Natan Sharansky

Studying Sharansky
By Larry Gordon
Published on Thursday, November 05, 2009

He blazed a trail that simply made things possible. He was just one man almost crushed by seemingly insurmountable odds. But he pushed back stubbornly and perhaps just a little harder than others, and that served as a catalyst for what would become a revolution.

I’ve followed the fashion in which Natan Sharansky has evolved since his days as a young man in the Soviet Union, jailed by Communist regimes because he was a Jew determined to express his Jewishness in some way, even though he was brought up in a religious vacuum and knew little about the details of what it means to be a practicing Jew.

As he languished in an assortment of Soviet prisons in the 1970s and early 1980s, protests on the outside, mostly by student groups based in New York, kept his name in the news. These street protests in front of the Soviet consulate in New York, at the UN, and at Russian cultural events managed to shame the Soviets into being more forthcoming on the issue of Russian emigration.

…Sharansky was born in Donetsk in the Ukraine and graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As a child, his bio says, he was a chess prodigy. He played chess matches in simultaneous and blindfolded displays, usually against adults. When he was 15, he won the championship in his native town. He says that when imprisoned and held for long stretches of time in solitary confinement, he played chess against himself in his mind. Sharansky beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in Israel in 1996.

Here is the full article.