Story of Natan Sharansky (From the book 'Bargaining with the devil')

Anatoli (Natan) Sharansky was twenty-nine years old when he was seized by the Russian secret police, the KGB, taken to Lefortovo prison, stripped naked and searched, and told that he was being charged with treason, a capital offense. He was accused of passing state secrets to the CIA. The charges were bogus. His real offense was that he had become a public spokesman for the Soviet Zionist movement. He had regularly provided the major American and European television and newspaper correspondents in the Soviet Union with interviews and information about “refuseniks”—
Soviet Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate to Israel.
The KGB wanted to make a deal with Sharansky, and they used a combination of carrots and sticks in their efforts to induce his cooperation.

In exchange for a confession and a condemnation of the refusenik movement, they offered Sharansky a short prison sentence, after which he would be free to leave the Soviet Union and join his wife in Israel. Implicit in the deal was the understanding that once Sharansky had left the Soviet Union, he could repudiate his confession as coerced. The stick included subjecting Sharansky to a merciless campaign of psychological torture, social isolation, continuing threats of extreme punishment, and harsh conditions.

Instead of cooperating, Sharansky adopted a stance of absolute refusal to make any deal with the KGB. He faced down a succession of high-level KGB interrogators, refusing to confess to anything or to provide any information that would implicate his friends and colleagues. He pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges, dismissed the state-assigned lawyer (whowas a Communist Party member), and insisted on the right to defend himself during the trial. He then used the trial as a forum to denounce the charges as a sham and vilify the Soviet regime. He was convicted on the bogus espionage charge and condemned to a thirteen-year sentence: three years in prison, with the remainder in a forced labor camp.
For the next nine years, Sharansky endured harsh physical conditions in Soviet prisons and labor camps. “During the long months of interrogation and isolation before my trial, and for all the years that followed, my captors were determined to break me, to make me con-fess to crimes I had never committed,” he later wrote in his memoir.4 He steadfastly refused all forms of cooperation, and even went on a nearly fatal hunger strike as a protest against the authorities.
Finally, in 1986, the Soviets released Sharansky in a prisoner exchange with the United States. Sharansky was released in Berlin and the United States released a captured Soviet spy.

To the very end, Sharansky refused to bargain with the Devil. On February 10, 1986, Sharansky was flown to East Berlin, accompanied by a KGB agent. A car was waiting to take him to the border. As they stepped off the plane, the KGB agent instructed Sharansky, “You see that car … Go straight to it and don't make any turns. Is it agreed?” Sharansky replied,
“Since when have I started making agreements with the KGB? You know that I never agree with the KGB about anything. If you tell me to go straight, I'll go crooked.” He then defiantly zigzagged his way to the car.
The next day he walked across the Glienicke Bridge to his freedom.

~ ~ ~

Sharansky's decision provides a rich context for exploring the issues raised earlier in this chapter. Sharansky himself has provided a wealth of information in his memoir and subsequent interviews.5 How did he make this decision—and continue to uphold it during the long years of his imprisonment? Was it based on analysis or intuition? Was it a pragmatic decision or a moral one? Above all, was it wise? 

Background

Sharansky was born in 1948 in Stalino, a city in the Ukraine. While ethnically Jewish, his family, like most Jews during the Soviet period, was not religiously observant. From an early age, Sharansky was taught that Jews were often persecuted and that expressing any form of dissent was dangerous. He was five years old when Stalin died in 1953, and he remembers the day vividly. His father told him that Stalin had been a “terrible butcher” who had killed “many innocent people,” that shortly before his death Stalin had again begun persecuting Jews,6 and that another pogrom might soon be in the offing. Moreover, “Papa warned us not to repeat these comments to anyone. This is when I first learned that in order to survive in Soviet society you had to function on two levels at once: what you really thought and what you allowed yourself to tell other people. I lived with this dual reality until 1973.”
