accompanied by the United States Ambassador to West Germany, Richard R. Burt.

The exchange took place on the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and East Germany, which had been used before for this purpose.

Sharansky immediately emigrated to Israel, adopting the Hebrew name Natan and eventually simplifying his surname to Sharansky.

Due to his age and poor health, he was exempted from the standard compulsory three years' IDF service, but had to undergo three weeks of military training and do a stint in the Civil Guard.

Sharansky beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition in Israel in 1996.

After Sharansky graduated from university, he began working for a secret state research laboratory.

Sharansky lived near Sokolniki Park, on Kolodezniy Pereulok in Moscow.

In his spare time, Sharansky would coach young chess players at the famous chess club in the park.

He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018, and currently serves as Chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), an American non-partisan organization.