Natan Sharansky is an Israeli politician, author, human rights activist and a former Soviet refusenik. He was born Anatoly Borisovich Scharansky in Donetsk in the Ukraine on the 20th January 1948. At that time the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
During his teens he was a chess prodigy, performing in blindfold exhibitions against adults. Sharansky claims that during his imprisonment in the Soviet Union he played chess in his mind against himself. In 1996 in a chess exhibition in Israel he beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
He graduated from the Physical Technical Institute in Moscow with a degree in mathematics and became involved with the human rights movement when he worked as an English interpreter for Andrei Sakharov. He emerged as a leading spokesman and dissident for the movement for the rights of Soviet Jewry.
Sharansky applied for an exit visa to Israel in 1973, which was refused. After that he was at the forefront of Jewish refusenik actions until 1977 when he was arrested and in 1978 he was convicted on trumped up charges of spying on behalf of the United States and sentenced to 13 years in prison. After 16 months in Lefortovo prison most of the time in a special “torture cell” in solitary confinement he was transferred to a prison camp in Siberia.
Sharansky was released from prison on the 11th February 1986 as a result of a campaign waged by his wife Avital in conjunction with international organizations and he arrived at last in Israel on that same night.
In Israel, Sharansky devoted himself to promoting the cause of Soviet Jewry and formed the political party Yisrael B’Aliyah. He represented this party in the Israeli Knesset from 1996 until January 2003, serving first as Minister of Industry and Trade, then as Minister of the Interior, after that minister of Trade and Industry and then Deputy Prime Minister.
In 2006 Natan Sharansky resigned from the Knesset and in June 2008 he was sworn in as chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Natan Sharansky has been honored in many ways in the United States. In 1986 he received the Congressional Gold Medal and in 2006 the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He met personally with President George W Bush who was an admirer of his Book “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Freedom and Terror” which has received attention from many quarters.
Natan Sharansky’s book “Fear No Evil” which is his memoir has been translated into nine languages.