Sharansky grew up “unaware of the religion, language, culture and history of my people.” As a youth he had little interest in a religion that could only be practiced in secret. “Because Jews of my generation had no desire to live a double life, or to be handicapped by a Jewish affiliation that meant little to us, we constantly looked for a means of escape.” Sharansky's means were his brains—he was a chess prodigy who excelled at math and had a passion for learning English.
Because of his mathematical gifts, and despite being a Jew, Sharansky was accepted to the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a prestigious, highly competitive school that liked to compare itself to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While a student there, inspired by Andrei Sakharov and his Committee for Human Rights,
Sharansky became interested both in human rights and the Soviet Zionist movement, a dissident group that sought to pressure the Soviet regime to grant Jews the right to leave the USSR for Israel and thus “make aliyah.”
Through this movement he developed a strong Jewish identity and the courage to speak out: “[F]or the first time in my life, I was no longer afraid to say what I really believed—about my fellow citizens, the country I lived in, and the values I adhered to. At the age of twenty-five I finally learned what a joy it was to be free.”
In October 1973, through his work with the Soviet Zionist movement, Sharansky met Natasha (later Avital) Stieglitz, who quickly became the love of his life. They soon moved in together. Later that year, Sharansky followed Natasha's example and applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union for Israel. In doing so, he knew it was only a matter of time before he was fired from his job as a computer specialist at the Institute for Oil and Gas.
Natasha's exit visa came through in mid-1974. The couple struggled with the question of whether she should leave without him, and if so, whether they should marry before her departure. They decided they should marry and that she should not put her exit visa at risk through a delay. They married on July 4, 1974, in a Jewish ceremony. The next day she left the Soviet Union for Israel, where she took the name Avital. Sharansky, hoping that his own exit visa would come through quickly, assured her that he'd be there within six months at the latest. In fact, they were not to be reunited for twelve years.
Sharansky increasingly devoted his energy and time to the Soviet Zionist movement, especially after he lost his job in 1975. Because of his excellent English, he became an important spokesman for the Jewish dissidents with the Western press. He developed close relationships with the Moscow correspondents of the major media from America and Europe, and frequently granted interviews and provided information about the plight of Soviet Jews in general and refuseniks in particular.
After several years, the Soviet authorities decided to crack down on the movement. On March 4, 1977, the newspaper Izvestia published a full-page article denouncing Sharansky and several other Jewish activists, accusing them of passing state secrets to the CIA. Soon thereafter, Sharansky was arrested.
After his arrest, Sharansky ended up spending nine years in prison and labor camps, including more than four hundred days in unheated, damp, four-by- six-foot “punishment cells,” with half rations. He also spent about two hundred days on hunger strikes.
He chose this course instead of joining his wife in Israel. Based on what he knew at the time, was this a rational decision? It certainly looked as though he was analyzing the situation rationally. He was a chess master. He had studied game theory and was well grounded inmathematics. He saw himself as locked in a strategic contest with the KGB, and he relished formulating and refining his tactics. Even before his arrest, he had been interrogated by the KGB on several occasions and had framed these dealings as akin to a chess game. He took comfort in thinking through in advance what the KGB's moves might be, and how he might respond and defend.
I had trained myself not to pay attention to the threats of the KGB interrogators I occasionally met with. Instead of answering their questions, I told them only what I wanted them to hear. In their presence I felt like a chess player facing a much weaker opponent.
They did exactly what they were supposed to, and I knew all their moves in advance: their threats and warnings, their attempts at blackmail, their flattery and their promises.
During the key period between his arrest and trial, he had sixteen months to refine his game. He also drew upon the memory of a computer program he had written as part of his graduate thesis, titled “Simulating the Decision-Making Process in Conflict Situations Based on the Chess Endgame.” He remembered that “an important element in my program was a hierarchical list, a 'tree' of goals and conditions for attaining them. And now, as I stared at the chessboard in my cell, it occurred to me that I could take a similar approach in the game that I was about to play against the KGB.”
Now let's pay close attention to Sharansky's description of his thought process.
What are the goals of this game? I asked myself. Clearly it was impossible to establish a goal of “minimizing the possible punishment,” for that would mean submitting to the will of the KGB.
