ABSTRACT
On the ides of March 1977, Anatoly Shcharansky, while in the company of two friends and two Western correspondents, was seized by agents of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, and taken to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow to be investigated for “crimes against the State.” Shcharansky’s cherished book in prison was the Book of Psalms. He had begun to study them in Hebrew after learning of his father’s death in January 1980. Shcharansky was punished with 130 days in solitary confinement for a hunger strike protesting its confiscation. Upon his release in February of 1986, he declared that “without religion he could not have withstood all that he suffered.” He also stressed that by religion he did not mean something that could be subsumed under Jewish history or culture or Zionism, important as all these had been, and still were, to him.
