Natan Sharansky
FREE
I wrote my memoir,
Fear No Evil,
partially because the
world really shouldn't be naive. The free world should understand
how different their world is from the one where slavery is not only
deep in the system but also deep in the minds of the people, where a
person is in fact the property of the state, and where the state decides
what a person should be permitted to do today and tomorrow. We
must not deceive ourselves . Although there is a new Soviet leader, a
new type of leader, there is definitely no change in human rights.
And we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this leader is
making exciting reforms, which he really isn't, or that he is changing
the basic principle of the system, the principle that people should get
instructions from the state.
Glasnost,
after
all,
is a new system of in–
structions, and the best proof of this is that many of the people about
whom I wrote are still in prison under the same conditions which I
described. The crime ofthe majority of them is that they were saying
some years ago what Gorbachev is saying today. I think that it is im–
possible to understand the system unless you know how developed it
is, how it does everything possible to destroy the individual. But
there was another personal reason for me to write this story. When I
left the prison I felt a big burden, something inside of me that
wouldn't let me be free. I felt that I had to share this experience with
others.
Coming back to the difference between the systems, you must
always remember that when we use the words
trial, prison, court,
lawyer,
state, individual, law,
you have to apply them to different
systems, Eastern and Western. The words are the same; the mean–
ing is absolutely different. And what was, after all, this so-called in–
vestigation of me? The Soviet authorities accused me of being a spy,
but President Carter said that I was not. Of course it was important
that President Carter said it and that people in the West who had
doubts knew that I wasn't a spy, but the Soviet people were not told
this . Andropov, who was the head of the K.G.B . and signed the first
paper of my case, the first of 15,000 pages of my case, knew very
Editor's Note: "Free" was first presented as a talk given at the Ninety-Second Street
Y
in New York City on June 12 , 1988.