After some thought, I decided upon three goals, and I sketched them out on a scrap of toilet paper, part of the daily ration of rough tissue paper the guard had given me at breakfast: Obstruct → Study →
Expose. (Emphasis added.)Upon further thought, he changed the first goal slightly. “Unfortunately, it wasn't in my power to obstruct, so I neatly crossed out that word and replaced it with a more modest goal: 'Not to cooperate.' ” Next he had to decide what it meant “not to cooperate”—what he would disclose, what he would not disclose. He spent a considerable amount of time diagramming the ends and means with each goal, dividing each into “more elementary parts” until it looked like a tree.
Analysts often construct decision trees to analyze rational decision- making under conditions of uncertainty. But on closer inspection,
Sharansky's tree looks suspiciously bare—in fact, it's missing a couple of branches. If Spock had been at Sharansky's side during this harrowing period, he wouldn't have let Sharansky get away with this.
Spock would have begun by observing that Sharansky appeared to have three obvious interests. First, to minimize punishment and avoid execution.
Second, to join Avital in Israel. Third, to promote the Soviet Zionist movement. On hearing a statement like the quoted passage above, Spock would immediately protest that Sharansky makes no mention of any interest in saving his own life, regaining his freedom, or joining his wife in Israel.
In fact, Sharansky has already cut those branches right off the tree. He appears to have jumped ahead a few steps and presumed that it would be impossible to negotiate a deal that would serve these interests at an acceptable cost—that any negotiated deal that even remotely served these interests would mean “submitting to the will of the KGB.”
Spock would have said, “Not so fast. This sounds rather like zero-sum thinking, with strong overtones of demonization and moralism.” At the very least, Spock would have insisted that Sharansky consider all his alternatives and weigh the pros and cons systematically. We will come back to this issue later.
Now let's return to Sharansky's thought process. If he made no deal with the KGB, what were his alternatives? There was really only one alternative: to defy the KGB and insist that his case be tried. Sharansky was very clearheaded about the possible outcomes if he went to trial. He understood that there was no chance that he would be acquitted. Given the reality of the Soviet system, his conviction was preordained once he was arrested and charged. The only question was the penalty. Under the Soviet statute underwhich he was charged, the penalty was either death or fifteen years in prison. To most utilitarian analysts, that would qualify as a terrible BATNA.
What were the odds that Sharansky would be executed? He had no way of knowing. On the one hand, the KGB clearly intended to make an example of him. Many refusenik dissidents had been arrested before, but they had been charged with the lesser crime of participating in “anti-Soviet” activities, which ordinarily carried only a five-year sentence. Sharansky was the first refusenik to be charged with a capital crime, and the KGB never let him forget it. Indeed, the KGB tried to give him the impression that the risk of execution was very great if he didn't cooperate. Interrogators repeatedly used the word rasstrel: death by gunfire. However, Sharansky also knew that his captors had an incentive to exaggerate this risk in order to make him confess.
Sharansky's own perception of the risk of execution fluctuated wildly during the sixteen months of his pretrial imprisonment and interrogation.
Initially, he thought a death sentence was extremely unlikely—little more than a theoretical possibility—for two reasons. First, the Soviet regime of the 1970s was imposing capital punishment far less often than in the Stalinist period, when many dissidents had been summarily executed.
Second, Sharansky was well-known in the West and knew that Avital would do everything possible to ensure that his case received continuing publicity.
He reasoned that the KGB could not afford to kill him or keep him completely hidden from the outside world because they would have to provide some proof to the media that he was alive. For the same reason, he believed that they would likely not kill his parents and brother, who remained in the Soviet Union.
But later Sharansky came to feel that the threat of execution was real. At a critical time shortly before the trial, when the KGB tried hardest to coerce him, they applied a variety of psychological pressures to make him believe that rasstrel was a substantial possibility. His cellmate, a likely KGB collaborator, continually made sardonic jokes about how the executioner would soon smear Sharansky's head with iodine (to mark the target for the bullet) if he kept up his stubborn refusal to deal with the authorities.
