Shcharansky: a Latter-Day Job

By Patricia Blake

The face is familiar: the high-domed forehead, penetrating eyes and open, boyish smile. His image has been carried aloft like an icon by demonstrators in every major Western capital. His name has become a household word from Jerusalem to New York. Prime Ministers and Presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, have pleaded with the Kremlin to cut short his 13-year sentence. For his sake, rabbis chained themselves to the fence of the Soviet mission to the United Nations. Most eloquent on his behalf has been his wife Avital, an Israeli citizen who has tirelessly campaigned for his release.

Anatoli Shcharansky, 38, is only one of an estimated 10,000 political prisoners in the U.S.S.R., but he has come to stand as a compelling symbol of Soviet repression. A Jewish computer specialist, Shcharansky graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1972, at a time when long pent-up yearnings for freedom and justice were coming into the open in the Soviet Union. As a genuine human- rights movement coalesced, Shcharansky was fired up by its libertarian ideals and began working with groups that were pressing for large-scale Jewish immigration to Israel. At the same time, he fell in love with a vividly beautiful girl in his Hebrew class, Natalya Stiglitz. After applying for visas to Israel, they married in a religious ceremony in 1974. Shcharansky's bride, who had taken the Hebrew name of Avital, had to leave the Soviet Union the next day, but he was denied permission to emigrate.

In Moscow, Shcharansky became the spokesman for groups of Jews who staged demonstrations near the Kremlin. His activism broadened as he joined the unofficial Moscow Helsinki Watch Group set up to monitor Soviet compliance with the human-rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki agreements. Shcharansky's fluency in English, his easy good nature and visible courage made him an ideal go-between for human-rights activists and the Western press. The KGB kept him under constant surveillance while he shuttled around Moscow keeping foreign correspondents apprised of the dissident movement.

Alarmed by the flood of adverse publicity abroad, Soviet authorities moved against Shcharansky. His 1978 trial was a major step in the Kremlin's systematic destruction of human-rights groups. To frighten other Soviet citizens from informing foreigners about dissident activities, the prosecution charged Shcharansky with spying for the U.S. Although President Carter issued a formal denial that Shcharansky had ever been employed by American intelligence, he was sentenced to three years in prison and ten in labor camps.

At a labor camp near Perm in the Urals, Shcharansky was locked up for 185 days in a 7-ft.-square punishment cell where he received food and water only every other day. In 1981 he was given three additional years in prison for "continuing to consider himself not guilty." Visiting him in 1984, his mother, a Soviet citizen, found him shockingly emaciated and in severe pain from heart disease. Last month, however, Shcharansky wrote his family that he had recently begun to receive better treatment and some medical care, apparently so he could make a presentable appearance in the West.

At his trial, Shcharansky said, "For more than 2,000 years, my people have been dispersed. Wherever Jews were, they would repeat every year, 'Next year in Jerusalem!' At present I am as far as ever from my people and from Avital. To them I can only say, 'Next year in Jerusalem.' " Eight years later, after enduring the afflictions of a latter-day Job, he may be close to Jerusalem at last.