Natan Sharansky: I Found Socrates in a KGB Prison

When I was growing up in the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century, the intelligentsia—in particular, the Jewish intelligentsia—had extensive home libraries. In my parents’ home, for example, there were more than a thousand books. Most of them were classic literature, for a simple reason: This was the least dangerous kind of book to possess. Modern literature was heavily censored and had to belong to the genre of socialist realism, in which the oppressed working class is always right and the capitalist oppressors are invariably doomed to defeat. But the older a book, the more likely it was to survive the official censors. To read classic literature, therefore, was a kind of escapism; it allowed us to enter a world free from the ever-looming presence of the KGB.

It is ironic, then, that the most notorious KGB prison, Lefortovo—where I spent 16 months between my arrest in March 1977 and my trial in July 1978, and where I underwent more than 100 interrogations—had the most extensive library of classic literature I encountered in the USSR. This was the twisted legacy of Joseph Stalin’s purges, when many members of Moscow’s intelligentsia were killed and their property seized. Confiscated books, after going through a rigorous redaction process to remove all “enemy” names, were then distributed to the various organs of the KGB.

And this is how, within the confines of Lefortovo, I had my second meeting with one of the world’s first philosophers: Socrates.

The first time I met Socrates—the great Athenian philosopher of the fifth century BCE, who was sentenced by his own city to death by poison for denying the gods and corrupting the youth—was when I was 15 and reading books from my home library. This meeting was quite formal, even distant. Socrates’s language, while well-translated, was confusing to me. His logic could be understood only by reading commentaries and learning about his historical background. At that point, I didn’t have the time or patience to study these texts carefully. I simply wanted, like every intelligent young Jewish boy, to know about Socrates’s fate and, at the appropriate moment, to use such popular phrases as, “We have to drink our cup to the end.”