The KGB reinforced these “jokes” with their own comments. One of the more sophisticated interrogators, named Volodin, made statements such as:We tolerated you for a long time. We warned you and your friends.
But even our patience has its limits. You ought to know our Soviet history. In every case where somebody was charged with crimes such as yours and did not confess and repent, he was executed. Well, not every case. There were times where there was no death penalty, and the accused received twenty-five years. We're not threatening you.
I'm merely explaining your situation, which is my duty as an investigator.
Assuming he escaped the firing squad, however, Sharansky knew he could count on a long prison sentence. This, too, carried great risk and uncertainty. Because of the harsh conditions in Soviet prisons and work camps, he might not survive. Even if he stayed alive, he might not survive psychologically; he feared that at some point in his incarceration, the KGB would finally break him and extract a confession. In his calmer moments, he thought the KGB would eventually let him go, perhaps in a prisoner swap with the West or out of sheer pressure from world opinion. But he had no idea whether this would happen in five, thirteen, or thirty years.
Did Sharansky have a realistic sense of what kind of negotiated deal might be possible? The answer is yes. For the sixteen months between his arrest and his trial, Sharansky was continuously subjected to KGB interrogation. Reasonably early in the process he got the first hint of the kind of deal the KGB might offer if he were prepared to negotiate.
[The interrogator's] tactic was to tell me about two other prisoners he had recently dealt with who had decided to cooperate with their investigators. They were both foreigners, a Dutchman and a Frenchman, and were arrested for passing out dissident literature. As I could see from the protocols of their interrogation [which the KGB shared with him], each had loudly insisted on his rights, but soon recanted. Then, after returning home, both men had repudiated their confessions, and the Dutchman had even written a book about his imprisonment. [The interrogator's] message was obvious: recant, and you, too, will be released. Then you can say whatever you like.Later the KGB was even more explicit: Our only goal is to defend state interests. You're young, and your wife is waiting for you in Israel. If you help us suppress the anti- government activity of the Zionists and the so-called dissidents, you'll receive a very short sentence—maybe two or three years. Perhaps you can even be freed right after the trial. We can make a deal about everything. We are not judges, of course, but we do have some influence in the courtroom.
The precise terms of a negotiated deal were not spelled out. Exactly how short a sentence would he be offered? Would his parents and his brother be allowed to emigrate as well? Would a confession and general renunciation of the Soviet Zionist movement be enough? Or would the KGB also require that Sharansky reveal information that might jeopardize specific Soviet Zionists who had been his colleagues? Sharansky believed that once he made any concessions, the KGB would “own him,” that he would be forced down a slippery slope and would need to make further and further concessions. Obviously, the scope of Sharansky's required cooperation would rationally affect his assessment of whether to make a deal. But without entering into negotiations, there would be no way to explore the KGB's “bottom line.”
Suppose an acceptable deal could be made that required Sharansky to do no more than confess and generally renounce the Soviet Zionist movement.
Could the KGB be trusted to uphold its end of the bargain? Sharansky said the answer was yes. Although this may be a surprising conclusion to some, he reached it logically—by thinking about the KGB's interests. He knew his enemy well. The KGB was a “repeat player” that needed to negotiate with other refuseniks. Therefore, Sharansky reasoned, the KGB had a strong interest in maintaining its reputation within the refusenik community for honoring such deals. Sharansky reports that his assessment was based on precedent: the KGB's previous dealings with refuseniks who had cooperated.
Sharansky also considered the costs of negotiating.Sitting in my cell, I asked myself the obvious question: why not recant and then repudiate it after I was released? But I already knew the answer. First, any confession I made would mean betraying my friends. When [dissidents] Yakir and Krasin decided to cooperate with the authorities, it was enormously demoralizing for the dissident community. I had no desire to undermine the movements I believed in, or to do anything that would leave my fellow refuseniks and dissidents with an even greater feeling of hopelessness, or of the KGB's own impotence.
