“I discovered Socrates in a KGB prison”

“Growing up in the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century, the intelligentsia – particularly the Jewish intelligentsia – possessed vast home libraries,” says Nathan Sharansky, a former Soviet refusnik, Israeli minister, essayist and freedom fighter, in an article by Bari Weiss in *Free Press*. “In my parents’ house, for example, there were more than a thousand books. Most were classics, for one simple reason: they were the least dangerous sort of book to own. Contemporary 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 was, the more likely it was to survive the official censors. Reading classical literature, therefore, was a form of escape; it allowed us to enter a world free from the ever-looming presence of the KGB. It is ironic, therefore, that the KGB’s most notorious prison, Lefortovo – where I spent sixteen months between my arrest in March 1977 and my trial in July 1978, and where I underwent more than a hundred interrogations – had the most extensive library of classical literature I ever encountered in the USSR. This was the distorted legacy of Joseph Stalin’s purges, when many members of the Moscow intelligentsia were killed and their possessions confiscated. The confiscated books, after undergoing a rigorous editing process to remove all ‘enemy’ names, were then distributed to the various branches of the KGB. And so it was that, within the confines of Lefortovo, I had my second encounter with one of the world’s greatest philosophers: Socrates.

The first time I encountered Socrates – the great Athenian philosopher of the 5th century BC, condemned by his own city to death by poisoning for denying the gods and corrupting the youth – was when I was fifteen and reading books from our home library. That encounter was rather formal, even distant. Socrates’ language, although well translated, seemed confusing to me. His logic could only be understood by reading commentaries and learning about his historical context. At that stage, I had neither the time nor the patience to study those texts carefully. I simply wanted, like any intelligent Jewish boy, to know Socrates’ fate and, when the time was right, to use popular phrases such as: ‘We must drink our cup to the dregs’.”

A deeper understanding came later, within the walls of Lefortovo, where – according to Sharansky’s account – the philosopher became a sort of companion. The irony he highlights is subtle and merits careful reflection. A state that confiscated private libraries to punish dissent ended up, by virtue of its own bureaucratic logic, filling its most feared prison precisely with those very texts destined to outlive it. The KGB could erase names, but not Plato’s arguments, nor the fact that a mind nourished by such thought does not cease to reason simply because it is deprived of freedom.

This is the dilemma that totalitarian systems can never fully resolve. They may nationalise property, censor the present and control publications, but the classics, once internalised, accompany the individual right into their prison cell. Sharansky’s testimony reminds us that the physical possession of books has never been the crucial aspect: a state that confiscates a library cannot, in any case, confiscate what the prisoner has already read. Truth needs no adjectives; and, it seems, even Socrates did not require the KGB’s seal of approval to continue defending his arguments, even from within the very institution set up to silence him.

(Translation by Giulio Meotti)