Natan Sharansky was a chess prodigy, a mathematician, and a committed Soviet citizen — until he applied to emigrate to Israel in 1973 and the state said no. In the Soviet Union, Jews who applied to leave were called refuseniks. They lost their jobs, their university places, their standing. Sharansky lost all of that and decided to make the refusal itself a cause. He became a spokesman for the Jewish emigration movement and a close associate of Andrei Sakharov's broader human rights campaign. He translated for Western journalists. He smuggled information out. He made himself impossible to ignore.
In 1977, the KGB arrested him on charges of espionage and treason — crimes carrying the death penalty. He spent nine years in the Soviet prison system, including long stretches in Siberian labor camps and over 400 days in punishment cells, sometimes in total darkness. He went on hunger strikes. He played chess against himself in his head. He carried a small book of Psalms his wife Avital had given him the day they were separated. When the guards confiscated it, he lay down in the snow and refused to move until they returned it.
He was released in 1986 in a prisoner exchange on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin — the same bridge where Cold War spies were traded. The Soviets told him to walk straight across. He walked in a zigzag, because they had controlled his movements for nine years and this was his first free decision. He flew to Israel that night.
They told him he could not leave. They told him he could not speak. They told him he could not be Jewish in the way he wanted to be Jewish. He did all three, and it cost him nine years, and he would tell you it was worth every day.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."