Second, I knew that the only reason that the world paid any attention to a small group of Soviet dissidents and Jewish activ-ists was our strong moral position. While collaborating with the KGB might be understandable, it would severely compromise that stance.
The moral righteousness of our struggle was our greatest asset, perhaps our only asset. To cooperate with the KGB would mean letting down our growing number of supporters in the free world and undermining their continued determination to help us.
Finally, on a more practical level, I knew that every time the KGB made a political arrest, it required permission from the political leadership. If I recanted, it would only make it easier for the KGB to receive permission to initiate new repressions and another round of arrests.
If you accept that Sharansky's only interest was promoting the dis-sident movement, he did an impressive job of cost-benefit analysis. As to that interest, Sharansky found the costs of negotiating unacceptable. He believed that any sign of cooperation—even if subsequently recanted—would undermine the movement. He feared that any statement he made to the KGB might be twisted and used to implicate his compatriots in some fabricated crime. He also feared that the movement might lose Western support if its leaders were exposed as collaborators. He concluded that he would better serve the movement by resisting the KGB, and even becoming a martyr if necessary.
Spock would not quickly dismiss this conclusion as irrational. He might question some of Sharansky's predictions and assessments, and he mighteven caution Sharansky against grandiosity. (How could Sharansky be so sure that the movement would be better served if resistance led to his death and martyrdom?) But if we accept that Sharansky's primary interest was the Zionist movement, Spock would have to agree that noncooperation met that interest better than negotiation. Indeed, it strengthened the movement by showing the world that Jewish dissident leaders could not be corrupted by the Soviet regime.
But something remains a puzzle. Why did Sharansky so completely ignore his other interests in this calculus? Why didn't they even count enough to be mentioned? Given how much Sharansky detested the Soviet regime, surely he had some desire to get out of prison and join Avital in Israel, where he could raise a family, speak freely, and further promote the movement. Rationally, it doesn't make sense.
And Sharansky would agree.
In April 2004, he gave an interview at the University of California,
Berkeley, that shed new light on his decision-making process.7 When asked how he decided what course of action to follow when imprisoned by the KGB, his answer had nothing to do with chess games or rational analysis.
The source of his resistance, he said, was a “feeling that as long as you continue saying no, you're a free person. … The moment you say to them 'yes,' you will go back again to that slavery of the loyal Soviet citizen.”
Sharansky added that this “intuitive, automatic feeling”—this desire “to continue being free” and “to enjoy [his] inner freedom in prison”—was “the basis of [his] resistance” (emphasis added). In fact, the basis of his decision was “irrational.”
But reason and logic also played an important role in implementing his goal.
[I]t is very dangerous to rely only on intuition, on non-rational things. As a religious, rational person, I was relying on my instincts, but as a scientist I had to rationalize these instincts. I had to explain to myself, rationally, why I should not cooperate with them. I had to make sure that I was controlling my behavior during interrogations, in spite of the fear, which they could insert in me, threatening to sentenceme to death. That's why I developed the whole system of rationalization, of what are my aims and means.
He makes a similar point about the decision tree he created in prison. In looking back at that tree now, he says in his memoir,
[It] seems like pseudo-science, a pathetic attempt to impose order on my racing and chaotic mind. But at the time it was tremendously important, as the familiar terminology from my scientific training helped me adjust to my new reality. After hours of scattered thoughts,
I was finally able to organize my impulses under the rubric of a logical plan. This alone was comforting, and gave me a sense of control.
In other words, he is admitting that he rigged the analysis. His desire to survive, which favored negotiation, was so powerful that he was afraid he would sacrifice his principles. So he simply removed that “interest” from the equation.
He was very much caught in the Faustian tension I described earlier: a conflict between pragmatism and conscience. And he is telling us, with remarkable frankness, how he managed that tension. He used the intuitive, feeling part of his brain to decide what his goal should be, and then went back and manipulated the analysis so it would lead him to the “right” conclusion.8
The “feelings” that were so decisive here relate to self-respect, moral purpose, and identity. Spock's analysis cannot easily capture these factors, but they are very powerful motivators in human life. Indeed, a constant theme in the memoir was the importance Sharansky attached to maintaining his self-respect and not allowing the KGB or the system to humiliate him.
