Politics & Power Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky’s line weaponizes memory as a rebuttal. By invoking “a generation ago in the USSR,” he’s not simply reminiscing; he’s staging a moral ambush for today’s doubters. The phrase “the same scepticism” collapses two eras into one pattern of intellectual failure: the respectable, worldly certainty that authoritarian systems are permanent. It’s an argument aimed less at tyrants than at the chorus of pragmatic observers who treat repression as a stable cultural preference rather than a political condition.

The context matters: Sharansky is a former Soviet dissident whose credibility was earned in prisons and propaganda states, not in seminar rooms. So when he recalls “few thought that a democratic transformation… was possible,” he’s calling out a particular kind of cynicism that masquerades as sophistication. The subtext is accusatory: your realism is laziness; your caution is complicity. If you’d lived in the USSR, you would have underestimated history then, too.

Notice how “behind the iron curtain” does double duty. It’s geographic shorthand, but it also signals informational captivity - the West’s limited imagination about what people living under dictatorship actually want. Sharansky’s intent is to reopen the future. Democratic change, he implies, doesn’t arrive because conditions are “ripe” in some technocratic sense; it arrives because people take risks before it seems plausible. The quote is less a forecast than a discipline: stop confusing the longevity of a regime with its legitimacy, and stop treating hope as naivete when it has, in living memory, been the only accurate analysis.