Game Plan FEAR NO EVIL

By Patricia Blake

All the great prison memoirs spawned by Russia's cruel history are alike in essence. From Dostoyevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and now Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil, they reveal a world of unrelenting human degradation: the bestiality of the jailers, the dog-eat-dog struggle among the prisoners, the treachery of the informers. Each account evokes the stench, the rattle of fetters, the heart-stopping cold, the killing hard labor. Still, each author used different stratagems to survive, to prevail as a human being and, ultimately, to bear witness.

To this enormous task Sharansky brought uncommon intellectual resources. In the mid-1970s he was best known as a spokesman for Soviet dissidents, especially Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel. But Anatoli Shcharansky (he later adopted his great-grandfather's Hebrew first name and simplified the English spelling of his surname) was also a mathematician, a computer scientist and a chess whiz who had devised a computer program for playing the end game. When he was arrested in 1977, he sought to use the same logic to defeat his KGB opponents, who were preparing to try him as an anti-Soviet agitator and a CIA spy.

Sharansky's game plan, which he first sketched out on a piece of prison toilet paper, had three objectives: not to cooperate with the KGB; to penetrate and foil its methods; and to expose its cruelty and lies to the outside world. He never wavered. Armed with his intelligence, his sense of moral rightness and his innocence of the charges, he confounded a team of 17 KGB investigators who had fabricated a case of high treason against him. Conducting his own defense, he turned his trial into a shambles as he demonstrated the falseness of the evidence. When his thundering final speech was reproduced in the Western press, Sharansky became, at 30, the most famous of the world's prisoners of conscience, a symbol of hope and defiance in the face of Soviet oppression. Though he was sentenced to 13 years, he had retained what he calls his "spiritual independence against the kingdom of lies."

Sharansky's captors, understanding that his struggle was "against the entire Soviet system," treated him abominably in a merciless nine-year effort to break him. He was confined for 403 days in freezing punishment cells, kept alive mostly on bread and warm water. He used various intellectual exercises to hold on. He solved in his head math puzzles he had read in a book by the American science writer Martin Gardner. Soaking up the water in his toilet with rags, then leaning deep into the bowl, he took lessons in Hebrew from a fellow prisoner stationed at his own bowl in an adjacent cell, who called out to him through the lavatory pipe.

Sharansky formulated a principle to live by: "Nothing they do can humiliate me. I alone can humiliate myself. Once I had absorbed that idea, nothing -- not searches, not punishments . . . not even several attempts to force-feed me through the rectum during an extended hunger strike -- could deprive me of my self-respect."

Sharansky's spiritual resources were even more remarkable. For comfort and guidance he memorized the Psalms in Hebrew and chanted them often. He composed a prayer that he repeated to himself before confronting every new ordeal. It ended, "Grant me the strength, the power, the intelligence, the good fortune, and the patience to leave this jail and to reach the land of Israel in an honest and worthy way." His wife Avital, who indefatigably campaigned around the globe for his release, symbolized for him the one "fixed point" he could absolutely rely upon. Like another mathematician before him, Archimedes, he reckoned that with a place to stand on he could move the earth. And so he did. His early release in 1986 as a result of international pressure and his triumphant arrival in Israel were understood by millions as just such a feat.

Nevertheless, Sharansky's memoir has no happy ending. The brutal treatment of prisoners he describes has scarcely been tempered by the reformist policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. If the General Secretary is serious about extending glasnost and perestroika to all Soviet society, he will see to the publication of Fear No Evil at home. That would be a powerful impetus for restructuring the inhuman penal system he inherited from his predecessors.