“When I was stripped and searched, I decided it was best to treat my captors like the weather. A storm can cause you problems, and sometimes those problems can be humiliating. But the storm itself doesn't humiliate you.
Once I understood this, I realized that nothing they did could humiliate me.
I could only humiliate myself—by doing something I might later be ashamed of.” He turned this thought into a kind of mantra: “[N]othing they do can humiliate me, I alone can humiliate myself.”As for the traps we mentioned earlier, they too played an impor-tant role.
It appears that Sharansky used the negative traps as a survival tactic.
Take demonization, for example. Sharansky consciously repressed any impulse to empathize with his interrogators, or even to think they might in any way have any of his interests at heart. When Sharansky overheard his interrogators chitchatting among themselves about their families and children, he told himself that he must resist the natural impulse to realize that outside the prison the KGB personnel might be normal people.
What worried me most about my isolation was that if it continued I would inevitably, perhaps even unconsciously, start adapting myself to the world of my interrogators. And once that process began, helped along by my fear of being killed and by [his cellmate's] constant chatter about the possibility of reaching an agreement with the KGB, I would gradually abandon my own world and my own values. The next step was all too clear: I would begin to “understand” my captors, and would try to reach an accord with them. Unless I stopped this process, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed.
To counteract that impulse, Sharansky demonized the Soviet regime in sweeping and absolute terms. He viewed the regime as evil and soulless, oppressing not only him but his community—the Soviet Jews—and more broadly, the entire Soviet population.
Sharansky also appears to have used the zero-sum trap to strengthen his resolve. He viewed every interaction with the KGB in purely competitive terms. In a chess game, there cannot be two winners. If your opponent wins, by definition you lose. And vice versa. He genuinely loved to do battle. He saw himself as supremely intelligent, and he relished the feeling that he could outsmart and defeat his captors. Sharansky did not want to see the “evil” regime win on anything, no matter how trivial. He refused to negotiate with the KGB even about receiving care packages in prison, or about receiving fewer days in a punishment cell in return for simply conversing with an interrogator.
Finally, his extreme moralism and self-righteousness, mixed with apparent narcissism, appear to have helped him fight the fear and lonelinessof life in the Gulag. Sharansky told himself that when even one individual cannot be co-opted, the entire Soviet regime is undermined. He saw himself as waging a moral battle in which he alone held the key to victory. If he did not cooperate, he won and the KGB lost. It was as if he believed that if he gave up, his whole purpose in life—his struggle against the Soviets for Jewish liberation—would be shattered.
He had little use for fellow dissidents who could not maintain this standard. In the Gulag, he confronted a former colleague, another Jewish dissident, Mark Morozov, who was negotiating with the KGB. Morozov wanted desperately to get out of captivity, and he justified his cooperation with the KGB by arguing that he would be more valuable to the Zionist movement on the outside than in prison. Sharansky felt both pity and contempt for him. His encounter with Morozov reaffirmed his intuition that “without firm moral principles it was impossible to withstand the pressure of the KGB. If you're a captive of your own fear, you'll not only believe any nonsense, but you'll even invent nonsense of your own in order to justify your behavior.”
After his trial, as he left the detention prison where the KGB had tormented him for sixteen months, Sharansky saw that prison as “the place where I had emerged victorious, defended my freedom, retained my spiritual independence against the kingdom of lies, and reinforced my connection with Israel and with [my wife].” On his way to serving a thirteen-year sentence, he felt joy in having exercised his freedom by speaking the truth at the trial.
In the ensuing years of imprisonment, Sharansky continued to demonstrate extraordinary discipline and courage. With the benefit of hindsight, there can be no doubt that his refusal to cooperate accomplished exactly what he hoped: to increase worldwide pressure on the Soviet regime.

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