WTH: Natan Sharansky on the Murder of Alexei Navalny
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2024
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alexei Navalny was allowed one book in his Siberian prison. He chose Fear No Evil by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, who joins us for an important conversation today to speak about his correspondence with Navalny and his own experience in a Siberian forced labor camp. Why did Navalny return to Moscow, and to certain arrest? What were his aims? What is it like to be held in what Sharansky refers to as his “alma mater” -- solitary confinement? And given Navalny’s murder, has Putin’s regime etched another notch in its belt, or is it still doomed to fail, as Sharansky predicted long ago? We talk Putin, Hamas, liberalism and neo-Marxism with one of the greats.
Natan Sharansky is a former Soviet refusnik, an Israeli politician, author and human rights activist. In 1978, Sharansky was convicted of treason and spying on behalf of the United States, and was sentenced to thirteen years imprisonment in a Siberian forced labor camp. Sharansky served as Minister of Industry and Trade from June 1996-1999. He served as Minister of the Interior from July 1999 until his resignation in July 2000 and as Minister of Housing and Construction and Deputy Prime Minister from March 2001 until February 2003. In February 2003, Natan Sharansky was appointed Minister without Portfolio, responsible for Jerusalem, social and Diaspora affairs. In November 2006 Natan Sharansky resigned from the Knesset and assumed the position of Chairman of the then newly-established Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. In June 2009, he was elected and sworn in as Chairman of The Jewish Agency for Israel, a post he still holds. Natan Sharansky is the author of four books: Fear No Evil (1988), The Case for Democracy (2004), Defending Identity (2008), and Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People (2020).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on. |
| 0:01.0 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:23.6 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:30.6 | And I'm Mark Tieson. |
| 0:31.6 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.6 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.6 | Mark, I can't even catch my breath so much as going on. What are we |
| 0:39.6 | talking about today? We're talking about the death of Alexei Navalny, or rather, as our guest |
| 0:45.6 | corrects us, the murder of Alexei Navalny, who is the Russian opposition leader who was just |
| 0:50.1 | murdered in the Arctic gulag by the regime of Vladimir Putin. And we're talking with somebody |
| 0:56.5 | who knows exactly what Navalny was going through because he served time during the Soviet Union |
| 1:02.4 | in the exact same gulag, in the exact same prison cells, in the same solitary confinement |
| 1:08.2 | as Alex Navalny. We're talking to Netan Sharanski, who is one of the great |
| 1:13.7 | human rights heroes of the 20th century and who entered into a fascinating correspondence |
| 1:18.9 | with Alexei Navalny from his prison cell. Navalny read Scheransky's famous memoir, Fear No Evil. He was |
| 1:25.0 | allowed to have one book in solitary confinement, and that's the book he chose. |
| 1:29.5 | And he wrote him a letter from his prison cell. And he said, I'm writing to you from Shizzo, which is the |
| 1:35.8 | confinement cell that Sharanki was put in. And Sharanki wrote him back, and they had this fascinating |
| 1:40.2 | correspondence that has just been published by the free press. And so we decided, let's haveanzh Chiransky on to talk about us, to tell us how this came about, |
| 1:48.8 | and to tell us about Navalny's struggle, the chances for the cause of democracy in Russia, |
| 1:55.3 | and also the implications for all of this in Ukraine and in the Middle East and all the rest of it. And we just have just an |
... |
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