NATAN SHARANSKY
13
in
Bloomingdale's - because even in little shops I
am
lost; that is why I
was afraid to go there. Even the choice between all the types of
orange juice or cereal in the morning - I can't understand how you
Americans have so many cereals. You have so many nice choices,
but you spend all your lives on such things. When you have thought
about more serious things, day and night, in a Soviet prison, then
you notice that your life has now become very shallow. So then you
think , "Well, who knows, maybe Gorbachev will go so far in his
reforms that he will permit me to go for two weeks , no more of
course , to a punishment cell , and there I'll really have some time to
think about important matters ."
But where does our power come from? I became free only when
I went back to my roots. And then I could speak for my people and
for the others . I remember that seventy years ago we came from the
same roots . During these seventy years there was a revolution and
Russian revolutionary programs that destroyed Jewish culture,
among other things . Then of course, there were the Nazis and the
Holocaust , and finally there was Israel. And if you survived it was
only because you were coming back to our roots, because you
remembered that freedom is inseparable from the Soviet Jews and
from the rest of the people. That is exactly the feeling I have these
days : that I cannot be free until the rest of the Soviet people are free.
That is what keeps me going, pushing people to organize demonstra–
tions , to continue pressing Gorbachev.
I respect President Reagan for what he did during the recent
summit conference : he put human rights in the center of the negotia–
tions , and he met the
refusniks
and dissidents , which gave them so
much publicity. But after this he said, "And now I understand that it
is all in bureaucratic hands." I can understand that he wanted to be
nice to the Soviet Union , but he almost nullified his own message .
We must remember that people in the Soviet Union still are viewed
as the property of the government. There are exciting changes in
Soviet policy, but the Soviet Union will go only as far as we push it
toward releasing our people. The government is only concerned
about how to save the Soviet economy, how to mobilize its own
resources and Western resources to save the economy. In this
respect Gorbachev is definitely a realist; he understands the dangers
of his system better than anybody else. But the fate of hundreds of
thousands depends on our ability to link his interests with our in–
terests and to continue to press them.
