A tale of two dissidents: Alexei Navalny’s moving letters from jail to Natan Sharansky

Natan Sharansky: His account of nine years in the Gulag gave hope to Alexei Navalny (Photo by GALI TIBBON)AFP via Getty Images

“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.”

Sharansky replied immediately that he was both shocked and excited to hear from a man he so admired, from his “alma mater”, the “university” where he had spent so much of his youth.

He wrote from Jerusalem on the eve of Passover and concluded: “I wish to you, Alexei, and to all of Russia, an Exodus as soon as possible.”

Navalny wrote back: “In your alma mater everything is as it was. Traditions are honoured. On Friday evening, they let me out of the SHIZO [punishment cell], today on Monday — I got another 15 days.”

He added: “Everything according to Ecclesiastes: what was, will be.”

Sharansky replied: “I know that for your freedom you are having to pay — with health, worries for your family, and eventually with your life.”

His words were prophetic. Navalny died in a Siberian penal colony on 16 February, aged 47. He had returned to Russia from Germany in 2021 after being treated for a near-fatal Novichok nerve agent poisoning attack, assumed to have been carried out by Russian agents.