Natan Sharansky first came to the world’s attention as a renowned Soviet dissident. The day he was released from prison in 1986, he was put on a plane to East Berlin; then he emigrated to Israel, where he entered politics and spent a tumultuous decade in the Knesset. Now, he has left government and returned to his roots as an agitator for freedom and human rights around the globe. But that’s not all. He once beat the great Garry Kasparov at chess, and his book The Case for Democracy was distributed throughout George W. Bush’s White House. It is often described as the blueprint for Bush’s second Inaugural Address and the inspiration for the Bush Doctrine.
Both Sharansky’s book and Bush’s speech presented the spread of democracy as a trump for the terrorist threat bedeviling the West. For a while, world events cooperated: The Orange Revolution brought a democratic government to power in Ukraine, Syria pulled back from Lebanon after an international outcry over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, and Egypt released dissidents when the United States threatened to cut off aid to Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian government.
But the more recent past has been far less kind to the Sharansky/Bush ideal. The election of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the continued sectarian conflict in Iraq, and recent crackdowns on democratic activists and private journalists by Russian president Vladimir Putin demonstrate once again how hard it is to plant democracy in hostile soil.
Some have taken these developments as proof that Sharansky’s theories were flawed. Those critics misunderstood his argument, Sharansky says. They reduced democratization to the mere holding of elections. Delivering the inaugural Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom lecture at the Heritage Foundation last year, Sharansky stressed that “democracy is free elections and free societies.” He continued, “The test of the democratic state is not elections; there are elections in every dictatorship. . . . The test of democratic states is the town square test, where you can go to this square to express your views and you will not be punished for it.”
The Soviet Union naturally failed this test, and Sharansky spent nine years in the gulag. During that time, he dreamed of engaging democratic leaders one on one in order to make them understand what repression meant to actual citizens. “It seemed that if only the voice of the dissidents were heard, and more discussion was possible, we could change the world,” Sharansky told me last week.
Next month, Sharansky will give the current crop of dissidents a megaphone through which to air their grievances and aspirations and rally international support: Along with Velvet Revolutionary and former president of the Czech Republic Václav Havel and former prime minister of Spain José María Aznar, Sharansky is cohosting a Conference on Democracy and Security. To be held in Prague from June 4-6, the summit will be attended by President Bush, en route to Germany for the G-8 Summit.
The conference will seek to strengthen the democratic movement by bringing together political leaders and people working to create freer societies all over the world. It’s Sharansky’s prison vision realized: Those in attendance will include opposition figures from “Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran, Cuba and North Korea, Belarus and Russia,” Sharansky says. “It’s like a representation of the dream of my dissident youth . . . in the former Soviet Union and we were very upset with the policy of appeasement”–détente, as it was called in America–“and we wanted to debate with [Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger], to challenge them publicly.”
Of course, Sharansky will find little to challenge in the policies of George W. Bush (though the realist machinations of some in the State Department, such as their effort to spike $100 million in aid for opposition groups in Iran, are less to his liking). As one White House official told me, the conference “is an opportunity for the president to meet again with dissidents and discuss ways that democratic governments can help support their advocacy for democracy.”
The gathering is being organized less for Bush’s benefit than for that of other government officials, both at home and abroad. “The belief in the power of democracy to change the world is still a dissident idea, even among the politicians of the free world,” Sharansky says. Voices from outside politics can inject vital real-life experience into the debate: “There can be no better nonpartisan defenders of this ideal than dissidents.”
When people point to the democratic shortcomings of the Middle East, Sharansky grows visibly agitated. “Often there is this question, ‘Where are the more moderate Muslims?'” he told me. “They’ll be in Prague. Come see them, talk to them, touch them, the moderate Muslims.”
He points to Iran as a society that, like the Soviet Union before it, is rotting from the inside–a termite-infested house just waiting to collapse. He calls Iran “almost a classic example of how in one generation a country of true believers could turn into a country of doublethinkers,” a term (borrowed from 1984) for those who no longer believe in the ideals of a totalitarian regime but are afraid to voice their disagreement. The opposition to the mullahs’ revolution, he says, is “so massive that it could be compared with Solidarity in Poland.”
Now, then, is the time for the trade unions and student organizations and journalists of the free world to get involved, Sharansky says. It’s just that kind of solidarity that he hopes to stimulate with the conference in Prague.
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
